An African Revolution. IMOD Power to the Women!

ADDIS ABABA - This one is about small farmers thinking big, big donors thinking sex, Africa thinking of a really big revolution.

Africa needs a different kind of Green Revolution, USAID Mission Director Thomas Staal said (ethiopia.usembassy.gov). In fact, the African farmers were left behind by the Green Revolution that Borlaug wrought.

Staal was speaking to the delegates to the by-invitation-only Borlaug Symposium 2010 in July. He was calling for a “Grassroots Green Revolution.” By the term “grassroots,” he referred to the small farmers, and he said they needed to become businessmen. Tillers thinking trade? That would require a continental paradigm shift. On second thought, perhaps it would require rather a tectonic shift.

He was dreaming for the poor African farmers. Staal said the farmers must connect directly to the market, and when they do, this will spur growth in the small towns as well as “create economic opportunities for the landless and for the youth.” That is to say, all things being equal, if the farmers grow and sell their own produce themselves, they can reap not only the fruits of their crops but also the fruits of their labors.

Staal said if the poor growers become their own sellers, they can get their fair share of the social value added by their produce and not give it away to middlemen. Not only that. This farmers’ market will have a multiplier effect directly in the villages, as it effectively shifts marketing power from the city to the village. The villages will be able to enrich themselves from their honest labors. A historical shift.

Question: But, can you teach old dogs new tricks?

Answer: You have to.

And yes, Staal said, the impossible has been done:

(1) In cotton, Francophone West Africa is now the world’s 3rd largest cotton grower, behind the US and countries of the USSR, 14% of exports from nothing in 1960. This was done by “a combination of public sector promotion and private sector investment.” I am reminded of the concept of creative capitalism proposed by Bill Gates more than 3 years ago (see Frank H’s “Bill Gates, Nobel Prize for Economics 2008! Well He Inspires US to Creative Science,” 28 October 2008, American Chronicle, and Frank H’s “Creative CGIAR. Rich out for the poor - Bill Gates,” 12 December 2009, American Chronicle).

(2) In dairy, there has been a tripling of milk production in Kenya, after this country “abandoned its public marketing controls on dairy products.” There are now more than 600,000 milk producers in Kenya. The raw milk sales now equal 85% of national consumption.

In his concept of the Grassroots Green Revolution, Staal said women farmers’ needs will have to be met more fully. After all, women produce 60 to 80% of the world’s food. The women must have access to assets, inputs and technologies, AAIT. The private sector must invest in AAIT, and the public sector must advocate for them and support them.

(I note that Staal says “access” and not “ownership” - access, not ownership, is a requirement for management of resources, whether by the poor or the rich. In his downloadable speech titled “Africa: The Donor View on Development,” Staal used the word “access” 6 times. I note access especially because in the Philippines where I am based, the mass media noise is for land ownership.)

Staal was speaking at the symposium held 13-14 July in honor of Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug, Father of the Green Revolution that forgot Africa. In the same occasion, former US President Jimmy Carter said, “He never let any of us - or leaders in the United States and abroad - forget the moral imperative we have to feed the hungry. Better yet, he taught them to feed themselves.”

In the same symposium, a paper was presented, authored by William Dar, Mark Winslow, Said Silim, Tsedeke Abate & Mary Mgonja of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, ICRISAT. The ICRISAT authors concurred with the idea of an African Green Revolution, but differed on strategy. The paper said that “the notion of a single, ideal balance point between food (and) cash crops may be too simplistic.”

ICRISAT Director General William Dar said there need not be conflict between growing a food crop and a cash crop, one for body sustenance and the other for other human needs. For instance, ICRISAT has been working in Ethiopia on chickpea, a single crop that is used to both grow grains and increase incomes, to raise both food and cash.

Dar said that the question is not to end hunger first but to end hunger and at the same time end poverty. The poor cannot have access to food if they cannot have access to cash. While he is feeding his family, the farmer must be able to raise cash to meet other necessities, and he can do that only if he becomes market-oriented.

This has in fact been discovered through a World Bank study, Dar said:

The World Bank … identified a common thread underlying the development of agricultural economies worldwide and over modern history. That common thread was a transition from a rural subsistence enterprise to an inclusive market-oriented enterprise responding to demand from urban centers. Importantly, they note that poverty and hunger decline as this transition proceeds. In a sense, rural areas use agriculture to capture a share of the growing wealth of cities.

We concur, Dar said. The insight of ICRISAT based on data gathered under the Institute’s long-term Village Level Studies initiative “concur with the World Bank’s analysis,” he said, based on ICRISAT’s 30-year observations regarding the drylands of Africa and Asia. Where the number of poor was going down, the farm-to-market connections were going up.

Upscaling the World Bank’s concept of inclusive market-oriented enterprise, ICRISAT has come up with the concept of inclusive market-oriented development, IMOD, inclusive of the poorest of the poor. The position of ICRISAT is that there need not be any food crop and cash crop dichotomy. Even for the poorest of the farmers, whatever the crop is, if brought to urban areas, it becomes a cash crop because city dwellers pay for the produce in cash. The IMOD lesson there is that if you are able to direct more of the poor farmers to produce more, and for the market, those farmers can rise above their low status in life. ICRISAT has since made IMOD a conceptual model for its Strategic Plan to 2020.

