HWB was with me and he was moved by Shakhik’s situation. He made sure that our contacts in Armenia got her a pair of glasses. There are times when you know you can only do one small thing for someone, but you feel that you must do it. At least, I must do it, and HWB has become the same way. It can cause problems. Dropping in and doing something specific for one individual can incite jealousy among others, or create discomfort for local NGOs we have asked to help us.
After this trip, I paid more attention to elderly people who are food insecure—wherever they are. I think again about Bob, the World War II vet from the Good Samaritan soup kitchen in Decatur. His corduroy pants were nearly worn smooth across his thighs, and his yellowed T-shirt was frayed and falling apart. His face was sunken and thin. But he seemed delighted and grateful to come to this place and get a meal. “I can cook,” he confided, “but I really hate to clean up.” His whole affect was so different from that of the two women in Armenia, although he clearly was very poor and probably would have battled hunger without Good Sam. How can we possibly calculate the psychological damage to an older person who does not know if someone—perhaps anyone—cares whether he or she eats or not? The older people I met in Armenia remind me of the importance of nourishment, real and psychological, to all people, of all ages, in all circumstances.
After the Soviet Union broke apart, poverty increased in many nations of Eastern Europe. That threatened the future of children like this young girl in Romania and broke the hearts of many elderly people. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
Story 14
Farming Under Fire
I have my sister, Susie, to thank for how I met Ed Price. For all the grief and teasing she and I have lobbed at each other over our lifetimes, this favor was one of the best she ever did for me—even though it could have gotten HWB and me killed.
In 2009, at a dinner in Sun Valley, Idaho, Susie sat next to General David Petraeus, who at the time was tenth commander, US Central Command. He told her about his efforts to try to bring agricultural assistance to farmers in Afghanistan. Susie is not much interested in agriculture, but she told him, “You ought to talk to my brother.”
Several months and phone calls later, and against the advice of almost everyone else in my family and other sane people in my life, HWB and I were suited up in heavy protective gear, sitting with Dr. Ed Price of Texas A&M University on a bench in a cold, drafty waiting room in a US Army base in Kabul, Afghanistan. We were waiting for the low ceiling of fog to lift so we could get into a Blackhawk helicopter to go east to Jalalabad. For two days the fog was too thick for us to fly. We were going to meet with some local farmers trying to rebuild their agricultural systems after years of neglect and, more recently, occasional fighting as the United States and allies tried to root out the remaining Taliban forces in the area. You didn’t need a travel agent to remind you not to pack a bathing suit in Afghanistan in February, but even in our winter gear we shivered. What’s more, the day before, all of Kabul was on high alert after the Taliban had launched a series of suicide bomb attacks on Kabul hotels, killing a number of civilians. We had seen the flash in the sky while driving out to the base.
The only safe transportation to visit farmers was Blackhawk helicopters. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
After seventy-two hours of cold, stress, danger, and boredom, the three of us had talked about everything from microcredit to shoulder-fired missiles to cassava, a vegetable that is a favorite tool of Ed’s personal war against hunger. Dr. Price is an agricultural economist by training who at the time was director of the Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture at Texas A&M. But what caught my interest is that he is one of the world’s foremost authorities on a most unusual aspect of agriculture: namely, how you do it when you’re getting shot at, bombed, and otherwise tormented and threatened.
Sometimes you meet a person who can teach you more over one dinner conversation than you’d learn in a year in school. It usually happens where you least expect it. Ed Price, pictured on the right, is one of those people. Photo: Howard W. Buffett
Ed had already made over a dozen trips to Iraq and Afghanistan by the time I met him. He’s taught agricultural economics at Texas A&M for many years, and he has an extensive background in agriculture and development, beginning with his first job out of college in the 1960s in the then-British colony of Sarawak. On the island of Borneo, Ed worked with hill tribes who were seeing their land degraded by the way timber companies were cutting down the surrounding forest. He became convinced that the violent conflict that erupted could have been avoided if the tribes had been empowered to harvest the trees themselves, since it would have been in their self-interest to do it in a sustainable way.
Ed later went to a number of conflict hot spots. In 2002, while working on a project to try to improve the yields of rice in the Ivory Coast, he was caught behind the lines of a rebel insurgent force. He was held in a hotel under conditions where he was not at all sure he would make it out alive. But that experience, he says, changed his attitude toward risk in an odd way: “You’re always affected by it. I was really shaken up. But after that, I started to realize that perhaps being willing to go into these situations is what I have to contribute. Maybe there is a better mathematician, or someone else is a better theoretician, but this is something I can handle.”
He would get more chances. In the months and years after the US military moved into Afghanistan, Ed started receiving letters from former students. Texas A&M has two thousand students who are uniformed members of the armed forces, and it graduates more military officers than any school outside the service academies. Because of their training in agriculture and technology, a number of graduates who knew Ed served on so-called civilian affairs teams that were deployed just behind the soldiers fighting to wrest control from the Taliban. These units’ job is to win the “hearts and minds” of the local people.
