Africa will experience a green revolution sooner than expected. What is required is the political will and mind change of African leaders to achieve a green revolution in the nearest future. Prof. Pedro Sanchez, a world class soil scientist and former Director General of the International Center for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF), Kenya, said this while speaking on “the millennium villages and Africa’s green revolution”, at a seminar at IITA.
Prof. Sanchez said that what rural African farmers need is empowerment. “They need the right quantity and quality of fertilizer at the right time, credit support to enhance and exp and their holdings, efficient crop processing capabilities to add value to farm produce, and good market outlets to sell their harvests.” He said there are fantastic technologies at IITA and other agricultural research centers in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The technologies must be pushed out to benefit people and not be kept in book shelves. “The grass roots are getting on fire … though the setting around the millennium villages may be a drop in the bucket … they are already being set on fire in Malawi, Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and in many parts of Africa”, He said.
Prof. Sanchez who is the Director of Tropical Agriculture and Senior Research Scholar at the Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, also serves as cochair of the Hunger Task Force of the Millennium Project, an advisory body to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). MDGs are the world’s time-bound and quantified targets for addressing extreme poverty in its many dimensions—hunger, disease, lack of adequate income and shelter, poor water, while promoting gender equality, education, and environmental sustainability. They also include basic human rights—the rights of each person on the planet to good health, basic education, shelter, and security.
The MDG is currently working with 78 villages in SSA and affecting the lives of about 400 000 people in 12 agroecological zones. Two of the villages are located in Nigeria. The main objective of MDG villages is to impact on the lives of people in 100 000 villages of about 5000 people each in the hunger spots of sub-Saharan Africa. “We have discovered that once these communities are empowered, they begin to achieve the millennium development goals quickly,” Sanchez said . The villagers have started with food production, getting out of hunger, controlling malaria with the use of treated bed spread, and transiting from subsistence farming to small-scale entrepreneurs.
Prof. Sanchez gave an example of the success of the MDG’s intervention in Malawi, a country with food deficit for several years but now with food surplus and even donating maize to neighboring countries of Lesotho and Swazil and; all within two years. He said Ethiopia is another good example of a country doing the right thing and on the path to agricultural development. If Malawi and Ethiopia can do it, then other democratic countries in Africa such as Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Mali, and Senegal whose leaders care to do the right thing can achieve self sufficiency in food production. “Malawi may be an example of Africa’s first green revolution because the leadership is committed and willing to change from extreme poverty line to becoming a major food producer … The Malawian President is the country’s minister of agriculture, and so focuses on practicing agriculture the right way … the rural farmers are willing to work hard … they are committed and determined to change their orientation and become liberated from poverty and malnutrition,” Sanchez said.
Prof. Sanchez also maintained that sustainability was an essential part of the projects from the beginning. In western Kenya, fertilizer and improved maize seeds were subsidized to the tune of 80% value for the villagers in the first year. In the second year, the subsidy was dropped to 40%, and now it has been reduced to 20%. Next year, it would be zero. Before the MDG exits from the villages in western Kenya, a farmer has decided on his own to opt out of the subsidy plan. “I have made good money from marketing onions and tomatoes … so I do not need your fertilizer … I know what to do and I know how to enter the market,” the smallholder farmer with half an acre plot of l and said . Prof. Sanchez enthusiastically described the farmer as number one of the 400 000 people in the millennium villages. He hopes that by 2015, farmers in sub-Saharan Africa would make similar comment as that farmer in western Kenya.
He said “What we are doing in the millennium villages in Malawi, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, and all other places where agricultural production has tripled has demonstrated that the research findings must be used for the peoples’ development.” Research for development is a continuum, where the work of the scientists becomes known and not just in research journals but translated into concrete achievements in development.
Pedro Sanchez is author of Properties and Management of Soils of the Tropics (rated among the top 10 best-selling books in soil science worldwide), and currently writing the second edition of the book.
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