In the IMOD context of investments, Dar said 3 sectors are necessary to make it all work for all: (1) the poorest of the poor are included as raisers of crops, (2) donors are sources of access to assets, inputs and technologies, and (3) the government provides support in matters of policy. Connect the farm to the market, and you will motivate the poor to grow more crops - the market becomes the motivation to raise food and cash.

Dar said because hunger and malnutrition cannot be postponed, the raising of more staple foods such as the major grain crops should be the first step within the pathway of IMOD, and the food surpluses brought to the markets. The choice of food grains as the first crops to raise is made because they are less perishable, more easily stored as food reserves, cheaper to grow with micro-dosing of fertilizers (an ICRISAT innovation), more easily transported over bad roads and from remote areas. If you are hungry, food is first; only after that will you want to meet other and higher human needs, following Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

If farmers are worried about their stomachs, high-value crops have no value for them. Governments and donor agencies must worry first about the food for the extreme poor, because amid hunger and malnutrition, there cannot be social stability or economic growth, Dar said. When the stomach growls, a beast may come out.

Once the IMOD process is triggered by the growing of staple food crops, and input & output channels have been established, then farmers can and will be willing to grow high-value cash crops. Farmer cooperatives can then add new crops to the mix and provide the proper training and inputs; the coops themselves can leverage their connections to push to market the new cash crops created by research and grown under new technologies “to increase returns-on-investment, ensure equity and sustainability, and remain competitive in the marketplace.”

With inputs, access to markets, infrastructure and credit, as Borlaug had dreamed for African agriculture, IMOD should help bring about the African Green Revolution.

I think that in fact, that African version of the Green Revolution may have already started, at least about 7 years ago. Dar said that planted in Ethiopia, the total harvest of ICRISAT chickpea varieties jumped from 168,000 metric tons in 2003-2005 to 312,000 metric tons in 2008, resulting in skyrocketing exports earnings from $1 million in 2004 to $26 million in 2008. Similar impacts had been reached in Tanzania with pigeon pea, now grown for both food and export, as well as in the African region with disease-resistant sorghum varieties. ICRISAT helped the National Smallholder Farmers’ Association of Malawi screen out groundnuts for aflatoxin content (using another ICRISAT innovation) in order to meet export safety requirements, and in linking to Fair Trade imports; success has resulted in higher incomes received by farmers of Malawi. This IMOD approach is now expanding into Mozambique, Tanzania and Kenya.

Dar said:

The important question for development agencies should be, “How can we foster a sustainable, equitable transition for the poor along the inclusive market-oriented development pathway?” A change in the balance of food (and) cash crops will be a logical outcome of this underlying transition. For each farmer, the balance will be different depending on their stage in the transition, particularly their food security status, their access to markets, and their capacities (assets, skills, capital).

So IMOD is good. What about the risks: Drought? Wildly fluctuating market prices? Exploitation of the environment? Climate change? They all have to be taken into consideration. They have to be addressed soon enough after food and poverty.

Now then, a final question: What about sex? To whom do we give more IMOD support: male farmers or female? In Africa, it must be the female, because women grow 80% of the food consumed in that region. In Kenya, I think the ICRISAT experience shows that the women are the brainier sex (see Frank H’s “New coffee in Kenya. In Emali, women show who’s the better half,” 26 February 2009, American Chronicle). The Kenyan women took the risk of growing the new ICRISAT pigeon pea varieties when the men would not. “It must have been that more of the women thought more of the food while more of the men thought more of the risk,” Frank H said.

In Africa and Asia, the women traditionally grow the food crop while the men grow the cash crop or leave home to find work in the city (Megan Rowling, 26 December 2008, reuters.com). So, the women need more help than the men. Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary General, said (Rowling as cited):

Today the African (female) farmer is the only farmer who takes all the risks herself: no capital, no insurance, no price supports, and little help - if any - from governments. These women are tough and daring and resilient, but they need help.

The scientists need help too, in fact. In the same symposium, former President of Mozambique Joachim Chissano spoke about the man they were honoring. He said Borlaug was worried not only about the farmers but also the scientists (Borlaug Symposium 2010):

He remained concerned that still too many agricultural scientists and officials remained too detached from smallholder farmers and their problems. It was as if the harsh realities of poverty, hunger and suffering didn’t exist. Too many, he feared, were more comfortable in their laboratories, experiment stations and offices, than in going to the fields to see the harsh realities their farmers were facing.

Borlaug died at 95 on 12 September 2009. We are told that his last words were, “Take it to the farmer” (Roger Thurow, Borlaug Symposium 2010). Which farmer? You have to sell the idea of markets to the farmers before they can turn themselves into businessmen. And, according to ICRISAT experience, the best businessmen farmers are, well, women.