Illustration by Joelle Bolt
Africa’s Hunger
Farm technologies that could help the poor are blocked by misguided advocacy groupsOne third of all citizens in sub-Saharan Africa are chronically undernourished today, and the single most important source of Africa’s hunger is deep rural poverty linked to the low productivity of human labor in farming.
Sixty percent of Africans are smallhold farmers or animal herders, and because they work with mostly unimproved seed varieties, little or no fertilizer, few modern means for crop protection, and little or no irrigation, their cereal yields per hectare are only one tenth as high as yields in developed countries. As a result they earn on average $1 a day. Africa has not yet experienced a science-based “green revolution” in farming of the kind that lifted hundreds of millions of small farmers in Asia out of poverty in the 1960s and 1970s.
In the face of such failure, it is surprising that so many well-fed people in Europe and North America actually do not want Africa to have a green revolution. Advocacy organizations claiming to care about rural social justice and the environment say it would be a mistake for African agriculture to follow Asia’s science-based path. They believe farmers in Africa should reject nitrogen fertilizers completely, so they can be certified as “organic.” When the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation launched a new Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa in 2006, activists repudiated the effort, warning it would only lead to “higher profits for the seed and fertilizer industries.” Persistent advocacy by these groups over the past two decades is one reason United States government assistance to African agriculture declined by 85 percent between 1980 and 2006.
Seed improvements based on genetic engineering are the science applications these advocacy groups oppose most strongly. Genetically engineered crop seeds have enjoyed safe, profitable, and increasingly widespread use over the past 15 years by small as well as large farmers in the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, China, India, the Philippines and elsewhere, but this technology has been blocked in Europe since 1998 due to stifling regulations based on a so-called “precautionary principle.” Because of Europe’s continuing post-colonial influence in Africa, the technology is now being blocked there as well. European-style regulations mean that it is not yet legal for farmers to plant any genetically engineered seeds in 44 out of 47 countries in Africa. In a majority of these countries it is not even legal for scientists to do research using these seeds.
European governments and advocacy organizations such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth (both based in Amsterdam) have intentionally scared Africa away from genetically engineered crops even though all the leading science academies in Europe itself—including those of the UK, France and Germany—state in writing that they have found no evidence of new risks to either human health or the environment from any of the dozens of genetically engineered seed varieties on the market.
Europeans reject agricultural biotechnology because they don’t need it to remain well fed; when it comes to genetically engineered medical drugs, which rich Europeans do need, the precautionary principle is set aside and regulators give speedy approval. By exporting these elite preferences to Africa, Europeans are imposing the richest of tastes on the poorest of people.
Author Bio:
Robert Paarlberg is the B. F. Johnson Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College. His book Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know was published in March 2010 by Oxford University Press.
Photo: Illustration by Joelle Bolt
