The Center on Food Security and the Environment is a joint effort of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
FSE's previous Rockefeller project on "Prioritizing Investments in Food Security under a Changing Climate" pursued several research directions in an effort to better characterize the risks that climate change poses to agriculture in Africa.
Agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa remains significantly less than the rest of the world, and 25 percent of people in the region still suffer from an insufficient dietary intake of calories. Yet sub-Saharan Africa has more arable land than Asia or Latin America, and a more diverse set of cereal grains. Agriculture also accounts for 20-25 percent of GDP for the region compared with only five percent for the rest of the world.
So why is productivity in sub-Saharan Africa so low when agriculture is such a big part of the economy, asked Rosamond L. Naylor, director of the Center on Food Security Environment at last week’s Connecting the Dots conference. Lack of irrigation is part of the problem. 95 percent of farms in sub-Saharan Africa are rainfed and rely on water from a short, 4-5 month rainy season.
“During the rainy season kids are fed pretty well,” explained Naylor. “But during the peak of the dry season up to one-third of children are severely malnourished in parts of West Africa where we have been working.”
Sub-Saharan Africa has largely missed out on the benefits of the Green Revolution that increased crop production in Asia two to three fold. Asia’s heavily irrigated agriculture took advantage of new crop varieties that were bred to take up nutrients with sufficient water availability. Groundwater sources in sub-Saharan Africa, on the other hand, are more fractured and not well understood, and surface water isn’t necessarily close to where the people are.
“But Africa has water” said Naylor. “Groundwater resources have not been sufficiently explored and rivers such as the Nile and Niger remain underutilized due to a mindset that irrigation systems must be large scale.”
This requires big investments and institutional involvement that have thus far not resulted in great payoffs. Corruption in some areas coupled with institutional and tribal issues have also contributed to failed investments.
“We need to change our investment strategies from large-scale to small-scale irrigation systems,” suggested Naylor. “Evaluate the returns from treadle, solar-power, and diesel pumps to see what works where, so that we stop investments that aren’t working and support investments where they are.”
Treadle pumps can work well if they are close to surface water, but require a lot of labor, explained Naylor. There is a huge energetic cost and an opportunity cost for someone to work the treadle pump, so it is necessary to ‘get the right technology to suit the water and labor conditions’.
Irrigation is not just about access (drawing water). It is also necessary to think about how to best distribute that water to crops (e.g. drip irrigation) and what you use them on. Production of leafy greens, for example, leads to higher income and nutritional returns.
FSE’s solar market garden project in Benin is a good example of where appropriate technologies are being applied in a cost-effective manner. Solar-powered, drip irrigation pumps have improved incomes and nutrition for participating farming groups through the year-round production of high-value crops. Proven to be a viable and profitable investment, the project is now scaling up in other villages in Benin and West Africa.
“According to the World Bank, investment in agriculture is the best bang for your buck than any other investment,” said panel moderator Jenna Davis, assistant professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering and affiliated FSE fellow.
Fortunately, the World Bank is beginning to recognize the viability and efficiency of investments in small-scale irrigation projects. NGOs and academia also have a role to play in facilitating these projects. Through these partnerships and shifts in investment strategies, the development community has a better chance of improving access to freshwater resources for some of the world’s most vulnerable and effectively addressing sub-Saharan Africa's water and food security crisis.
In the first decade of the 21st century, global production of ethanol and biodiesel increased nearly tenfold. If that trend continues, says Rosamond L. Naylor, director of Stanford University’s Center on Food Security and the Environment, national biofuels policies will have an increasingly powerful impact on food prices, food security, energy security, and rural incomes in the developing world.
During a two-hour symposium held on the Stanford campus last Wednesday, Naylor addressed the role of biofuels in global food price volatility and the implications of biofuels development in rural Africa and Asia. Although she acknowledged that global income and population growth have contributed to increased demand for biofuels, she also emphasized “the unbelievable dominance of policy” in driving current trends.
“The main part of this that I think is so significant is the use of mandates,” Naylor said. “Policies such as the United States’ Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS), which sets a national target of using 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol per year by 2015, have reshaped price and supply dynamics in both food and fuel markets. “
“When you think about the fact that the US provides half of the world’s corn…the fact that we’re using so much in our gas tanks, biofuels really is changing the nature of global markets,” Naylor said. Policies that fix demand for corn from the ethanol market, she explained, have a destabilizing effect on corn prices, especially in the face of supply shortages.
“When you have mandates you have a quantity that you’re absolutely insisting you use, regardless of the price,” she said. “That inelastic demand leads to more volatile prices with supply shocks.”
