Africa: Will Annan's 'Green Revolution' Work for the Starving in Africa?

from All Africa

The Nation (Nairobi)

ANALYSIS

Alfayo Otieno
Nairobi

FORMER UN SECRETARY-GENERAL Kofi Annan this week toured western Kenya with the same campaign he anchored last week at the World Economic Forum for Africa in Ghana - the Green Revolution as the continent's panacea against hunger and poverty.

In his keynote address on appointment by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa as its first chairman, Mr Annan pledged to work with fellow Africans in a new effort to comprehensively tackle the challenges holding back millions of small-scale farmers in Africa.

Last Sunday at a Bungoma village, he said: "Africa is the only region where overall food security and livelihoods are deteriorating. We will reverse this trend by working to create an environmentally sustainable, uniquely African Green Revolution. When our poorest farmers finally prosper, all of Africa will benefit."

THE ALLIANCE FOR THE GREEN Revolution in Africa, established last year with an initial $150 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates and the Rockefeller foundations, seeks to help millions of small-scale farmers across Africa to lift themselves and their families out of poverty and hunger through increases in farm productivity.

It is headquartered in Nairobi and will be working throughout the continent on a wide range of interventions across the agricultural "value chain," ranging from strengthening local and regional agricultural markets, to helping improve irrigation, soil health and training for farmers, to supporting the development of new seed systems best equipped to cope with the harsh African climate.

It strongly endorses the vision laid out in the African Union's Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme, which seeks a 6 per cent annual growth in food production by 2015. But this initiative has brought to the fore the question: Can a Green Revolution reverse Africa's reliance on food aid?

It is the decline in people's assets and the collapse of their livelihoods, as well as the lack of infrastructure in poor communities, rather than drought, which create vulnerability to starvation.

Rain failure is only a proximate cause of famine. With nothing to fall back on or cash to buy their way out of danger, drought simply deprives poor Kenyans of their food supplies.

Yet Kenya is capable of producing food in abundance. Does this, therefore, mean that Mr Annan's prescription of a Green Revolution is the only way out?

The term Green Revolution was coined up by Dr William Gaud in 1968 to describe rapid agricultural progress triggered by improvements in technology. Such opportunities were opened through new architecture for wheat and rice, and commercial exploitation of hybrid corn, sorghum and other crops.

While Mr Annan and company are engrossed in seeking solutions to Africa's food problems in a second Green Revolution, they need to acknowledge that global agriculture is at a cross-roads in terms of ecology, economy, energy, employment and equity.

Ecologically, the problems have both long-term and short-term dimensions. Ground water depletion and pollution, soil degradation and biodiversity loss as a result of habitat destruction are some of the areas of immediate concern.

In the long term, climate change leading to adverse changes in precipitation, temperature, and sea level can have disastrous consequences for food security.

In the area of economics, agriculture is becoming uneconomic unless massive State support is extended to farmers.

Kenya is capable of producing food in abundance. Why then is it that even at times when there is plenty of locally grown food on the Kenyan market, millions continue to need food aid?

This is a paradox rooted in the people's lack of purchasing power among communities which have no alternative sources of income.

TO NIP PROBLEMS OF POVERTY IN the bud, governments must focus on the importance of smallholder agriculture.

In recent years, attention has been paid to liberalising markets and creating macro-economic stability to stimulate demand for agricultural products. Such policies not sufficient.

To enable smallholders to respond to new demands, the constraints that have caused smallholder agricultural growth to lag behind must be removed.

Where land is scarce, agricultural development efforts need to target middling and better-off smallholder households and to look for ways to assist the semi-landless through the rural non-farm economy.

Roads, communication, water management and markets all need improving if the agricultural sector is to thrive. Years of decline in Government agricultural frontline services must be reversed.

Mr Otieno is the editorial manager, Info Media Ltd.