Saving Africa’s Seeds: Farmers fighting for diversity

Agricultural programs have too often scratched where there wasn’t any itching. — Agronomist Roland Bunch¹

Meeting the world’s future food needs is dependent on preserving the genetic diversity of the plants we grow and eat, as well as their “wild relatives”. While collecting and saving the world’s seed patrimony in “gene banks” or ex situ may be a worthy endeavor, a new FAO publication underscores the critical need for efforts that protect agricultural biodiversity on the farm itself or in situ. This means supporting the millions of small farmers and peasants throughout the world who manage diverse species of plants and animals in and around their fields. Based on research conducted in over 100 countries, the conclusions of the FAO’s State of the World’s Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture put into question rural development approaches like the Alliance for a new Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) that may in the long run threaten farmers’ ability to manage on-farm diversity, preserve their seeds and cope with a changing climate. As part of a growing Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, West African farmers are questioning these imported development programs and calling for solutions rooted in farmer knowledge and local seed systems.

Humans have inhabited Africa’s grasslands for over 100,000 years, perhaps longer than anywhere else on earth. From the native grasses of the Savannas, farmers domesticated an astonishing number of food crops such as African rice, millets, sorghum, tef and fonio. As a result, Africa now has a richer diversity of native cereals than any other continent. These traditional cereals have sustained rural farm families for generations. Well-adapted to African soils and equipped with the hardy, drought-tolerant traits of their Savanna ancestors, they are the traditional buffers against famine. For example fonio, an indigenous West African crop enjoyed in soups or as a porridge or cous cous, thrives in sandy, marginal soils. It is also extremely nutritious, with high levels of cystine and methionine, essential amino acids often lacking in the diets of the rural poor (and deficient in major cereals like wheat, maize, rice and barley).[2]

The tremendous agro-biodiversity of African food crops holds potential for solving some of the greatest problems facing food production today, including climate change. Native grains can thrive where introduced grains produce poorly or not at all, such as infertile soils, in drought or flood conditions, and in extreme heat or cold. Some varieties of pearl millet, for example, can survive the most hostile Sahelian conditions, including searing heat that can literally ‘cook’ seedlings before they’ve grown or dry out the soil so that plants cannot break through the earthen crust. [3] While outsiders have long derided the plant as scrawny, top-heavy, unresponsive to fertilizer application and low-yielding, none of the world’s “major” grains come close to matching its resilience. For this reason, pearl millet is prized as a remarkable food plant for ensuring human survival, and one of increasing importance as climate change increases the incidence of severe drought, particularly in dryland regions.

Like peasants all over the world, African smallholders grow a wide range of species and varieties in their fields. While this complexity has long frustrated agricultural scientists, the genetic diversity of peasant farm systems acts as a buffer against crop failure: even if one variety is damaged by weather or disease, the others are likely to succeed. Several varieties of pearl millet, for instance, are often intercropped with other cereals such as sorghum and maize or legumes like cowpeas or peanuts. In addition to their agronomic qualities, farmers select plant varieties according to local culinary preferences. In West Africa, preparations of native grains generally accompany soups or stews made from peanuts, okra, leafy greens, peppers or small eggplants known as ‘garden eggs’.

Unfortunately, most of Africa’s native food crops have been neglected by decades of agricultural development policies that favored introduced crops like maize, wheat and Asian rice. These crops were brought in from overseas by a succession of non-Africans, from colonial authorities and missionaries to agricultural researchers and aid agencies, all of whom heralded the new, foreign crops as superior in taste, nutrition and yield. Scorned as “poor people food”–consumed as porridges or fermented products alien to Western palates–native grains received little or no development resources, yet they remain mainstays of rural, subsistence diets to this day. This despite the surge of cheap, subsidized grain imports following liberalization policies of the 1980s and 90s.

In West Africa, the slashing of import tariffs led to a flood of cheap rice from Southeast Asia, undermining producers of African rice and further shifting consumption patterns away from traditional foods, especially in urban areas. Structural Adjustment policies pushed by the World Bank and IMF heavily promoted cash crops for export at the expense of subsistence food production. During the 1990s, for example, Mali increasingly brought more land into cotton cultivation, increasing production from 200,000 tonnes to 620,000 tonnes by the end of the decade. [4] Increased dependence on food imports left West African cities highly vulnerable to skyrocketing global rice prices, which increased by 100% between February 2007 and March 2008. The price hikes triggered so-called “food riots”--citizen rebellions protesting government failure to shield them from global market shocks–in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mauritania and Senegal.

The food crisis roused a fierce debate over the future of African food and agriculture. Fears of urban instability due to food price hikes led some policy-makers to withdraw from neoliberal policies (which favored importing cheap food from surplus-producing countries) in support of national self-sufficiency in “major” grains like maize and rice. But instead of building on the peasant production systems already in place, the new talk of “self-sufficiency” provided auspicious cover for advocates of a new Green Revolution, which promised to increase food production through the use “high-yielding” seeds and fertilizers. Led by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation–along with other mega-philanthropies, aid agencies and multinational companies–the move could actually compound the problem.

First, the promotion of hybrid seed varieties is the number one cause of “genetic erosion”: the narrowing of the genetic base for agriculture. A 2006 village-level study in Mali revealed that the introduction of hybrid sorghum had led to the disappearance of three locally-important native sorghum varieties, a loss that threatened peasants’ ability to adapt to changing conditions. Another Malian study showed that the expansion of cotton, a 100% hybrid crop, and maize monocultures led to the disappearance of 60% of the sorghum diversity in the Sudano-Guinean zone. [5] In the Philippines, a showcase country for the first Green Revolution where around 3,500 rice varieties once thrived, only eight varieties now dominate.

On the heels of the 2008 food crisis, the Gates-funded Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) announced plans to ramp up funding for the development and release of new rice varieties–such as New Rice for Africa or ‘Nerica’–in Mali, Nigeria, Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda and Malawi. AGRA program officer Jane Ininda stated, “Farmers need new high-yielding, locally-adapted varieties to raise rice yield and turn around Africa’s food crisis situation…There is need for urgent action here.” But the small farmers, in whose name urgency is being called for, are not so sure. Nerica rice--a hybrid designed to merge the resilience of African rice with the high productivity of Asian rice–has achieved remarkably low levels of farmer adoption. A 2008 evaluation by the Science Council of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) showed that farmers were unlikely to use Nerica seeds unless they received them free or very cheaply. The Council also found that claims to yield improvements, drought and heat tolerance were dubious and that aid-funded researchers had succumbed to the “strong temptation to oversell potential products and breakthroughs to donors,” thus risking their scientific credibility.[6]

Like most hybrids, Nerica is a demanding crop compared to native rice varieties, requiring more resources (especially fertilizer) to achieve promised yield gains. Accordingly, one of the pillars of AGRA’s work involves promoting networks of private agrochemical dealers or “agrodealers” to dispense hybrid seeds, fertilizers and other inputs throughout rural Africa. Consequently, multinational agribusiness companies are gaining access to a continent of millions of potential new seed and chemical consumers: farmers who currently employ largely sustainable, “low external input” practices such as the countless successful examples of agroecological production documented by the Center for Learning on Sustainable Agriculture (LEISA) and the Participatory Ecological Land Use Management (PELUM) Association. But sustainability, in this case, is framed as “low farmer adoption” of promoted technologies, a barrier to be overcome with increased private investment and improved “market access.” As such, Nerica has become part of the rush for foreign investment in Africa, including massive “rice land grabs”recently reported in Mali and Liberia.

In addition to the rush on land, a rush to control seeds threatens the very foundation of farmer autonomy and livelihoods. A new report by ETC Group details how the seed and chemical industry are using the allure of “climate ready” seeds to ease public acceptance of genetically engineered crops and to convince governments to reduce biosafety restrictions. Dominated by only six companies (DuPont, BASF, Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer and Dow), the global seed industry is scrambling to obtain patents on technologies and gene sequences related to stress-tolerance in plants. That’s because hybrid seeds, with their built-in dependence on purchased inputs, are big business. The global market for drought tolerance in just one crop– maize– is an estimated $2.7 billion.

There are clear benefits to agribusiness concerning the research and promotion of “improved” seed varieties, but African farmers have been scrutinizing such projects and organizing alternative campaigns that promote homegrown solutions. At a series of“citizens’ juries” held in Mali in January 2010, farmers, pastoralists, food processors and consumers from Mali, Senegal, Burkina Faso and Benin heard evidence from expert witnesses and made recommendations about the future of agricultural research. The event followed an unprecedented farmer-led assessment of the state of Malian agricultural research and agro-biodiversity, concluding that direct farmer involvement in the design and implementation of agricultural research was sorely needed. They further argued that research should focus on improving agro-ecological practices and promoting local agro-biodiversity through activities like seed sharing instead of moving towards commercial farming that relies on hybrid seeds and expensive inputs.

At best, the seed and fertilizer packages pushed by the Green Revolution “scratch where there is no itching,” offering expensive foreign technologies where local seeds and adaptations could succeed–if supported by policy. At worst, they threaten the very foundation of global food production: the agro-biodiversity preserved primarily by small farmers.

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