Poor countries need to boost their agriculture through new thinking, not just new gadgets
The Economist / March 25, 2000
IN A village in Tulang Bawang, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, 25 farmers have gathered in a rice field. They have their eyes to the ground, not planting or harvesting, but studying the ecosystem at their feet. They are learning to compare fields under conventional cultivation, using synthetic pesticides, with those under integrated pest management (IPM), which uses biological means to establish a balance between beneficial and harmful bugs. IPM usually performs better in terms of cost and yield. Farmers come away from their training with an understanding of a more sustainable and environmentally sound way of keeping their pests down.
But equally important, according to Peter Kenmore, head of the IPM programme at the Food and Agriculture Organisation, they acquire new skills to share information with each other, and a new language to tell researchers and policymakers what they need. Such field schools for farmers have sprung up across Africa and Latin America, offering their students home-grown ways of dealing with local problems such as water shortages, soil erosion and poorly performing plant varieties.
"Science", wrote Thomas Jefferson, "never appears so beautiful nor any use of it so engaging as those of agriculture and domestic economy." In Jefferson's day, as now, agriculture was caught up in a technological revolution. The beginning of the 19th century saw a rush of mechanical inventions that transformed farming in the West. More recent innovations produced higher-yielding crops, chemical herbicides, insecticides, fungicides and fertilisers that were put to good use in the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, doubling wheat yields in India and boosting Chinese rice harvests by two-thirds between 1970 and 1995. And now there is biotechnology, which many predict will revive flagging harvests and offer a new cornucopia of plants and animals to help feed the poor.
The Green Revolution's toolkit probably saved more than a billion people from starvation. For 30 years it was feted as a great success. However, the way it was implemented in some countries caused not only considerable environmental damage but also social upheaval as large numbers of peasant farmers -- most of them women -- found themselves replaced by the contents of a bottle. And the gains are tailing off: cereal yields in Asia, for example, are now increasing at only two-thirds the rate seen in the 1970s. Meanwhile, many developing countries' populations are still growing rapidly, and little prime land, and even less water, is left to expand the area under cultivation. If biotechnology is to achieve what Gordon Conway, head of the Rockefeller Foundation, calls "a doubly green revolution", it must offer more than a technical fix: it must help poor farmers make better use of the tools they have.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, 830m people in the world are underfed. And yet the world's grain cupboard is comfortably full, with 18% more cereals in stock than are consumed in a year, and the world price of grain has fallen steeply since the mid-1990s. Almost four-fifths of the hungry live in rural areas and depend on agriculture to make a living. Simply shipping the surpluses of regions such as North America and the EU to starving countries is not a solution. Not only do such imports tend to get stuck in urban centres, rarely reaching rural areas, but subsidies also often make them so cheap that they undercut local supplies.To improve poor farmers' prospects, it is essential to boost their productivity beyond subsistence, so they have something left over to sell, as well as markets to sell it in. The question is how to do it.
Better domestic policy would be a start. Nowhere is this more pressing than in sub-Saharan Africa, where agriculture accounts for more than half of GDP and two-thirds of the workforce. Thirty years ago many African countries had active "anti-agricultural" policies, taxing farm exports to finance poorly performing industrial firms, and allowing state monopsonies to gouge producers. Now the damage is done mainly through neglect: failing to invest in rural infrastructure to provide access to markets, or in agricultural research to develop technologies and native crops suited to local conditions, such as sorghum. As a result, Africa now accounts for a quarter of the world's famished.
This failure is clear in Zimbabwe, where the old world of input-intensive agriculture is being upset by AIDS. The disease is killing off male migrant agricultural workers, leaving widows on tiny homesteads who lack access to the networks of contacts that provided the men with credit and chemicals. The land that is still farmed by these women is losing its fertility, because artificial fertilisers are out of reach and manure-producing livestock has been sold off to pay for food. However, with the help of both local and foreign NGOs, some of the women in the Zambezi Valley are now turning to organic cotton, which commands a premium on the export market precisely because it has not been treated with synthetic chemicals.
