Joe and I are friends, but we do not agree on everything. I have an allergic reaction to the term “Green Revolution” in Africa. Many of Africa’s farmers are too poor, their soil too degraded, and their markets too fragile to go this route on a fast track. I believe solutions have to be tailored far more specifically to the reality of rural life and social considerations that do not favor big development blueprints. In general, I focus more on the quality of the soil, while Joe focuses on seed. Both are critical parts of the solution.
However, I support Joe’s strategy of using the private sector to build a seed industry. It creates value that is sustainable and has a chance of maintaining momentum after various funders have left. Joe is almost single-handedly driving a new energy through the seed industry in Africa with smart and locally appropriate support for entrepreneurs. Literally millions of small farmers all across Africa now get seed through Joe’s Program for Africa’s Seed Systems. PASS is working with more than seventy private, independent seed companies and is headed for one hundred. Joe figures that the African seed companies helped by PASS harvested about 57,000 tons of seed in 2012, or about one-third of all the commercial seed produced in Africa and enough to plant roughly two million hectares. His goal is for seed production to hit 200,000 tons by 2017.
In southern Malawi, members of my team recently met a recipient of one of Joe’s PASS grants who brought to life the logic of his approach and the opportunity to pursue market-based solutions with a social conscience. In a beautiful though poor region called Monkey Bay, there is a farm called Funwe, which was named for a strangely camel-humped mountaintop that looms above the property and has become its symbol. There lives another veteran of the NGO world, Carrie Osborne, an optimistic, high-energy Brit who spent twenty-five years working with Save the Children on HIV projects.
“NGOs are great, but you go project to project, and for the communities, support comes and goes,” she explained. “My husband and I wanted to create something for the communities—particularly long-term, stable work for the local workers. The question was, could we set up a small business with a long-term sustainable course? We could never have imagined what we have now.”
Carrie and her husband, Jon Lane, a water engineer, got a list of farm properties in Malawi that had been foreclosed and were available. In 2001 Jon began visiting some of the properties. She recalled, “To me, I looked and said, ‘Oh this is impossible.’ He’s an engineer, and he said, ‘You can fix a road, you can fix a building.’ ” They found a former tobacco estate that was a combination of woodland and agricultural land.
From the start, they focused not on commercial crops but on producing corn and legume seeds. In 2007 they came to Joe’s attention, and he gave them a four-year grant to work on a new Malawi maize hybrid called MH26, which Funwe Farm has started growing and marketing through agro-dealers. Their progress has been gradual but impressive. Carrie figures they are now producing enough seed for food to feed 350,000 people for a year. She calls that “thrilling.”
Sitting in a thatched roof rondavel (outdoor round hut), Carrie explained to our field team that it is satisfying to her that Funwe is making a difference in the local community by providing employment with a sustainable business, not aid. Funwe has 220 local people on the payroll, and the farm provides day care and meals to its workers. “Where you are sitting now is the poorest area of the third-poorest district of the sixth-poorest country in the world,” she observed. “For ten years we’ve paid people when they get sick. We cover their medical bills. We have a little day care center, and we take food to the little nearby primary school by ox cart.” She and her husband don’t expect to ever make a personal profit from the venture, although they’d like to get their personal investment back. “We’ve had disasters and successes. We are private sector although I can’t really say we’re profit making. Still, it’s quite nice that we’ve been able to stick with it.”
Private seed companies like Funwe are starting to gain momentum, Joe confirms. In Kabiyet, Kenya, Western Seed Company is one of forty-five seed companies set up in Kenya with AGRA’s backing, and Joe says that by 2015, he hopes that half of Kenya’s farmers will be using these homegrown products, up from about 10 percent today. In this case, a native Kenyan is driving the effort. In 2012 Saleem Ismael, Western’s founder, planted two thousand acres of hybrid seed corn—the biggest such field that Joe had ever seen in Africa. Our foundation’s 9,200-acre Ukulima Farm in South Africa, where among other projects we sponsor research in seeds suited to African soils and climates, provides some of the foundation seed to Western. Western provides maize seed for smallholder farmers and has been steadily increasing production. “I don’t know of any other subsector of the African agricultural economy that is growing at a comparable rate to that of the African seed industry,” says Joe, who adds that the program has led to countries seeing their first homegrown seed companies. These include Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and, particularly satisfying to Joe, Mozambique.
PASS is training local people in the skills and technologies that will long outlive its involvement. Joe is focused on how to breed improved varieties of Africa’s indigenous, staple food crops which are so important to small farmers. He’s focused on the infrastructure elements that can facilitate a seed industry, including: university research, training local farmers in seed use, assisting local dealers in distributing the seed, and developing policies for local governments that knock down barriers to improved seed trading.