Because of the substitutability of basic food commodities, Naylor said, price volatility in the corn market has far-reaching consequences. “Prices of corn ripple through all of the world food economy markets…it affects the demand and supply of wheat and rice and soy, and other things,” she explained. And for poor households in the developing world, she said, “it has big income effects…when you’re spending 70 to 80 percent of your budget on food, you’re going to be hurt the most.”
However, Naylor also noted that biofuel mandates in the developed world could provide valuable market opportunities for developing-country farmers.
In rural Africa and Asia, she said, farmers “see the US having a big mandate, EU having a big mandate, and they think, can they supply into that mandated need?”
For now, it seems, the answer is “maybe.” In Africa, for example, efforts are underway to increase the use of jatropha – an inedible, drought-resistant shrub – as a biofuel feedstock. But Naylor said that low yields and high labor costs are likely to severely limit the economic returns from jatropha-based biofuels.
And in marginal growing conditions, the use of more conventional feedstocks is often restricted by resource availability. In India, for example, where almost all sugarcane is grown under irrigated conditions, expansion of sugarcane area to supply the ethanol market could lead to water shortages. Even if these countries can make large-scale biofuel production economically viable, the benefits to poor farmers could vary widely depending on the structure of the market.
“The implications of biofuel development are going to be quite different,” Naylor said, “depending on the organization of the value chain.”
Dr. Siwa Msangi, a Senior Research Fellow with the International Food Policy Research Institute, agreed. In comments following Naylor’s presentation, Msangi said biofuel development contributes most effectively to rural income growth “when you can have vertical integration…people all along the value chain have to be making money.”
Msangi also noted that commodity price increases, including those driven by ethanol mandates, could benefit small farmers if they are controlled and predictable. “Sharp, fast, sudden price rises – those are the ones that are bad for consumers,” he explained. But prices rises “can be positive…especially if those price rises can be gradual and sustained over time, because that gives people the opportunity to mobilize resources to make use of higher returns.” For example, small farmers at the local or national level can increase their production of crops in high demand for biofuel production.
The emerging connections between agriculture and energy markets are complex, Msangi said, but can be advantageous if handled carefully. “If there are good opportunities for agribusiness, I think there’s a case for taking them,” he said, “but also for being aware of the context and all the issues.”
This was the eighth talk in FSE’s Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series.
Philanthropist and software giant Bill Gates spoke to a Stanford audience last week about the importance of foreign aid and product innovation in the fight against chronic hunger, poverty and disease in the developing world.
His message goes hand-in-hand with the ongoing work of researchers at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Much of that work is supported by FSI’s Global Underdevelopment Action Fund, which provides seed grants to help faculty members design research experiments and conduct fieldwork in some of the world’s poorest places.
Four FSI senior fellows – Larry Diamond, Jeremy Weinstein, Paul Wise and Walter Falcon – respond to some of the points made by Gates and share insight into their own research and ideas about how to advance and secure the most fragile nations.
Without first improving people’s health, Gates says it’s harder to build good governance and reliable infrastructure in a developing country. Is that the best way to prioritize when thinking about foreign aid?
Larry Diamond: I have immense admiration for what Bill Gates is doing to reduce childhood and maternal fatality and improve the quality of life in poor countries. He is literally saving millions of lives. But in two respects (at least), it's misguided to think that public health should come "before" improvements in governance.
First, there is no reason why we need to choose, or why the two types of interventions should be in conflict. People need vaccines against endemic and preventable diseases – and they need institutional reforms to strengthen societal resistance to corruption, a sociopolitical disease that drains society of the energy and resources to fight poverty, ignorance, and disease.
Second, good governance is a vital facilitator of improved public health. When corruption is controlled, public resources are used efficiently and justly to build modern sanitation and transportation systems, and to train and operate modern health care systems. With good, accountable governance, public health and life expectancy improve much more dramatically. When corruption is endemic, life-saving vaccines, drugs, and treatments too often fall beyond the reach of poor people who cannot make under-the-table payments.
Foreign aid has come under criticism for not being effective, and most countries have very small foreign aid budgets. How do you make the case that foreign aid is a worthy investment?
Jeremy M. Weinstein: While foreign aid may be a small part of most countries’ national budgets, global development assistance has increased markedly in the past 50 years. Between 2000 and 2010, global aid increased from $78 billion to nearly $130 billion – and the U.S. continues to be the world’s leading donor.
The challenge in the next decade will be to sustain high aid volumes given the economic challenges that now confront developed countries. I am confident that we can and will sustain these volumes for three reasons.
First, a strong core of leading voices in both parties recognizes that promoting development serves our national interest. In this interconnected world, our security and prosperity depend in important ways on the security and prosperity of those who live beyond our borders.
