A new chapter for sustainable development in Africa?

There are high hopes that this week's G8 Summit will lead to a dramatically new policy for sustainable development: focusing on agriculture instead of food aid. To bring you a fuller picture of this story, I interviewed Dr. Marjatta Eilitta in Ghana, the Director of the North and West Africa Division of IFDC, an international center for soil fertility and agricultural development.

As the Financial Times recently reported, there has been too much attention on global food aid, and not enough on agriculture. Not enough focus on the people - farmers - who enable food security. The G8 draft communiqu says, "The combined effect of long-standing underinvestment in agriculture and food security, price trends, and the economic crisis have led to increased hunger. Food security is closely connected with economic growth and social progress as well as with political stability."

Way to get onto it, G-8-ers. Farmers have been saying that for years. Finally, there is growing acknowledgment about the importance of the farmer. And if you look at China (and other East and South East countries), those that place food security high on the development agenda have done well. Its not that complicated - people have gotta eat. Food aid is, at best, a short term solution, and more often then not, hunger is a long term trend (and too often has human origins - for people who still read books, I recommend, David Keen's, 'the benefit of famine').

Now the G8 is talking about tripling investment to agriculture. That's US$12 bn over the next three years. Dr Eilitta said, 'it's a very exciting time. The focus on agriculture as a goal for development is completely on target. When we look back at the decreased focus on agriculture in the past two decades in sub Saharan Africa, its been a huge setback. When you look at India and China, they've tripled and quadrupled production and there is better food security there.'

In other words, the donors made a serious mistake. Not, many of you might think, for the first time.

But that was then, and this is now, and 2009 has challenges that the 1960s did not. One challenge is how interconnected everything is (not that it wasn't before, but we all seem much more aware of it now). Japan, not for the first time, is advocating the need for a 'grand coalition with a common vision' while investing in agriculture. Dr Eilitta is one of the partners of 'Farmers First', which I wrote about several months ago, who have come up with one of the first business- farmer-scientist platforms to advance several common goals: It's a growing and powerful partnership.

Partnerships are important, but what are they partnerships for? How is the money going to be spent? What are the successful projects, and how can they be scaled up? It wasn't long before Dr Eilitta and I started talking about the African Green Revolution. The 'first' green revolution helped increase productivity by 200% in India - and significantly contributed to that country's economic growth. It also led to pumping the soil with inorganic fertilizer, which has been critiqued by many environmentalists during and since. The debates on the Indian Green Revolution are long and deep. Forgive me, but I'm not going to summarize them here.

Dr Eilitta takes a middle path. Inorganic fertilizer can help certain types of soil. It has tremendous benefits for higher yields. It can also be damaging; proper regulation (especially consistant regulation across different regions) is important. More than that, phosphate fertilizer, based on petroleum, won't be around for ever, given peak oil. It's necessary to be as efficient as possible with what little petroleum we have left. It's also necessary to use organic fertilizer. We talked about one of the cutting edges of fertilizer - using both human and animal waste. When treated properly, it's excellent fertilizer - and there's little concern of it running out.

She also emphasizes that it's not just about input. It's also about transportation, access to seeds, access to credit, access to markets, and enabling environments through harmonizing policies and effective regulatory systems. She favors 'supporting the people, not the product'.

Like most people working towards sustainable development, she focuses on solutions tailored to the needs of a given context: "Funding needs to be made available by engaging organizations at local, national and regional level. There is also need for greater research. We know how to increase productivity of agriculture, but we know less about how to make and use resources efficiently for production.'

How this potentially new chapter in (potentially) sustainable development for Africa might unfold still contain many details that need to be worked out.

Perhaps most important, she argues that we need 'solutions (to) serve us for next 3 generations. we want to have resources available for all future generations.' Indeed; let us all work towards that goal.