From: Jim Rosenfield <jnr@igc.apc.org>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african
Date: 09 Nov 92 21:03 PST
Subject: Bring Green Revolution to Africa
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1471700237:000:6073
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!jnr    Nov  9 21:03:00 1992


/* Written  9:03 pm  Nov  9, 1992 by jnr in igc:hunger.general */
/* ---------- "Bring Green Revolution to Africa" ---------- */
BRING THE GREEN REVOLUTION TO AFRICA

By Richard Critchfield

Is there a way to stop the suffering of those Somalian and
Ethiopian children who haunt our TV sets? Can something be done to
end chronic famine in Africa?
  
Yes, says Norman Borlaug, the Iowa plant breeder who won the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1970 after his high-yield dwarf wheat rescued Asia
from famine. Dr. Borlaug advises governments in Latin America and
Asia, Including India and China, heads a foundation in Poland and
is a science adviser to President Bush.

His remedy: put together all the data on African crops, Including
information on the use of fertilizer, control of insects and weeds and
use of moisture. And then apply that knowledge to an African farmer's
fields.

Since 1986, Dr. Borlaug, financed by a Japanese philanthropist,
Ryoichi Sasakawa, has done this on more than 150,000 African farms.
Yields have increased by an average of 2.5 times. Dr. Borlaug began
with heat and sorghum in the Sudan and maize in Ghana. Civil war ended
the work in the Sudan. Even so, in March the Sudanese harvested
800,000 tons of wheat, up from 160,000 in 1986. Ghana's maize
production is up 40 percent from 1986. Mexican scientists working with
Dr. Borlaug are now operating in Tanzania, Benin and Togo and are
moving into Nigeria and Ethiopia.


Once African political leaders and economic planners see how crop
yields can be increased, Dr.  Borlaug says, they need to make sure
fertilizer gets to villages at least six weeks before planting,
provide credit to farmers to pay off debts after harvest and insure a
fair price. The job of persuading African leaders to do so goes to
Jimmy Carter, who volunteered to use his prestige to back up the
Borlaug team's field work.

In short, Dr. Borlaug would do in Africa what worked In Asia, where
new government agricultural and economic policies combined with plant-
breeding advances to create the green revolution. By crossing Dr.
Borlaug's dwarf wheat with cold weather strains from Korea, China now
produces more wheat than the U.S. and is the world's leading grain
producer.  India has quintupled wheat output since planted has high-
yield varieties widely.

Two problems loom ahead in sub-Saharan Africa. One is its farming
environment, a savannah of open grasslands, thorny bush and baobab and
acacia trees, bordered by the

Sahara and tropical jungle. Leached of its nutrients by thousands of
years of heavy rains and never enriched by glaciers, the continent's
red acidic soil badly needs fertilizer.  Yet there are only two major
fertilizer plants in sub-Saharan Africa, both in Nigeria.

Most farming is done by human muscle, mainly slash-and-burn
cultivation with hoes, sickles and digging sticks - about 80 percent
of it by women.  

Because the tsetse fly's parasites devastaste livestock in many areas,
just 16 percent of African farms depend on animal power. Only 3
percent use machinery. A family can only farm about about two and a
half acres without an animal, so most farming is subsistence. The up
side is that Africa is one of the few places left on the planet with
plenty of unused, cultivable land. One problem that Dr. Borlaug didn't
face 25 years ago in Asia is the huge monolith of the World Bank,
which through its affiliate, the International Development Agency,
gives the lion's share of aid in Africa, money that keeps a lot of its
governments going.

Senior officials of the bank, mainly economists or former academics
who have never set foot in an African maize field, are wedded to
policies like "structural adjustment," a buzzword in free-market
strategies that entails drastically cutting budgets and inflation,
privatizing industry, lowering trade barriers and encouraging foreign
investment. Sensible enough in theory, this blueprint goes wrong in
practice when the World Bank opposes fertilizer subsidies or argues
that more research is needed before going whole hog the Borlaug way.

The bank also finances what it calls a "training and visit'' system -
sending local government workers to train farmers in, 27 African
Countries.  But their demonstration polots are too small to produce
enough grain to be effective.

Africa's food crisis, which has been worsening since the 1983-84
drought, came just after the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the
prime movers in Asia's green revolution, phased out their agricultural
programs. Ford shifted entirely to social spending and Rockefeller to
giving 9 million a year on molecular genetics and biotechnology, which
combat insects and disease, but don't directly increase yields.  Also,
the U.S. Agency for International Development. has virtually opted out
of agriculture.

In what amounts to global neglect when it comes to agriculture, Dr.
Borlaug's African work is of tremendous importance. At a recent
meeting with World Bank officials in Virginia, Jimmy Carter voiced his
frustration. "God knows" he told the bankers, "if we can't do anything
in agriculture, where people are starving to death, and getting worse
every year, then I think the entire situation in Africa is hopeless. 
Dr.  Borlaug's system works. I've been on the farms. I've seen it
work. We need desperately for the World Bank to join with us."

Will it? Great bureaucracies have their own imperatives.  "The World
Bank says you can't justify our kind of field work because enough
research hasn't been done," says Dr. Borlaug, "even though we've
demonstrated clearly that we can double, triple, sometimes even
quadruple yields."

How can anybody not support programs that help feed hungry, miserable
people? "They've never lived in Africa," Dr. Borlaug laments. "They
live in an ivory tower called the World Bank." 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Critchfield, author of "Villages," writes about how technology
affects culture.   This article, which appeared in the Sept 14, 1992
New York Times, is reprinted with permission.

Newsgroups: soc.culture.african