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Africa: Green Revolution Requires Supporting Farmers, Says Agriculture Expert

27 October 2009

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interview

Akin Adesina, vice president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra), talked to AllAfrica about the work of the young, Nairobi-based institution and how its priorities and programs are evolving to improve food security across Africa. Agra was founded in 2006, with initial support from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Bill Gates recently announced that the foundation will give another $15 million to enhance Agra's effectiveness. Here is part one of the conversation.

What's new about what Agra is doing?

We are going to be putting 40% of all our investment in core countries: Tanzania, Mozambique, Ghana and Mali - what we call "portfolio one countries." Within those countries, we are drilling down to focus on the "bread basket" areas of high population density, with relatively good infrastructure, relatively good market access, and good agro-ecological environments to stimulate productivity growth.

The rational for that is very simple. The amount of investment needed in infrastructure for agricultural transformation in Africa is huge – roughly $11 billion a year - which means that those infrastructural investments can't be done everywhere. Whether it's rural roads, electrification or irrigation, what has been done before is to scatter investments everywhere, so there is no density of investment in critical zones where one can get productivity growth. We need to turn that around and target those breadbasket areas, to rapidly raise their production and drive down the price of food.

That doesn't mean, of course, that we are not going to consider the lower-potential areas. But if you are able to get production up and reduce the price of food, it benefits both urban and rural consumers. That's one fundamental change that we've made.

Could you say more about your work beyond those core countries?

Agra is currently working in 13 countries across east, west, central and southern Africa, and we are going to expand that to 25 countries in the next few years. There are post-conflict countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone that are very important. Agra has programs to provide initial catalytic grants to support them, especially in the area of training and seed modification.

In addition, we still are making thematic investments. The approach is a "comprehensive value-chain approach" – from seeds to soil health to markets to policy. Agra funds demonstrations of what works in each of those areas. Then we fund the scaling up of what works in partnership with others, especially with government, private sector, bilateral and multilateral institutions.

The seeds work, for example, includes supporting the capacity of plant breeders. We have two centers of excellence - one in KwaZulu-Natal, which is called Africa Center for Crop Improvement, and another at the University of Ghana at Legon, called West African Center for Crop Improvement. Those two centers are training about 85 PhDs and about 200 master's students in total.

In addition, we are supporting the development of improved crop varieties that meet the agro-ecological needs of diverse zones in Africa by African plant breeders. That's very important, as opposed to introducing improved varieties from outside the continent - an approach that has been used before and has never worked. This is about developing a much broader genetic base for crops in Africa and making sure those varieties meet the diverse agro-ecological conditions and the taste preferences of farmers and consumers.

That work is being done through grants to national plant-breeding institutions. Over the last 18 months, they have released about 65 new crop varieties, ranging from sorghum to maize to cassava that have all been adapted to agro-ecological conditions.

We have supported the establishment of about 25 small to medium-size seed companies. Local seed companies are critical, because they help turn the publically bred varieties from the national institutions into commercial systems. We've provided star-up grants to help set up seed modification and distribution systems. This year, I think they have sold about 6000 metric tons of seed, which is quite a lot.

Then we have a program for agro-dealers. These are rural input shops that sell farm inputs in rural areas. That is our most impactful program so far. In 2008-2009, these agro-dealers sold U.S. $45 million worth of seeds and fertilizers in rural areas in Malawi, Tanzania and Kenya. In addition, as the volume of inputs and the range of inputs being supplied has increased, the distances that farmers actually travel to buy seeds and fertilizers have gone down dramatically. It has now gone down in Western Kenya from an average of 17 kms to about 3 - 4 kms.

In terms of our work on soil health, we try to scale up what we call "micro-dosing technology" in the Sahelian countries. Essentially, you take the cap of a Coca-Cola bottle and put about that amount of fertilizer at the base of your plant. That micro dosing has a number of advantages.

First, it is appropriate for dry land areas in the Sahel, where there is high risk of using fertilizer when there is no rainfall. Second, the farmers don't have to spend a lot of money on the fertilizer, because you need only small amounts. Third, it allows the farmers to time the application to the needs of the plant, as opposed to "broadcasting" that wastes fertilizers. Finally, it is affordable for even the smallest of farms.

What is dramatic about this is the yield impact. The yield increase from using micro-dosing can range anywhere from 135 to 145% compared to not using it. So we've given grants to scale that up to about 600,000 farmers in the Sahel.

We are also helping to scale up the production of soy beans, pigeon and cow peas, which are legumes that fix nitrogen. That allows farmers not to spend a lot of money on buying fertilizers. In addition, these legumes provide better nutrition and benefit women farmers, in particular, who grow most of the legume crops as a source of cash.

Agra also has programs in market development and finance.

The market is our newest program. We have some grants to consolidate earlier investments from the Rockefeller Foundation, [including] helping to strengthen national agricultural commodity exchanges in Kenya and in Malawi.

Exciting work has continued on the issue of access to finance. Less than one percent of total available private capital in Africa goes into agriculture. So you have 80% of the population in a sector that is not served by the private capital market. Instead of Africa having to depend perpetually on official development assistance, we believe that Africa has to leverage the huge amount of private capital in the commercial markets to work for agriculture.

