Norman Borlaug in a Mexican wheat field, holding the so-called “miracle” wheat that he developed by crossing a native Mexican strain with a Japanese dwarf variety. 1970. Photo: Arthur Rickerby, Smithsonian Institution.
We know how to solve hunger. In fact, we’ve known how to do it for 50 years, ever since the plant breeder, Norman Borlaug, and his colleagues at The Rockefeller Foundation introduced higher-yielding wheat varieties in Mexico, then India and Pakistan, and broadly overcame an impending famine. In 1966, India imported over 8 million metric tons of wheat to feed its population. By 1979, wheat imports were down to zero. Today, India’s wheat exports exceed $50 billion annually.
Borlaug won a Nobel Prize for his work. More importantly, the knowledge of how seed of more efficient crop varieties could enable even poor, smallholder farmers to increase their yields and help feed the world spread to other crops and countries of Latin America and Asia.
Hunger is not solved by seed alone. Soil fertility and crop management practices also play an important role in boosting crop yields. But a quick survey of successful interventions to reduce hunger and poverty around the world – from hybrid maize in the US, to high-yielding wheat varieties in Mexico and India, to the ‘IR8’ rice variety in Southeast Asia – reveals that the common denominator for alleviating hunger has been seed of improved varieties.
Unfortunately, these “Green Revolutions” largely bypassed Africa. Among the main reasons for this, two stand out: firstly, the crops and varieties bred for other continents were not adapted to Africa; and secondly, governments and development agencies failed to foresee the critical role private enterprise would have to play to deliver improved seed, fertilizer, and other technologies to farmers across Africa’s immense agricultural landscape.
In July of 2006, however, The Rockefeller Foundation published a document entitled Africa’s Turn: A New Green Revolution for the 21st Century, which outlined a strategy for agricultural transformation in Africa. This was followed in September with an announcement in the New York Times that the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations would commit $150 million to raise agricultural productivity in Africa. The partnership, they said, would “entail developing new varieties of seeds, training African crop scientists and retooling seed distribution systems.” In 2013, USAID also joined forces with AGRA through a $47 million grant for the Scaling Seeds and Technologies Partnership.
By 2017, AGRA’s work in 13 African countries had resulted in the development and commercialization of 400 improved crop varieties adapted to local, African growing environments and the establishment of 114 private African seed companies which were producing and marketing 120,000 tons of seed annually to farmers via 25,000 private agro-dealers.
The impact on crop yields in 10 countries AGRA assisted to develop viable seed systems, compared with 10 where it did not intervene, is shown in the graph below.
Notes:
Assisted Countries: Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda.
Non-Assisted Countries: Angola, Benin, Burundi, Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, DR Congo, Guinea, Madagascar, Sierra Leone, and Togo.
Source: data are the annual averages for maize and rice (https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QCL).
African crop yield statistics are notoriously difficult to influence. Yet crop yield trends in the countries assisted by AGRA and its donors are undeniably positive, while yields in non-assisted countries barely budged. In terms of the impact on human health, the average rate of child malnutrition in seed-assisted countries reduced by a whopping 42% during the period in question. In non-assisted countries it also reduced, but by only 24%.
Seed Systems Group (SSG) derives its mission from this conclusive impact of improved seed on the lives of poor, smallholder farmers. We focus on the countries that were left-behind in the first wave of assistance to reduce hunger through seed systems development. In those communities, food is scarce because harvests are too small to adequately feed the people who depend on them, and they have no other source of income to purchase food. By helping farm families to produce surplus harvests we allow them to eat better, earn a profit from their farms, and make more empowered choices for the future.
The recent withdrawal of support for this work by the US government has called into question the future of efforts to solve hunger in Africa and other hungry parts of the world. This decision is made more tragic by the fact that we already have proof that this goal is achievable in our lifetimes.
Seeding a Green Revolution in a portion of Africa was one of the great success stories of the past decade, but whole regions of the continent were left behind. SSG’s challenge to the international community is to help us and our partners to finish the job.