Joe maintains that governments and NGOs shouldn’t give away seed because the competition discourages local seed companies from taking root (literally). Thus, it dooms the effort to the failing temporary aid cycle from which Africa must emerge. As Joe told me, “Half of the battle is just convincing African governments to believe in their own agricultural scientists and entrepreneurs as viable agents of positive change.”
A BETTER GOAL: PROFITABLE AND SUSTAINABLE LOCAL BUSINESSES
There is a good explanation of this dilemma about giving away so-called inputs such as seed or fertilizer or other materials in economist Dambisa Moyo’s book Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa. A native of Zambia who holds degrees from both Harvard and Oxford, Dambisa calls it the “micro-macro problem,” and uses the example of a local entrepreneur in Africa who is making and selling mosquito nets. This entrepreneur may employ ten people, each of whom has another ten or fifteen dependents living off his salary. The company is enjoying good growth, although perhaps not meeting demand for the nets. Along comes a philanthropist who decides to send $1 million worth of nets to the local community, probably putting the local net maker out of business. Isn’t it good to send more nets to meet demand? Well, in the short term, yes—except that in four or five years, when those nets are worn out and useless, there is no longer a homegrown company to provide them. The choice is then more aid or no nets. If the philanthropist had instead invested in helping the business expand local net making, the result could have been profitable and sustainable.
In 2010 our foundation gave Joe $1.6 million to bring his seed breeding program to two postconflict countries, Sierra Leone and Liberia. Later that year, we put in $5 million to bring Joe’s seed breeding program to South Sudan and USAID matched our $5 million. Today Joe’s operation is going strong in South Sudan, one of the most difficult places in Africa to work.
Joe has made a bigger impact on improving the food security of the people of Africa than just about anybody I know. He and I share a common frustration, one all the more interesting given that he has spent most of his life in the NGO world. Joe told me once: “The development industry is the only industry I know that over time can get more stupid.” Joe is still part of the NGO world, but he’s shaking it up from the inside. He’s now helped to launch seed companies in sixteen countries and figures the reach of that effort has fed twenty-five million people.
Joe DeVries has made a clear-eyed, on-the-ground as
sessment of what has worked and what hasn’t, and he’s changed tactics and is seeing success from doing so.
Story 16
Shakira
Yes, that Shakira.
There can be a thin line between enthusiasm and mayhem. I’ve seen it in aid distribution centers around the prospect of food arriving. People in difficult situations often engage in a certain amount of dreaming and magical thinking: hoping that they will be rescued, imagining a miraculous end to their suffering, fantasizing about what would happen if only someone they admire or have heard good things about could see them. It’s the plot of countless movies, from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory to Slumdog Millionaire.
Shakira Mebarak has a deep interest in the plight of poor children. She and I became friends several years ago. She is a talented entertainer and a big-hearted philanthropist, with a great sense of humor. When she visited my farm in Illinois I let her drive the combine. I don’t know if it was her performer’s precise awareness of her stage or her dancer’s coordination or what, but she managed to drive the combine better than 95 percent of the people I have let try it.
In 2008 we were with her parents, driving down a street in Barranquilla, Colombia. I was there to look at some of the schools her Barefoot Foundation had funded, because they make a point of including school lunch programs and the children of internally displaced families as a focus. Our foundation was helping support that effort. As local people and many children from the city began to realize that Shakira was in the SUV, they were so excited and happy they surrounded us. They peered in the windows. They banged on the glass. They yelled. I had never experienced anything quite like that before. Our driver grew a little concerned that we might have crossed over that line into mayhem and asked if we wanted him to get us out of there.
“No,” Shakira insisted. “I need to get out and see them and meet them.”
She smiled at me and said, “Okay, here we go!” She got out with such a smile on her face, you would have thought she was about to head up the red carpet at the Grammy Awards. She shook hands, she signed autographs, she hugged children, she posed for pictures. I can also tell you that she was exhausted, drained from the heat, and a little apprehensive to be surrounded by that many excited and agitated people.
To me, Shakira is not just a singer and entertainer; on our trip to Colombia, I saw how deeply she cares for children and that she has never forgotten her roots. Photo: Howard W. Buffett
Shakira is not just a face. She feels a connection to poverty and suffering. Shakira grew up in Colombia, and was aware of the plight of the poor from a young age. Although her early life was comfortable, her father declared bankruptcy when she was eight, and she was sent to live with some relatives in Los Angeles. When Shakira returned to Barranquilla, much of what her parents once owned had been sold. Her father took her to a local park and showed her orphans who lived outside in the park. She has said that the vision of those orphans stayed with her, and she vowed that she would do something to try to help poor children if she ever became successful.
She made good. When she turned eighteen, Shakira set up her first foundation in Colombia. She followed that up with the Barefoot Foundation, which supports six schools in the Colombian regions of Barranquilla, Altos de Cazucá, and Quibdó. She has added schools in Haiti and South Africa, too. More than five thousand children receive nutritious meals, education, and psychological support services from the schools. Ultimately, the programs benefit some thirty thousand vulnerable children, their families, and community members, most of whom have been affected by population displacement due to conflict in Colombia.