The question is why money is not going to agriculture. It is not going to agriculture because most of the farmers are small; they do not have the collateral to pay; the banks are not well trained to lend to small holder farmers; and there is a huge amount of risk and high transaction cost in reaching these farmers. What Agra has done very successfully in the last 18 months is use $15 million in loan guarantees to reduce the risk of lending by banks. And we have leveraged about $160 million over the last 18 months into small-holder agriculture and agricultural value chains that support those farmers. So, essentially we've been able to leverage 10 times the amount of money we put down to cover the risk of lending to farmers by commercial banks. It's been a hugely, hugely successful program.

What will Agra do on the policy side with the $15 million grant announced this month from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation?

The policies that have guided agriculture in Africa since the 1980s have been set outside of Africa. That is the so called 'Washington consensus,' the Structural Adjustment Programs that placed policy conditionalities on African agriculture. All of the support systems and the incentives and the institutions that the farmers need to be productive, efficient and competitive were stripped away - whether it is extension services, research and development, access to finance or price stabilization

Today, African farmers are the least supported in the world, so we shouldn't be surprised that Africa has huge problems of poverty or food insecurity. That is what is going to happen when we abandon our farmers We are going to be doing three things with this new policy work:

First, center the debate on the right kinds of policies for African agriculture away from a Washington consensus to an African consensus

Second, revamp policy institutions all across Africa, both in terms of human capacity and in terms of institutional capacity for formulating evidence-based policies that are relevant, that are impactful and are sustainable for small-holder agriculture.

Third, we will be supporting policy advocacy platforms for farmers. Farmers are the best advocates for their own livelihoods, but in Africa they are very weak in terms of their institutional capacity to engage the policy space. We want to give them greater voice, but we want to also give them capacity in their institutions to understand how policy affects them - national policy, regional policy or international policy. So we are going to strengthen the policy advocacy platforms.

Finally and particularly crucial to us, we are going to strengthen parliamentary [capacity]. African parliaments have a huge role to play. They determine the laws, the rules, and the regulations. They vote on budgets for agriculture. But when you look at Africa - where most of our parliamentarians come from rural areas - you have a situation where budgets for agriculture are so low. Agra is going to be working closely with Nepad (the New Economic Partnership for African Development) on the Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Program (CAADP). Agra and Nepad are going to coordinate on how to strengthen the parliamentary groups across Africa to better understand the needs of agriculture, but, better yet, to put in place the kinds of policies and support the kinds of institutions and financing mechanisms to make agriculture the engine of growth in most African countries.

Agra is also training the future generation of policy analysts for Africa through an African regional masters program in agriculture and applied economics. It is based at the University of Pretoria and is working with 16 universities in 12 countries, training analysts in four critical areas: environmental economics and policy, rural development, food and agri-business management and trade and agricultural policy. A review of the program was completed recently and found it is a world-class program, able to provide masters training at about $22,000 dollars over two years, compared to $70,000 in the U.S.

What are some specific areas where these policy initiatives can produce results?

Let me start with seed policy. Right now, we have helped to develop all these varieties. CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research).and several other centers are doing a terrific job of developing new crop varieties all across Africa. However, in many of the countries, less than five percent of the farmers are using improved varieties. In Nigeria, less than five percent of farmers are using improved maize varieties. In Tanzania, about 8 - 10 percent are using improved varieties.

Part of the reason is that the policy environment is not supportive of private seed companies, so many of countries still have publically controlled seed development and distribution programs. Our policy work is going to encourage governments to put in place better policies to encourage private-sector seed companies to produce and to commercialize seeds and to get them to small farmers.

Secondly, if you look at the length of time between the development of a new crop variety and when it is released commercially, it can range anything from five to ten years in Africa. If you look at other parts of the world, it is anywhere between eight to 12 months. We have a situation in Africa where the seed release system is actually not friendly to small holder farmers, so we are going to be supporting the development of new policies and regulatory systems that will dramatically cut down the amount of time it takes to get the varieties out to farmers. That is especially important in the context of climate change.

But given the erosion of government capacity to support effective agricultural policies, might privatization of seed development further reduce the capacity of governments to aid their farmers? How can you ensure that the private market will work more efficiently, unless there is more capacity within the government structures?

The critical thing is the price of seed and the timeliness of the availability of the seed and the quantity of the seed available. We are very supportive of public institutions doing the breeding work - the development of the crop varieties - because in most cases they are crop varieties for poor farmers, and the best way you can support that development is through public programs. But, if you have a government monopoly seed company commercializing seed distribution, then you run into problems of lack of availability of seeds in the right quantities, the diversity of seeds available and the high cost of seeds.

Around the world, evidence shows that small and medium sized local seed companies - and I'm not talking about multi-international seed companies - are able to supply seed to farmers at 30 - 40 % lower than the cost of public institutions. So it is very important to have a public-private model for getting the seed to farmers. At Agra, we believe that it is important for government to support the development and the commercialization of seeds by small holder farmers.

See Part Two of this Conversation

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