Loosening the grip of famine

Press, 13 July 1985, Page 18

Loosening the grip of famine

A “green revolution” in Africa and beyond is possible, but the answer is not in modern farming methods, according to LAURENCE ROCHE, Professor of Forestry and Wood Science at the University College of North Wales. Reprinted from the “Daily Telegraph,” London.

It is easy for us in the West to criticise the state of African agriculture. Of course the poverty and starvation we see is due to bad organisation, lack of foresight, political interference and the like; but the fact is that African farming once had its own kind of prosperity, before the white man went there. In colonial times, and since, all effort has been concentrated on commodities familiar in world trade such as wheat, rice, maize, coffee and tea, and well-known to western science. In the meantime, the ecological bases of small scale, traditional farming systems, and the related husbandry of sustainable natural resources such as that described by early explorers, have been and are being destroyed over much of the tropics. Travelling across Africa between 1795-1797, from Gambia through the territory of the pre-sent-day states of Senegal and Mali, Mungo Park, the British explorer, was repeatedly struck by the prosperity of agriculture and the ecological richness and diversity of the landscape. One of his observations is worth quoting: “ ... We passed a large town called Kabba, situated in the midst of a beautiful and highly cultivated country; bearing a greater resemblance to the centre of England than to what I should have supposed had been the middle of Africa. The people were everywhere employed in collecting the fruit of the shea butter tree from which they prepare the vegetable butter mentioned in former parts of this work.

“The kernel is enveloped in a sweet pulp, under a thin green rind; and the butter produced from it, besides the advantage of its keeping the whole year without salt, is whiter, firmer, and, to my palate, of a richer flavour than the best butter I have ever tasted from cows’ milk. The growth and the preparation of this commodity seem to be among the first objects of African industry in this and neighbouring states; and it constitutes a main article of their inland commerce.” This report on the commercial importance of the shea butter tree in African states was written more than 180 years ago. The states through which Park travelled are now two of the most ecologically impoverished and poorest nations in Africa. The shea butter tree, what is left of it as a species, is still in its wild state, endangered, unselected, and unknown to the world’s planners of green revolution technology. This tree is a symbol of the decline and destruction of traditional husbandry over much of the tropics. Its history can be multiplied many times over for other woody species throughout the region. Such species have received the attention of neither agriculturalists, nor foresters, and it must be said that in spite of some small improvement in recent years (education and training, together with research and development in agriculture) the tropics are still locked in conventional attitudes and policies that have been determined by historical accident rather than the needs of rural people. Most aid

programmes in agriculture reinforce these policies. Traditional forms of land husbandry were not assisted or given the opportunity to evolve to higher technological levels. They are now an over-taxed, impoverished and neglected sector, albeit involving millions of rural people. The resulting exodus to cities and its political consequences inaugurate the familiar pattern of increased emphasis on green revolutionary technology, often with direct involvement of the public sector (state farms, and so on) and artificially maintained low food prices through Government marketing boards. Over much of the tropics, because of these policies, the small farmer does not obtain the market price for his products. A vicious circle of increased penury and increased social and political instability in the rural areas is established without any improvement in the quality of life in the urban. Scientists, planners and politicians have simply not grasped the fact that the economic and ecological bases of small-scale peasant farming systems depended on the continued existence of natural forest vegetation. For this reason, the appalling consequences of deforestation, in terms of human deprivation, have not been foreseen. In Tigre and Wollo, regions of endemic famine in Ethiopia, whole mountain catchment areas and huge areas of farmlands on the lower slopes, are denuded of forest vegetation, and massively eroded. Low rainfall has merely exposed both the underlying collapse of the ecological bases of peasant agriculture in countries such as Ethiopia and the inadequacies of an urban industrially based green revolution technology with its limited options in crop production. The number of plants at present being used in modern agriculture

is less than a fraction of 1 per cent of the flora of the earth. For example, less than 10 of the higher plant species of the earth’s estimated 250,000 account for more than 70 per cent of the total cash receipts from crops from member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (0.E.C.D.). Man has hardly begun to explore, conserve and manage for his own benefit the genetic resources of tropical and sub-tropical forests, though these forests provide habitats for the richest plant genetic resources on earth, including many of the centres of origin major food crops. Ironically, famine-stricken Ethiopia is one such centre. I am not suggesting that the green revolution and its. supporting research should be abandoned or weakened in favour of some form if intermediate technology more appropriate to small farming systems. This is neither desirable nor possible. What is desirable, what is possible and most urgent, is the opening up of a second front in agricultural research and development which will not replace but will complement the present system. This second front will concentrate on small-scale farming systems and community needs, and in research and development programmes will include those neglected plants traditionally valued by local communities. It will ensure that great atten-

tion is given to the role of trees in sustaining these systems, and providing rural people with fuelwood, food and fodder while protecting major catchment areas. Forestry in all its ramifications must become an integral part of agricultural development. Time and again one reads that the forestry sector contributes one to three per cent of the gross domestic product of particular developing nations. Such statistics, which appear even in documents concerned with fuelwood supplies, invariably refer only to the quantified and monitored industrial sector, and, more often than not, do not include values of other forest products including fuelwood. Yet it is certain that for the well-being of millions of rural people, the industrial forestry sector is often the least important fraction of the overall contribution of forests, woodlands and trees. The value of these in the provision of fuelwood, building poles, food and fodder, in the ecological underpinning of traditional agriculture and in the conservation, and management of water resources, is rarely if ever properly* quantified in national planning. At a time when per capita. agricultural production is decreas- ( ing over much of the tropics, and* when chronic famine prevails in; Africa from Senegal to Somalia, it is time to question these statistics and the basic assumptions of de-, velopment which lie behind them.