In my article on Sunday about the future of the food system, I briefly mentioned the potential for improved agricultural output in Africa. The situation there is a prime example of a larger problem that concerns the world’s agronomists: the yield gap.
That term is used to describe the enormous gulf between the crop yields obtained by the most successful farmers and the least successful. Farmers in the United States, for example, routinely grow five times as much corn per acre as small farmers in Africa. While Africa has the world’s largest concentration of below-potential agriculture, other areas also lag. They include parts of South Asia, such as rice farming areas in northeastern India, and the agricultural regions of many ex-Communist countries.
Experts say that closing the gap must be a prime strategy for feeding the world. And there is no technological mystery about how to do it: the strategy of using high-yielding modern crop varieties and nitrogen fertilizer has already been proven, in the Green Revolution, to raise output for farmers. But getting these tools into the hands of poor smallholder farmers requires both political leadership and large public investment.
China did it, transitioning from a famine-plagued country to one able to feed itself. To a considerable extent, India and Pakistan did it. But most African governments, chronically short of funds and often plagued by poor leadership, have not done it.
The original Green Revolution bypassed Africa for other reasons, too. It worked best in the irrigated agriculture systems that had long prevailed in Asia, and for a handful of major cereal crops, primarily rice, wheat and corn. Irrigation is relatively uncommon in Africa, a continent dependent on rain to water its crops.
Moreover, while the big grains have made inroads in Africa, the continent still depends on a slew of smaller crops as dietary staples, like cassava, savory types of bananas, sorghum, millet and so forth. These crops were not the target of much investment in the original Green Revolution.
Nowadays, with a renewed focus on global food security, efforts are afoot to bring a new Green Revolution to Africa and other areas plagued by yield gaps. And the question is not simply: Can it be done? The better question is: Can it be done sustainably?
For as I outlined in a blog post on Sunday, intensive agriculture causes many environmental problems, particularly in areas where heavy subsidies for nitrogen fertilizer lead to its overuse. Some of the nitrogen volatilizes into a major greenhouse gas, and some of it washes into rivers and helps create dead zones where the rivers meet the ocean.
Perhaps even more worrisome, much of the intensive agriculture created by the Green Revolution is not sustainable over the long haul even on its own terms, since it depends on mining non-renewable resources. In parts of India, farmers are withdrawing groundwater at alarming rates; that is true in other areas, too, including parts of China and the United States.
Those risks would be bad enough, but as I outlined in my article, a new one looms: climate change. No continent’s agriculture is more at risk from climate change than Africa’s. So the task on the continent is not just agricultural development, but making that agriculture more resilient in the face of rising risks from heat, drought and erratic weather of all kinds.
In light of these challenges, many experts have begun to use the term “sustainable intensification” to describe what needs to happen. That essentially means that we need to close the yield gap in as many places as possible, especially in Africa, but in a way that is as sensitive as possible to environmental concerns and assuring the long-run durability of agriculture itself.
“We’ve got to increase the amount of food, and we’ve got to do it without damaging the environment,” said Roy Steiner, a deputy director of global development at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “That’s not an easy thing to do.”
As I mentioned briefly in my article, numerous entities are trying to tackle these problems. The United States has introduced an ambitious new program called Feed the Future to help 20 of the poorest countries improve their agriculture. Governments of other rich countries have pledged billions in aid, although as I reported, the money has been slow in coming.
The World Bank has increased its lending for agricultural projects. The Rockefeller Foundation, the original instigator of the Green Revolution, is still involved in supporting agriculture in poor countries.
“We’ve got to increase the amount of food, and we’ve got to do it without damaging the environment. That’s not an easy thing to do.”
But perhaps the single most interesting new entrant on this stage is the Gates Foundation. When I interviewed Bill Gates, he told me that the decision he and his wife made in 2006 to invest in agricultural development was partly a function of the huge gift to their foundation that year by Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor. “Without his gift, what we ended up doing in agriculture would have been very modest,” Mr. Gates said. “The fact that we have a reasonably sized program — he gets a lot of the credit for that.”
The Gates Foundation has posted its strategy and a list of its agricultural projects, and Mr. Gates gave speeches in 2009 (here — video and text are on separate tabs) and this year (here, also separate tabs) outlining the foundation’s approach.
When he delivered this year’s speech in Washington, Julie Borlaug, the granddaughter of Norman E. Borlaug of Green Revolution fame, stood up in the audience to thank Mr. Gates for his work.
Among the major recipients of money from the Gates and Rockefeller foundations is an entity called the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, which is working to develop more advanced tools and techniques. A separate project called Water Efficient Maize for Africa aims to get high-yielding, drought-resistant corn seeds into the hands of African farmers.
Not only is the Gates Foundation paying to scale up flood-tolerant rice in India and nearby countries, it is working to bring variations of that crop to Africa. One of the foundation’s most interesting endeavors has been to help finance a World Food Program strategy of buying local crops within Africa, as a way to connect small farmers better to regional markets.
The Gateses and their foundation have been attacked ideologically, for instance here and here, for some of their positions, including a refusal to rule out genetically modified crops as a potential answer to agricultural problems in Africa and Asia. The critics also fear that the Gates Foundation’s work will lead to more corporate control of agriculture in poor countries.
Mr. Gates answered some of this criticism in his 2009 speech in Des Moines, declaring that technological approaches and environmental sustainability were not really in conflict. “I believe it’s a false choice, and it’s dangerous for the field,” he said then.
Activist groups have also faulted the Gates Foundation because a separate entity that manages its investments has bought some shares of Monsanto, the big American agricultural company. (The Gateses explain the investment philosophy of their money-management arm here.)
Anybody who has watched the Gates Foundation over the years knows that it has a long history of trying to work with corporations rather than going to war with them; in fact, the foundation pioneered a whole new approach that leverages foundation money and corporate interests in pursuit of social goals. That tactic has paid dividends for the Gateses in the field of public health, inducing drug companies like GlaxoSmithKline to take on projects to help some of the world’s poorest people.
It will be interesting to see what they manage to coax out of the Monsantos and Syngentas of the world. Already, Monsanto has donated rights to a gene-altered corn variety designed to resist drought so that it can be adapted for Africa. Natalie DiNicola, a vice president at Monsanto, told me that her company was one of 20 or so agricultural companies that had committed publicly to working with entities like the Gates Foundation, “all recognizing that we need a new vision for agriculture that’s going to be able to meet food security needs, conserve resources, and serve as a foundation for economic development.”
Abroad, Mr. and Mrs. Gates have become as well-known for their charitable work as for Mr. Gates’s role in founding Microsoft. Indeed, one of the most interesting elements of their role as charitable entrepreneurs is that the Gateses have become, in effect, roving ambassadors for the United States.
My colleague Hari Kumar interviewed a farmer in India, Anand Kumar Singh, who had been amazed by the resilience of the flood-tolerant rice financed by the Gates Foundation. Mr. Singh was among a group of farmers in Bihar state who met with Bill and Melinda Gates when they visited India a few months ago.
“The world’s richest man and his wife sat on the ground with the poor farmers of Bihar and inquired about our agriculture and our lives,” Mr. Singh told Mr. Kumar. “I cannot forget that experience throughout my life.”
The Gates Foundation has been working in agriculture for only five years, and the renewed international focus by the world’s governments on agricultural development is even shorter than that, dating essentially to the 2008 food crisis. Many agronomists I spoke with for my article are hopeful that these efforts will, in coming years, produce what some of them call a “greener revolution” in the agriculture of poor countries.
“There are more pieces of the puzzle in place now,” said Robert Paarlberg, an agricultural expert at Wellesley College, “than at any time in previous decades.”