Starved by the rich : the cult of organic food imposed on Africa

Last week I met up with a friend who is passionate about organic food. No pesticides for her, no large industrial farms and certainly no Frankenstein food. She is not alone in this, the movement for the promotion of the so called organic food gains more and more supporters. Their ideal world consists of locally grown food on small family farms instead of the current large factory farms with a large carbon footprint. They strive to abandon the use of synthetic chemical fertilizers, pesticides and genetically modified organisms and wish to eat crops who are grown organically instead. Animals should be able to range freely instead of being locked in small cabins. Greenpeace, Oxfam and others, including my friend, wish to see “slow” food rather than fast food.

After listening to her commercial I was left wondering what the desirability was of organic agriculture for the peasant trying to make ends meet. Is organic agriculture really the best option for the impoverished of this world? Are we in fact not imposing the richest of tastes on the poorest of people? Are the rich starving the poor?

Robert Paalberg makes in his book “Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa” a strong case that this is indeed the case. Wealthy countries are blocking biotechnological progress from deprived regions like Africa by giving adverse incentives while the African peasants are the ones who most need it. In former times numerous countries had to deal with famines as the weather didn’t cooperate, population growth was too high or crops were contaminated by diseases or insects. Several green revolutions during history have put an end to this, recent examples being Mexico, India and other parts of Asia. Africa however has not been able to put an end to the medieval situations of crop shortages and famines, they are stuck in organic agriculture.

Africa’s organic farms

Oxfam, greanpeace, friends of the earth and my friend advocate a generalized organic agriculture, but how might such an idealized food system actually look like? Robert Paalberg points to Africa. The post-materialist fantasy described earlier is an actual reality for most African peasants. This might look good at first glance but a second look makes you think twice. The drive up to the farm is exhilarating with red soil underneath, the blue beauty of the sky above and arid vistas at the sides. As at the end of the road the two-lane tarmac makes place for rutted dirt, one eventually comes to meet the people. The fields at that end of the road are populated with hardworking people yet they are obviously poor. They do not use chemical fertilizers, have no knowledge of irrigation, improved seeds are absent and with their meagre crops they earn less than a dollar a day. Two third of the African population still depends on this kind of farming that may be organic yet provides them little income and little nourishment.

In the coming decades, Africa will have to feed a population that is expected to increase from around 850 million today to more than 1.8 billion in 2050. But at the current pace, it is estimated that Africa will be able to feed less than half of its population by 2015. A major increase in agricultural productivity is absolutely essential. If we look to the feasibility of this, one has to conclude that technology is the only answer. In the last four decades in Africa, less than 40 percent of the gains in cereal production came from increased yields. The rest was from expansion of the land devoted to arable agriculture. The problem of this expansion is that it comes at the expense of forests, soil fertility and water.

Increasing production by increasing yield on existing areas, employing methods such as improved plant varieties, mineral fertilizers and irrigation in dry areas has proven necessary yet problematic in Africa. Power machinery is almost absent with only two tractors for every thousand agricultural workers, irrigation is used with only 4 percent of the crops, traditional crop varieties are still used on more than two thirds of all cropland instead of the scientifically improved varieties and animals still have to look for their own food instead of being fed, what would give better results. The use of chemical fertilizer per hectare is only one tenth of the industrial world average, insecticides and herbicides are unaffordable, weeding is done by children who should be at school and genetically engineered crops are not grown because African governments follow Europe and have not approved such crops for use.

All this makes African farms very organic which makes the post-modern dreamers very happy. That these kind of farms are therefore also poor and non productive is not thought of by the defenders and propagators of this ideal post-modern world of slow food. But they should think of this. Population growth this year is close to 15 percent while the agricultural production per capita has fallen 19 percent below the level of 1970. Unless African agriculture will reform it’s current organic agriculture and start apply modern agricultural science, it comes to depend more and more on imported food aid.

Are the rich countries imposing the richest of tastes on the poorest of people?

The post-modern dreamers of the North are the reason for the harsh reality of the African peasant. However oversimplified this can be, there is a core of truth in it. As the organic dreamers of the rich countries in the north gained the momentum and all the more adherence, the support for science-based farming in the 1980s sharply diminished. This resulted in catastrophic neglect for the modernization of farming. When the U.S. Agency for International Development was still devoting 25 percent of its official development assistance to the modernization of farming at the end of the 80s, it is merely one percent today. The statistics for the World Bank aren’t any better with a drop from almost 30 percent to the current 8 percent.

Agricultural modernization is the way out of poverty and Europeans should know that. For the agricultural revolution has once enabled the European farmers to escape poverty with the British agricultural revolution in the 18^th an 19^th century spreading across Europe and eventually facilitating the industrial revolution. But some official donors and nongovernmental agencies are non the less still trying to block farm modernization in Africa. And then we don’t even speak of the European governments and NGOs who promote regulatory systems that block the use of genetically engineered crops, including crops capable of resisting insects without pesticide sprays.

In Europe only 4 percent of cropland is currently being farmed organically (and less than 1 percent in America), but Africa, so does the West seem to demand, has to be 100 percent organic. By this approach, perhaps unknowingly, the affluent countries are imposing the richest of tastes on the poorest of people. This way the African peasant stays organic but poor. This way the rich are starving the poor.

edit:

Acknowledging the merits of organic farming, some points in this article require revision. However, I do reaffirm the core point:  industrial farming is superior when attention is paid to sustainability factors and science-based farming deserves more support, certainly  in the developing world.

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References

Starved for Science
How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa
Robert Paarlberg
Foreword by Norman Borlaug and Jimmy Carter
Harvard University Press
Amazon.com

Robert Paarlberg is the Betty F. Johnson Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College.
Norman Borlaug is Distinguished Professor of International Agriculture at Texas A&M University and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.
Jimmy Carter is Former President of the United States and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

• Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa
• Will Africa cotton to bioengineering?
• GM Comes to sub-Saharan Africa (sort of)
• Out of Africa: is the cult of organic keeping people poor?
• Africa’s organic farms
  
• What is organic food?

The russian future with Dmitri Medvedev: a look at the inner mechanisims

The Times published yesterday 2 very interesting articles that give a good insight into the consequences of the Russian elections that have put Dmitri Medvedev in the presidential seat formerly occupied by Vladimir Poetin. The first article “from bankruptcy to big bucks” considers the political economy of Russia. The second analysis of Michael Binyon “Back-seat driver should resist trying to grab the wheel” gives an interesting insight into the psychology of Russia’s new president

From bankruptcy to big bucks

Tony Halpin in Moscow — March 3, 2008

Two three-letter words sum up Russia’s economic good fortune under Vladimir Putin: oil and gas.

Russia was bankrupt just a decade ago, its economy in meltdown after the Government defaulted on its foreign debt and the stock market lost two thirds of its value in a single day.

Oil was just $11 a barrel in 1998, half the level of the year before, but the price rebounded sharply to $35 just as Mr Putin came to power in 2000. Foreign currency reserves tripled and Russia — the world’s largest oil producer and second only to Saudi Arabia as an exporter — has been awash with money ever since as the price of crude has risen to above $100 today.

It has wiped out its international debt and built up foreign currency reserves of $480 billion, the third largest in the world after China and Japan. It has also built up a vast stabilisation fund — worth $144 billion and growing — to support future investment and insulate the state budget against falls in the oil price.

Dmitri Medvedev inherits a country transformed by oil, though he cannot hope to enjoy Mr Putin’s luck in seeing revenues triple. One immediate challenge is to tame inflation at almost 12 per cent as the petro-fuelled economy threatens to overheat.

But the former chairman of Gazprom knows that Russia’s status as an energy superpower can only grow. Russia is the world’s largest gas exporter and has the world’s largest proven reserves. It supplies a third of the EU’s gas imports, a dependence that has triggered alarm bells in Brussels, and is extending its reach with new gas pipelines and deals to sell direct to consumers.

Critics say that the Kremlin is already using its energy influence to reassert political influence over its former Soviet neighbours, raising prices and manipulating supply. Russia replies that it is simply switching to market prices for everybody.

Some experts warn that Russia has become dangerously dependent on energy and that a dip in prices would hit the economy hard. Mr Medvedev has made diversification of the economy a central part of his programme, promising to encourage the growth of small businesses by slashing red tape and fighting bureaucratic corruption.

Analysis: Back-seat driver must resist taking the wheel

Michael Binyon — March 3, 2008

President Putin insisted last September that he did not want his successor to be a puppet. Russia would need a strong President for the foreseeable future, he said, since party democracy was still in its infancy. But did he mean it? And now that he is no longer President, will he allow his hand-picked successor any room for manoeuvre?

Mr Putin’s ambivalence was already clear then, a month before he announced that he was “willing” to serve as a future Prime Minister. He also declared that he intended to continue playing a key role in Russia’s government, and that whoever followed him “will have to reckon with me”. So how does he propose to steer policy-making as a back-seat driver? Already there are forecasts that the Kremlin Zil, zigzagging in different directions, will crash, and that it will be President Medvedev who gets hurt.

Dmitri Medvedev has no political constituency of his own. A middle-class lawyer, the son of academics, he owes everything to Mr Putin, the mentor who is very different in temperament, background and ideology. He is a competent administrator — he transformed the lumbering state-owned Gazprom into one of the world’s most influential energy companies. But, unlike Mr Putin, he has no loyal following of acolytes, former KGB colleagues or ambitious politicians. He will be accepted by the Kremlin siloviki (power-brokers) solely because he is Mr Putin’s man.

Both men understand this. But both know that a clone would be unacceptable at home and overseas. Mr Putin has ridden the wave of nationalist, nostalgic and aggrieved sentiment, basing much of his popularity on harnessing Russia’s longing to be strong, disciplined and feared again abroad.

The mild-mannered Mr Medvedev can never don the same clothes. But he can show a different face: the liberal (a relative term in Russia) who speaks for the middle class, the conciliator in tune with a young generation of businessmen more open to the outside world.

This would go down well with the intelligentsia, the only class not swept away by Putinmania. It would also smooth Moscow’s dealings with the outside world after a tricky year. All that would be useful to Mr Putin who, as Prime Minister, will remain in charge of domestic policy, where his authoritarianism finds greatest resonance.

The two can therefore work in tandem — the good cop and the bad cop. The bad cop will clearly set the pace — but he will do so as he always has: incrementally and often in the shadows. And if Mr Medvedev has any mind to challenge this arrangement, there are plenty of Putin loyalists to remind him who is still the boss.

Nevertheless, a clash could occur, largely because the presidency carries duties that cannot be ignored even by a dominant Prime Minister. Mr Putin must at times defer to the head of state, especially in dealings with foreign countries.

Neither Mr Putin nor the Russian public would welcome a President they do not respect. Mr Medvedev must assert himself at least to the point where he is considered a political figure in his own right. The question is whether, if he starts turning down an unfamiliar route, the back-seat driver will seize the wheel and even eject the driver.