Linking hunger and education is one of the strategies for battling hunger that works just about everywhere in the world. School feedings can be adapted for the specific nutritional needs of a community. Getting children fed and sometimes even providing food for children to take home can create an incentive for parents who otherwise might not be inclined to make sure that their children, particularly their daughters, receive an education.
School feeding programs address another reality: undernourished children lack the energy to do well in school even when they can physically be there. There are so many fundamental benefits of an education and nutrition, but it’s also true that schools convey other important—even lifesaving—information such as personal hygiene, dental care, and sanitation practices. Teachers can identify illnesses or conditions such as hearing loss or vision problems.
The United States established a National School Lunch Program in 1946, later adding a School Breakfast Program. Today these two programs reach more than thirty million students each year (54 percent of enrollment) in over one hundred thousand schools and child care institutions, at a total cost of more than $11 billion a year. In 2008 Congress added a Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, allocating another $1 billion for fiscal year 2008 through 2017 for school feeding programs.1
If we believe that a school lunch program is important in the world’s wealthiest country, imagine its value in the poorest countries, where most of the hungry school-age children live. If American children deserve a healthy meal at school, so do children in other countries. In 2002 Congress launched the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program to provide agricultural products and financial and technical assistance to countries in the developing world that are committed to universal education. The point is to support school feeding programs, but it has been disappointing to me that the program’s budget often is not fully funded.
Our foundation has directly supported school feeding programs in Burundi, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Sierra Leone, Tajikistan, and the United States. Shakira’s commitment to schools and to making sure that food programs are part of the package is a big contribution.
Shakira also understands the importance of hope to people who are struggling. She takes on the challenge of letting people who feel vulnerable and forgotten know that she cares, and that is what motivated her to get out of the car.
One of the transitions in my thinking over the last ten years or so has been the realization that we cannot move the needle on an issue like global hunger simply on a project-by-project basis or even by supporting research. We also have to pay attention to global awareness and advocacy. There is a saying I’ve heard in Africa that applies here: “You cannot play the drums with one hand.” We have to leverage our financial resources and our ability to bring attention to situations, and we have to work on forcing a shift in the thinking of a critical mass of people.
Celebrities willing to lend their energy to important causes are powerful allies. I am pleased to work with several who have become friends. Benefit concerts, endorsements, and personal appearances on behalf of a project usually represent a lot of work and time. And these efforts can come at a personal price. I was in a meeting with the rock singer Bono once. He is a friend of our family’s, and sometimes he is a target of aid critics and others who question his credentials, which I think is unfair. He is consumed by the challenges he takes on, and he is committed to getting measurable results. This particular day, an article had been published that jabbed at the sincerity of his advocacy work on behalf of the poor; even making fun of his cowboy hat. Someone else at the meeting expressed anger about it, but Bono just smiled quietly and said, “Look, let’s not waste time on this. I asked for this; I put myself out there, and I have to be able to take it. It’s not a big deal.”
Shakira has talked about the faces of hunger that motivate her: “All I have to do is close my eyes, and I can imagine their faces. I know that each child has a name, a heart, a dream; I know that their lives are just as valuable as yours or mine. Yet many of these children die every day in total abandonment.” Having spent time with her and having talked at length about some of the projects we’ve worked on, I believe that is truly how she feels. She is a person whose dreams came true, and she does not forget how important encouragement and hope can be.
Story 17
A Francisc
an Padre in the Sierra Madre
Before I even saw him, I heard Padre David Beaumont coming down a hotel hallway in Hermosillo, Mexico, where our meeting was to take place. His low, husky cough was a reminder that he spends much of his time in villages where charcoal is burned for cooking and warmth. He wears the thinnest of robes: an almost threadbare brown cotton cassock with a rope belt over jeans and a shirt. His hair and beard are long. I suspect that he does not often see food of the variety and quality that the staff at the hotel brought to him when we met, but he appears to choose to live as his people do. He never touched the food, instead accepting only a cup of coffee after making the five-hour drive to see us.
In early 2012 I was in Mexico for several days of meetings with different participants in Mexican agricultural sectors: small and large farmers, grain brokers, food companies, activists, academics. I’m concerned about Mexico. I have many friends there from my days with ADM, and the country is in the grip of two situations that I’m not sure are appreciated by many Americans.
The first issue is a water crisis. Mexico has expanded its agricultural production inefficiently in recent years, and the water supply is dwindling in areas of agricultural importance. The rate of extraction from aquifers has exceeded their replenishment. Many large Mexican farming operations still use flood irrigation, the most inefficient of all methods. I visited several farms where I tried to talk up the value of center pivot or drip irrigation and other approaches that could cut water usage without lowering crop yields.
40 Chances Page 13