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Africa can profit from Green Revolution, says Jeffrey Sachs

CHENNAI: The food crisis plaguing Africa’s economic development can be solved by applying the lessons learned from the implementation of the Green Revolution in India, according to Jeffrey Sachs, eminent development economist, special adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

“Africa is now 40 years behind India in crucial aspects of development,” said Professor Sachs, who was speaking at the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) here on Thursday. “But thankfully, with the lessons we have learned so far, along with developments in technology and our ability to diffuse information today, we will not need that long a time to close that gap.”

The current food crisis in sub-Saharan Africa is similar to the agrarian crisis India faced in 1965, Professor Sachs said. Around 284 million people suffer from famine and malnutrition in the sub-Saharan region today, and one out of every two child deaths is as a result of malnutrition.

The essence of the problem, Professor Sachs believes, is stagnancy in the agricultural sector. This is the only region in the world that has seen declining per capita food production over the last 50 years. Over this period, while cereal output has increased to two and a half tonnes per hectare in South Asia and four tonnes per hectare in East Asia, it has remained firmly fixed at one tonne per hectare in Africa.

“It is astounding that yields have not budged in 40 years,” said Professor Sachs. “Without agricultural transformation you cannot have industrial transformation, and then you remain stagnant in subsistence. But what is even more astounding is that the world has not responded to this.”

In India, agricultural production was radically transformed with the introduction of high yielding varieties of seeds, fertilizers and systems of irrigation. “Not one of these three has been applied in Africa,” Professor Sachs noted.

He believes that a change in development policy in the 1980s towards structural adjustments — trumpeted loudly by organisations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund — prevented a similar Green Revolution in Africa.

“This was a fundamentalist market ideology that only markets could bring about change in developing countries and that states needed to be shrunk,” Professor Sachs said. “The wrong idea was that in Africa the problem was government, and that markets would stop the crisis. For 20 years, the World Bank said no state support, no use of government institutions to diffuse technology and no public financing of inputs. This is antithetical to what was learned in the Green Revolution.”

Professor Sachs believes that following the Green Revolution paradigm will “double or triple food production in Africa in two or three years.” After introducing high yielding varieties of seeds and fertilizers in Malawi, food production increased from 1.2 million tonnes in 2005 — a famine year — to 3.4 million tonnes within 12 months.

With potentially vast reserves of foreign aid and advancements in knowledge and technology gained from experiences like the Green Revolution, Professor Sachs is confident that the many problems faced by the agricultural sector in Africa will ultimately be solved. “Fundamentally, our problem is a priority problem,” he said.

“In the U.S., the defence budget for 2008 is $623 billion. Just 21 hours of Pentagon spending would provide insecticide-treated netting against malaria for 300 million Africans for five years.” Professor Sachs, however, did insert a strong note of caution — quoting Green Revolution pioneer Norman Borlaug, he warned: “The potential is there, but you can’t eat potential.”

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