Oftentimes, however, the units are not necessarily expert in the problems the locals find most onerous. “They sometimes joke that they’re there to hand out volleyballs,” Ed says with a laugh, “but I started getting letters from former students describing a number of different agricultural problems, such as irrigation canals that were clogged with weeds. In one case, I got an email from a former student asking me how he should go about determining the value of a cow. Somebody from his unit had accidentally shot a cow and wanted to compensate the poor owner, but no one had any idea how to put a value on something like that.
“I realized that it might be important to have agricultural expertise involved in some of the efforts over there to not only help hold these communities from a military standpoint but also get the people back on track and organized to be able to feed themselves and their families.” He responded to his students’ inquiries, but he also made some calls to Washington, and he met Paul Brinkley, deputy undersecretary of the Department of Defense in the George W. Bush administration. Brinkley needed Ed’s expertise for yet another hot spot.
Brinkley was leading a group of military, government, and private sector interests that were trying to help Iraq recover, not only after our invasion but also after years of neglect. Iraqi agriculture had all but collapsed during Saddam’s expensive war with Iran in the 1980s. Roads were in terrible condition, irrigation canals dysfunctional, irrigation pumps broken. The system for getting seed and fertilizer was increasingly squeezed to the point where farmers just gave up, so food shortages were a growing problem. Ed made a series of trips there and even lived in Iraq for six months trying to help the local farmers reorganize and rebuild capacity.
General Petraeus, Paul Brinkley, and others understood the can-do spirit for which the Afghans are legendary and that some good expert advice could yield big dividends. So, Paul asked Ed to go help Afghan farmers establish some pilot projects. Our foundation ended up helping to fund the construction of an agricultural college, some center-pivot-based irrigation to try to get two crops grown per year, and a processing plant for a women’s co-op that I’m
hoping will become a model not only in Afghanistan but in other parts of the world.
In that freezing cold Quonset hut in Kabul, we forged a relationship that has produced some other exciting projects too. I am always impressed with people who are not only analytical and strategic but also practical. For example, I still remember our conversation about cassava, a tan, bulgy root vegetable that looks like a bouquet of potato bugs. But it has particular value in conflict areas because it is fairly rich in carbohydrates, calcium, vitamins B and C, and essential minerals, and it can grow in harsh, dry conditions. Best of all, Ed explained, the nutritious payload is underground. “It makes it harder to steal, and it means a farmer harvesting it is less exposed.”
Knowing the difference between planting a crop that you can harvest when you need it versus planting something like corn—which rebels or an occupying army can easily burn or steal (or more easily attack you while you harvest it)—is information that can have life-or-death consequences. After our initial collaboration, Ed became the first Howard G. Buffett Foundation chair in conflict and development at Texas A&M, and his team is producing some important research that I am convinced is essential to helping craft more realistic and practical solutions for conflict-exacerbated hunger.
Story 15
Seeds of Change
Joe DeVries is a wiry, blunt-speaking guy who was born in Ada, Michigan. As a college freshman, he was inspired by a traveling missionary’s talk. It helped him prepare for a life helping the poor in the developing world. He studied agriculture, and his first job was working at Disney World’s Epcot theme park as a researcher in the Land pavilion. Next, Joe volunteered to work for the United Nations, which sent him to build irrigated rice systems in northern Mali. It was important but fairly tame stuff. That changed in 1989 when Joe joined the relief organization World Vision. The NGO sent him to Mozambique, the former Portuguese colony on the east coast of Africa that was in its second decade of a brutal, complicated civil war.
Mozambicans were starving, but it was too dangerous for food aid convoys to travel on the rural roads. So Joe’s job was to get packets of seeds to farmers displaced by the war so they could grow their own food. He and his staff, flying in tiny Cessna bush airplanes, ferried thousands of tons of seeds, hoes, and machetes to farmers, often dodging gunfire. His teams would land near a village, and, after unloading their cargo, the locals would bring out fresh victims of land mines to be flown out for medical treatment. Joe’s stories of the time are harrowing: the planes he flew in were often peppered with bullets. One local farm extension employee he worked with was tied to a tree and beaten to death for trying to help farmers.
Flying behind the front lines made Joe a hero to thousands of farmers who depended on his efforts to keep their families from starving. When he’d visit a village to check on the crops, the local people would surround him. But on one visit in October 1989, as he endured the long speeches by local leaders in his honor, he saw a lone farmer at the edge of the crowd trying to get his attention. Finally, the ceremony ended, and Joe let the persistent grower drag him away to see his farm about a kilometer outside the village.
Joe walked into a field for which he had supplied cowpea seeds two months earlier. The plants appeared healthy, but they hadn’t flowered, which meant that there were no pods filling with the protein-rich beans. Joe asked to see other plots around the village and saw more of what no one but the one farmer had been willing to tell him: none of the lush plants had pods. The crop was a failure. The seeds had been imported from Zimbabwe, and the farmers had planted them according to instructions. But the seeds were the wrong variety for that lowland tropical area. The plants never got the right cues from their environment to start seed production.
