Africa Needs Western Agricultural Technology

By Former President Jimmy Carter, founder of the nonprofit Carter Center, which seeks to improve health, prevent and resolve conflicts, and enhance freedom and democracy. This piece is reprinted from the International Herald Tribune of November 6, 1997.

As we approach the new millennium, starvation and malnutrition remain serious threats to almost a billion people worldwide, according to the World Food Summit. The situation is gravest in the 49 countries that make up Sub-Saharan Africa.

The reality is that we have the knowledge and ability to prevent starvation but fail to act.

If affluent nations choose to act in two broad areas, many African farmers would benefit. After all, they are proud, ambitious, competent, and hardworking. They respond almost immediately to new ideas and plow most of their profits back into improving their farms and agricultural tools.

First, developed nations must escalate efforts to share existing technologies with small-scale farmers.

For the past 11 years, the Carter Center and the Sasakawa Africa Association have been involved in a grassroots agricultural effort, SG 2000, that now reaches 12 African countries. Led by the American agricultural scientist and Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, SG 2000 works with heads of state and their ministries of agriculture to share successful agricultural techniques with more than 600,000 small-scale farm families.

Through this collaboration, we have proved that it is possible to double, triple, and even quadruple crop yields, using existing technology. This is done primarily through planting in contour rows and through the proper use of improved seeds, modest amounts of mineral fertilizer, and timely weed control.

Second, wealthy nations must be prepared to share emerging technologies with less-developed countries. For example, agricultural biotechnology can play a vital role in improving health and nutrition.

Regrettably, extremist groups in affluent countries have begun to mount attacks against responsible plant biotechnology and the moderate use of fertilizer and pesticides, wrongly asserting that they will “poison” the earth’s farmland.

This type of speculation is erroneous. Of course, we must be environmentally responsible in growing food, but we cannot use only methods that were developed to feed a much smaller number of people.

The world’s population is expanding by 100 million people each year. Within the next four decades, we will need to expand food production to about 10 billion tons per year. It took some 10,000 years to reach half that amount.

Obviously, the world’s farmers will not meet this challenge unless they have access to continuing breakthroughs in agricultural science and technology.

Many in the international donor community want to help improve food security in Africa and other developing areas. However, some environmentalists, backed by powerful lobbying groups, have clashed with food producers over the best methods of achieving higher productivity. The resulting discord has led many donor agencies to throw up their hands in discouragement and to stop supporting the agricultural programs so urgently needed in Sub-Saharan Africa. This policy deadlock must be broken.

Norman Borlaug is one of a growing number of agricultural scientists who believe that the proper use of biotechnology can help increase crop yields and reduce pesticide use at the same time.

Researchers in universities and the private sector have worked for years seeking methods that would improve the yield, dependability, and quality of agricultural crops. Using biotechnology, these scientists build upon traditional plant breeding but go far beyond it.

With this powerful new knowledge, they now have the capability to pack large amounts of improvement into a single seed. For example, they can insert genes that resist diseases and insects, thus reducing the need for chemical pesticides. They also can insert genes that help crops withstand drought conditions.

Farmers almost certainly will not be able to feed their nations unless these new products reach them soon, even if they immediately begin using existing techniques.

We must also provide biotechnology training to scientists and extension workers in developing countries, and at the same time encourage the development of regulatory safeguards to govern research and production and to protect consumers.

Public–private collaboration will be crucial to achieving these objectives, but development of biotechnology is very expensive for the private sector. Private companies must have appropriate incentives and protection of their intellectual property rights if they are to continue their research.

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