The Hardest Case - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 139

The limitations of the Brazilian model are nonetheless obvious. It is a proven method
of generating more agricultural production and more commercial gains from farming,
but not a fully proven method of using farming to bring adequate income or greater
food security to the rural poor. Brazil has increased food security for the rural poor
most recently through expensive public-sector conditional cash transfers, not through
corporate investments. Defenders of the Brazilian approach argue that poor smallhold-
ers will be able to participate through contract farming, promising their crop to a large
firm at a prearranged price in return for seeds, fertilizers, irrigation, and technical assis-
tance. The authors of the World Bank's 2007 study insist that, even on their own, African
smallholder farmers are capable producers: “Given the opportunity, smallholders in
Africa have proved to be just as responsive to new technologies as their Asian counter-
parts. Witness the adoption of hybrid maize in much of southern Africa, the dairy revo-
lution in East Africa, and the increased production of cocoa, cassava, and cotton in West
Africa.” The World Bank authors also warn that large-scale farming has a long record of
disappointment in Africa, dating from colonial times (Byerlee and de Janvry 2009).
On the political Right, nearly all agree that Africa needs a technology upgrade in
farming comparable to the Green Revolution that brought farm productivity and
higher rural incomes to Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. In 2006, two pro-technology phil-
anthropic foundations, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, joined in a joint venture they called an Alliance for a Green Revolution
in Africa (AGRA). Bill Gates himself explained the importance of introducing African
smallholder farmers to modern agricultural science:
In Africa today, the great majority of poor people, many of them women with young
children, depend on agriculture for food and income and remain impoverished and
even go hungry. Yet, Melinda and I have also seen reason for hope—African plant
scientists developing higher-yielding crops, African entrepreneurs starting seed
companies to reach small farmers, and agrodealers reaching more and more small
farmers with improved farm inputs and farm management practices. These strate-
gies have the potential to transform the lives and health of millions of families.
(Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 2006)
This Green Revolution vision for rural Africa, embraced uncritically by most on the
Right, is firmly rejected by critics on the Left. When the AGRA initiative was announced
in 2006, those who did not want a green revolution in Africa responded with reflex-
ive hostility. Peter Rosset, from a US nongovernmental organization (NGO) named
Food First, lampooned the Gates Foundation's “naïveté about the causes of hunger” and
warned that the most likely result of the new initiative would be “higher profits for the
seed and fertilizer industries, negligible impacts on total food production and worsen-
ing exclusion and marginalization in the countryside” (Rosset 2006).
The political Left is critical of trying to bring a Green Revolution to Africa in part
because of what happened in Latin America when high-yielding seeds were introduced
there in the 1960s and 1970s. Due to extreme social inequities in rural Latin America,
ownership of productive farmland and access to credit for the purchase of essential