Looking into the eyes of the hundreds of farmers who had trusted him, he realized that some people in the village would starve because of how naïve relief organizations can be about agriculture. Joe resolved to take on the mission of making sure that the seeds he gave poor farmers would be the best possible variety. “It was a tragic learning experience,” he says, looking back, “but that is where my fascination with matching new seeds to Africa’s agro-ecologies began.”
Joe and I have traveled around the world together in the last decade. He is one of the most determined and passionate guys working in agricultural development that I know, and once I heard this story of his having stood among those farmers I understood why. Talk about a life-changing experience.
Joe returned to the United States, and in 1994 he earned a PhD in plant breeding and genetics from Cornell University. Dr. DeVries then went back to Africa.
THE SEEDS AFRICA NEEDS
After a few years more with World Vision, in 1997 Joe joined the Rockefeller Foundation, which was then one of the few philanthropies working on seeds for African farmers. He became a corn breeder in Nairobi, Kenya, but quickly came up against a problem when he developed new varieties designed to improve yields in local conditions: there were no government or other local seed corn producers who could multiply the seeds so there would be enough to give farmers. Under pressure from the United States and other donor nations to get their fiscal houses in order, African governments had slashed spending on many services, including state-run seed production. The conventional economic wisdom in the West at the time was that the private market would do a better job at such things in Africa. But the lack of infrastructure, scientists, and bankers throughout much of Africa in the 1990s instead meant that vital functions such as seed production had collapsed entirely.
Joe felt that Africa was facing a vacuum when it came to seeds. The governments were retreating from doing seed research and development, and the private market wasn’t interested either. Multinational companies did not see subsistence farmers as potential customers. The result was that the vast majority of smallholder farmers in Africa couldn’t access new seeds, and so were condemned to reuse tired varieties that lost their potency over time, as insects and diseases found their vulnerable spots. Some African farmers have been handing down the same seeds for decades, even as the weather and pests changed. Little wonder that Africa’s grain yields are a quarter of the world average.
Creating good so-called hybrid seed is time consuming and hard work in any part of the world. Hybrid seeds should not be confused with genetically modified seeds, where the plant DNA itself is manipulated in the laboratory. Hybrids are created through traditional breeding techniques that involve selectively choosing traits to combine from both parent plants such as increased yield or drought resistance. Crop breeders have to be willing to work under a hot sun in their plots as they jot down data in their books and decide which plants to mate together, a process that in the case of wheat can involve surgeon-like skill with tweezers. Creating one new variety that resists a new disease or makes more kernels takes years.
Joe DeVries would describe himself as a maize breeder; I describe him as a modern-day hero. He is a crusader against hunger. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
And Africa is probably the most challenging place for a crop breeder to work. Unlike in Asia, where one miracle seed can be planted across huge expanses of irrigated land, growing conditions and topography in Africa change so dramatically over short distances that monoculture is largely impossible. The vast majority of Africa’s farms depend upon rainfall, which means that the availability of water varies widely. A variety of corn that thrives in one village might not adapt in another just a few hours down the road, thanks to everything from changes in elevation to differences in the soil. And the crops that Africans want to eat change across the continent as well. Bananas are a staple in Uganda, but in Sudan, it’s sorghum; in Kenya, it’s corn; and across much of Ethiopia, the favored food crop is teff, a cereal grass used to make bread with a spongelike consistency.
To get the seeds it needs, Africa requires an army of crop breeders to account for changing growing conditions and diverse tastes. The solution that the Rockefeller Foundation devised with Joe broke from the way that NGO
s had long tended to work in Africa. Joe was convinced that aid in the form of bags of free seeds to farmers was not the answer. With the government out of the picture, it would have to be the private sector that got better seeds into farmers’ hands. Working out of Nairobi, Kenya, Joe took it upon himself to become a breeder of seed companies.
In 2004 he helped to organize the $7 million African Agricultural Capital fund with money from the Rockefeller Foundation and London’s Gatsby foundation. But just as the Rockefeller team in Africa was trying to find more donors to expand its agricultural work, new leadership at the foundation back in New York was mulling its future in agriculture. The Rockefeller Foundation had ended its agricultural work in Asia. Fortunately for Joe, at about the same time, a few officials at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation were beginning to think about making a big push into agricultural development. With three out of every four of the world’s poor people living in rural areas, they had identified agricultural development as the key to fighting poverty. The Gates Foundation knew that my father was preparing to make a big gift, enough for them to embark on this new direction.
Roy Steiner at the Gates Foundation sent an email to Joe asking for some game-changing ideas that the foundation could support. In June 2006 my dad’s gift was announced. By the time the dust cleared months later, the Gates Foundation would put $100 million into a partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation, which put up $50 million. Joe was at the center of their Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, or AGRA. He had a budget for giving fellowships to African agricultural scientists and research grants to fledgling seed companies.
40 Chances Page 12