Second, providing assistance is a reflection of our values – it is these humanitarian motives that drove the unprecedented U.S. commitment to fighting HIV/AIDS during the Bush Administration.
Perhaps most importantly, especially in tight budget times, development agencies are learning a great deal about what works in foreign assistance, and are putting taxpayers’ dollars to better use to reduce poverty, fight disease, increase productivity, and strengthen governance – with increasing evidence to show for it.
Some of the most dire situations in the developing world are found in conflict zones. How can philanthropists and nongovernmental organizations best work in places with unstable governments and public health crises? Is there a role for larger groups like the Gates Foundation to play in war-torn areas?
Paul H. Wise: As a pediatrician, the central challenge is this: The majority of preventable child deaths in Sub-Saharan Africa and in much of the world occur in areas of political instability and poor governance.
This means that if we are to make real progress in improving child health we must be able to enhance the provision of critical, highly efficacious health interventions in areas that are characterized by complex political environments – often where corruption, civil conflict, and poor public management are the rule.
Currently, most of the major global health funders tend to avoid working in such areas, as they would rather invest their efforts and resources in supportive, well-functioning locations. This is understandable. However, given where the preventable deaths are occurring, it is not acceptable.
Our efforts are directed at creating new strategies capable of bringing essential services to unstable regions of the world. This will require new collaborations between health professionals, global security experts, political scientists, and management specialists in order to craft integrated child health strategies that respect both the technical requirements of critical health services and the political and management innovations that will ensure that these life-saving interventions reach all children in need.
Gates says innovation is essential to improving agricultural production for small farmers in the poorest places. What is the most-needed invention or idea that needs to be put into place to fight global hunger?
Walter P. Falcon: No single innovation will end hunger, but widespread use of cell phone technology could help.
Most poor agricultural communities receive few benefits from agricultural extension services, many of which were decimated during earlier periods of structural reform. But small farmers often have cell phones or live in villages where phones are present.
My priority innovation is for a $10 smart phone, to be complemented with a series of very specific applications designed for transferring knowledge about new agricultural technologies to particular regions. Using the wiki-like potential of these applications, it would also be possible for farmers from different villages to teach each other, share critical local knowledge, and also interact with crop and livestock specialists.
Language and visual qualities of the applications would be key, and literacy problems would be constraining. But the potential payoff seems enormous.
Binswanger-Mkhize's talk will look at past and likely future agricultural growth and rural poverty reduction in the context of the overall economy of India, in which growth has accelerated sharply since the 1980s, but agriculture still has not followed suit. Despite slow growth, urban-rural consumption, income and poverty differentials have not risen. This is because urban-rural spillovers have led to a sharp acceleration of rural non-farm growth and income. Binswanger-Mkhize proposes an optimistic vision can be realized if agricultural growth accelerates, high and widely shared economic growth leads to strong spillovers to the rural economy, and the rural non-farm sector continues to flourish. This would enable the rural sector to keep up with income growth in the urban economy and rural poverty would rapidly decline. However, if agricultural growth fails to accelerate, and overall economic growth falters, a more pessimistic vision is also possible. Binswanger-Mkhize will also discuss the role of prices and wages in determining agricultural growth, rural poverty and nutrition, and the two interlinked income parity issues: rural-urban and agricultural-non-agricultural incomes parity.
Marianne Banziger, Deputy Director, Research & Partnership at International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) will provide commentary.
Bechtel Conference Center
In Kenya, 11 million people suffer from malnourishment. Twenty percent of children younger than five are underweight, and nearly one in three are below normal height. In a typical day, the average Kenyan consumes barely half as many calories as the average American.
But Kenya – and other underfed countries throughout Sub-Saharan Africa – have more than enough land to grow the food needed for their hungry populations.
The juxtaposition of food deprivation and land abundance boils down to a failure of national agriculture policies, says Thom Jayne, professor of international development at Michigan State University. Governments haven’t helped small farmers acquire rights to uncultivated land or use the land they own more productively, he said.
Speaking earlier this month at a symposium organized by the Center on Food Security and the Environment, Jayne said lifting African farmers out of poverty will require a new development approach.
The focus, he said, should be on increasing smallholder output and putting idle land to work in the hands of the rural poor.
Much of Sub-Saharan Africa’s fertile land, Jayne explained, falls under the ownership of state governments or wealthy investors who leave large tracts of land unplanted.
Meanwhile, population density in many rural areas exceeds the estimated carrying capacity for rainfed agriculture – approximately 500 persons per square kilometer, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Above this density threshold, farm sizes become so small, farming becomes economically unsustainable.
“As farm size shrinks, it’s increasingly difficult to produce a surplus,” Jayne said. “As it’s difficult to produce a surplus, it becomes difficult to finance investments in fertilizer and other inputs that could help you intensify.”
Agricultural development policies, Jayne said, have exacerbated these problems. One Zambian fertilizer subsidy program, for example, delivered support payments to over 50 percent of farms greater than five hectares in size – but only reached 14 percent of farmers whose holdings measured one hectare or smaller.
“This was a poverty reduction program that was targeted to large farms,” Jayne said. “Where’re the allocations to R&D appropriate to one hectare farms, tsetse fly control, vet services, all the things that are going to make that one hectare farm more productive?”
He stressed that investments in small farms could reduce poverty.
“Fifty to seventy percent of the population in these countries is engaged in agriculture,” he said. “There aren’t very many levers to reduce poverty and get growth processes going except to focus on the activities that that fifty to seventy percent are primarily engaged in.”
Smallholder-based growth strategies delivered stunning results in Green Revolution-era India – while large-farm strategies in Latin American countries have largely failed to alleviate rural poverty, he said.
Symposium commentator Byerlee, a rural policy expert and former lead economist for the World Bank, agreed with Jayne. In particular, Byerlee expressed skepticism about the benefit of large land investments by foreign agricultural interests.
“The social impacts aren’t going to be very much,” he said of the large-scale mechanized farming operations favored by foreign investors.
“They don’t create many jobs,” he said. “That’s really what we should be focusing on in terms of poverty reduction – job creation.”
Byerlee also stressed the need to formalize Sub-Saharan Africa’s land tenure systems. Currently, he said, about eighty percent of Africa’s land is titled informally under “customary” rights.
“When you have this population pressure, and on top of that you have commercial pressures coming in from investors, this system is just not going to stand up,” he said. “If you had better functioning land markets, it could reduce the transaction costs for investors, allow smallholders to access land, and provide an exit strategy for people at the bottom end.”
Jayne suggested reforms and new policies should include mechanisms to help small farmers gain access to unused fertile land. He called for comprehensive audits of land resources in Sub-Saharan African nations, a tax on uncultivated arable acreage, and a transparent public auction to distribute idle state lands to small farmers.
Additionally, he said, governments can help by improving infrastructure in remote rural areas and clearing fertile land of pests – such as tsetse flies – that threaten crops and human health.
But whatever particular policies they choose to pursue, Jayne said, African governments cannot afford to ignore the problems associated with inequitable land distribution and low smallholder agricultural productivity and. Failure to implement broad-based, smallholder-focused growth strategies will result in “major missed opportunities to reduce poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa,” he said.
This was the seventh talk in FSE's Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series.
Despite the fact that sub-Saharan Africa in 2012 contains much of the world’s unutilized and underutilized arable land, a significant and growing share of Africa’s farm households live in densely populated areas. Based on two alternative spatial databases capable of estimating populations at the level of one square kilometer and distinguishing between arable and non-arable land, we find that in at least five of the 10 countries analyzed, 25 percent of the rural population resides in areas exceeding 500 persons per square kilometer, estimated by secondary sources as an indicative maximum carrying capacity for areas of rain-fed agriculture in the region. The apparent paradox of a large proportion of Africa’s rural population living in densely populated conditions amidst a situation of massive unutilized land is resolved when the unit of observation is changed from land units to people.
A review of nationally representative farm surveys shows a tendency of (1) declining mean farm size over time within densely populated smallholder farming areas; (2) great disparities in landholding size within smallholder farming areas, leading to highly concentrated and skewed patterns of farm production and marketed surplus; (3) half or more of rural farm households are either buyers of grain or go hungry because they are too poor to afford to buy food; most households in this category control less than one hectare of land; and (4) a high proportion of farmers in densely populated areas perceive that it is not possible for them to acquire more land through customary land allocation procedures, even in areas where a significant portion of land appears to be unutilized.
Ironically, there has been little recognition of the potential challenges associated with increasingly densely populated and land-constrained areas of rural Africa, despite the fact that a sizeable and increasing share of its rural population live in such areas. Inadequate access to land and inability to exploit available unutilized land are issues that almost never feature in national development plans or poverty reduction strategies. In fact, since the rise of world food prices after the mid-2000s, many African governments have made concerted efforts to transfer land out of customary tenure systems (where the majority of rural people reside) to the state or to private individuals who, it is argued, can more effectively exploit the productive potential of the land to meet national food security objectives. Such efforts have nurtured the growth of a relatively well-capitalized class of “emergent” African farmers. The growing focus on how best to exploit unutilized land in Africa has arguably diverted attention from the more central and enduring challenge of implementing agricultural development strategies that effectively address the continent’s massive rural poverty and food insecurity problems, which require recognizing the growing land constraints faced by much of its still agrarian-based population. The final section of the paper considers research and policy options for addressing these problems.