Whereas much of Africa would benefit from better access to the technologies of the Green Revolution, the most fertile parts of Asia might be able to exploit new GM crops to boost yields. But not the sort of transgenics currently on parade in the industrial world. Sticking a Bt gene in rice and expecting it to solve the problem of insect predation is a "silver-bullet" approach to a highly complex ecological problem. More useful are plants bred to be better at extracting nutrients from the ground or tolerating salinity, making more effective use of existing land and bringing new land into cultivation. Some researchers see the future of biotechnology in providing tools to help poor farmers deal with local problems without becoming heavily dependent on foreign inputs.
One such possibility is apomixis, essentially the reverse of the infamous "terminator" technology which promised to induce reproductive sterility in seeds. Apomixis, however, is a trick done naturally by a handful of plants in which, in effect, they clone themselves, creating seeds that are genetically identical to their parent. If staple crops, such as maize, could be coaxed into apomixis, this would be a boon to poor farmers who save seed to plant year after year, and watch its vigour dwindle. A few research institutes around the world are working on apomixis, trying to find molecular switches to turn on this potential lying dormant in plants.
Limits to growth
Of course biotechnology is more than genetic engineering; many of its tools, such as tissue culture and DNA sequencing, are already helping scientists in many parts of the world to push ahead with ambitious programmes for improving plant and animal varieties. Animal products account for 40% of the value of agricultural output in the world as a whole, but for a much higher proportion in developing countries, where they provide not only food, but draught power, fertiliser, fuel and tradable credits. Molecular genetics, for example, can enhance conventional breeding programmes, boosting the disease resistance of livestock in difficult conditions. Cloning too, although controversial, could help preserve animal diversity rather than reduce it, by allowing single cells to be stored for future reproduction (instead of the messy and unreliable business of semen collection and artificial insemination).
But there is a big gulf between what biotechnology can do in principle and how, in the developing world, it will be used in practice. The first is regulation. It is hard enough for rich countries to work out how to assess the risk and control the production of genetically enhanced crops, let alone poor ones that entirely lack the necessary regulatory framework. To avoid the unintended ecological fallout of the Green Revolution, they need to proceed with caution.
The second obstacle is intellectual-property rights. The fruits of the Green Revolution emerged almost entirely from public-sector laboratories and national breeding programmes, allowing easy access for users. New biotechnologies are different. Although much of the basic science has come from universities, the commercial development has been done by private companies that have shielded their multi-million dollar investment with patents.
Farmers must pay "technology fees" to the firms to use their genetically enhanced seeds. Research institutions that want to use some of these proprietary genes or technologies get caught in a web of patents and cross-licensing arrangements between firms and universities, paying costly royalties or being denied access altogether. Such public institutions are already strapped for cash. Investment in public-sector agricultural research and development has stalled in recent years. According to a study by Philip Pardey at the International Food Policy Research Institute and Julian Alston at the University of California at Davis, more than half the agricultural R&D in both America and Britain is done by private companies, whose spending is growing at twice the rate as the public sector's.
Foreign aid for agriculture has fallen by half since 1986. Donors such as the German government have slashed their funding for the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), and others are strictly earmarking their funds. This makes it difficult for the CGIAR's 16 international centres, once at the heart of the Green Revolution, to serve poor farmers.
Some are looking for new relations between the public and private sector to ease the exchange of seeds, machinery and other tools. Agriculture has a model in its wealthier cousin, health care. Just as large biotechnology firms are unenthusiastic about developing drugs for poor-country diseases such as sleeping sickness, so they are reluctant to use their technologies to improve staples such as cassava, yam or sorghum that feed millions in the poor world but offer few opportunities for making money. Public agricultural organisations, such as the CGIAR, have a lot to bring to these partnerships, such as custodianship of the world's largest colletion of seed varieties, as well as access to poor farmers -- a future market for companies. A few deals have been struck: last year, Monsanto agreed to make its virus-resistance gene for potatoes available to public-sector breeders in Mexico for poor upland farmers, while continuing to sell its own GM seed to commercial farmers. But more are needed.
Getting hold of the technology is one thing; getting it into the field is quite another. In many poor countries, the national extension services that take new seeds and techniques from the public sector out to farmers are so run down that they often miss those most in need. They require more money and manpower. Agricultural innovation cannot flourish without strong institutions to deliver the goods.:
