Starved by the rich : the cult of organic food imposed on Africa
Posted by Waldo Vanderhaeghen on March 5, 2008
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 18th an 19th 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.
——————————————————————————————
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.
sunkissed said
hey, this was an interesting read. barriers to development don’t rest solely on african people’s shoulders. it’s unfortunate. what benefits to do the “post-modern dreamers of the north” derive from organically produced foods from africa? it’s not like they are importing the foods into their own countries at least to support.
Quick Brown Fox said
I think you misunderstand the concept of what organic farming. It is not defined by the lack of industrial processes and it does not necessarily mean “old-fashioned”. Many farms in Africa now may meet certain organic standards due to the fact they do not use pesticides etc. but that does not mean they have taken on a fully organic approach. What that would entail is careful management of soil, intelligent crop rotation etc. Basically, practices which lead to a sustained increase in soil health and productivity. Organic farming is very information intense and what’s more, European organic farming practices don’t translate identically into Africa due to different climate and conditions. Instead, African farmers need to take the organic practices that work for them and develop their own. This has already been happening for many years. Because of this and the specialised organic research facilities organic farming should be considered a continually improving science.
The benefits also include using a lot less energy and water than industrial (including GM) farming, which is more important to many African countries than yield, which measures the mass harvested per unit area of land. Another strong incentive for Africans to go organic is the independence it gives them. The start-up costs for industrial farming require credit beyond the means of most and organic farming offers a way to start increasing productivity straight away and ensuring that the vast majority of the population enjoy the benefits. Something, I’m sure you’ll agree is vital in these countries. I think most African countries have now become very wary of “help” offered by industrialised nations that has led to increased debt and dependence, and rightly so. The pressure from foreign NGO’s to keep GM out is much smaller than the pressure from the biotech businesses to get GM in, and this makes sense considering the difference in budget sizes. The truth is that the discussions such as this one taking place in rich nations with paternal attitudes won’t decide what African countries do and that is a good thing. Being able to feed themselves is one thing but it needn’t cause them to increase their debt and dependence on other countries. They must be the masters of their own destiny and they are already showing us what they have decided to do.
I have not even started on the criticism of GM but I’ll keep it short and say that it as an industry that is all about hype and it has delivered very few of the benefits it has promised and so far the benefits have been felt solely by the biotech and big agriculture firms. The vast majority of GM commercial plants are ones that have engineered resistance to a certain type of herbicide (Monsanto’s Roundup) or that have made to secrete one specific pesticide. We are already inevitably seeing that weeds are developing resistance to the herbicide and insects are developing resistance to the pesticide and decreasing yields as a result. This farce is pointless with well managed organic fields, which keep just enough pests alive to keep those pests’ predators alive to keep the pests in check. Indefinitely, and for free! As the pests evolve so do the predators. The other promises made by GM 25 years ago have not been delivered and are not close. I have only scratched the surface of this topic but I respectfully ask that you look into these issues in more detail before blogging in favour of GM again. Contact me if you wish for references for the above claims. I’ll just finish by saying that in a comprehensive study of the use of language on both sides of the GM debate it was found that the term “Frankenstein food” was used many times more frequently in criticism of the anti-GM view than by the anti-GM people themselves, in an attempt to paint them as irrational and emotional. Did you friend really use those words?