40 Chances

by Howard G. Buffett

  DOES FOREIGN AID ACTUALLY FOMENT VIOLENCE?

  Subsequently, Dr. Price has put together a talented team of young researchers to build a unique database that shows what has happened to conflict—both internal and international—in more than two hundred countries that have received foreign aid. They have plugged in sixty years of data on international conflict alongside foreign aid data from the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Data on a laundry list of socioeconomic indicators, such as poverty, mortality, literacy, and GDP growth, are going in as well.

  The preliminary results are fascinating. They suggest that foreign aid in general isn’t effective at thwarting violence in developing countries. Indeed, the data show that violence has the upper hand in the relationship. There is some evidence that violence attracts foreign aid, and that those who perpetrate violence may do so to get hold of aid resources, whether food or building supplies or other assets.

  The researchers are drilling down into the data to study different types of foreign aid, such as building schools, immunizing children, and anticorruption training. They are trying to better understand the differences in the type and impact of aid to see precisely what their relationship is to conflict.

  Not surprisingly, this work is difficult. It involves juggling a lot of variables, and the OECD’s country-level data on different types of aid go back only to 2002, which is too short a period for drawing concrete conclusions. Still, the data that Dr. Price’s team has been able to evaluate so far suggest something we have long suspected. “When all forms and sources of foreign assistance are considered, agricultural development and food aid actually do reduce international conflict as well as intracountry violence,” says Dr. Price. At the same time, other types of foreign aid—such as projects for building infrastructure, certain health services, and improving government administration—can increase the risk of further conflict.

  How is this possible? Dr. Price suspects that the issue is in how the aid is distributed. Foreign aid that flows into the pockets of the privileged people in any poor society will increase income inequity, which itself is a good predictor of conflict. A lot of foreign aid, such as for hospitals, roads, and building government institutions, tends to gravitate toward urban centers, which can benefit the elite.

  Shahriar Kibriya, the associate director of the Center on Conflict and Development at Texas A&M, estimates that only 5 percent to 10 percent of the resources allocated in a typical government-funded foreign assistance project directly reach the lives of the impoverished. He adds that studies have shown that most foreign aid money ends up in bank accounts in the West, either because it passes through the hands of a society’s elites or due to multiple levels of administrative overhead and inefficiency in development aid organizations and NGOs.

  Agriculture development aid—be it teaching better farming techniques or creating breeding centers for improving seeds—is especially potent at reducing income inequity because the benefits can’t help but flow to a large group of poor people: namely, farmers. “It is hard to administer agricultural development aid unfairly,” observes Dr. Price. Assistance in the form of training, irrigation infrastructure, or improved seed development, for example, is of little use to thieves or corrupt officials.

  To get clearer answers, the researchers at Texas A&M are using an analytical method developed by a man whose own background offers a poignant irony on this kind of research. Noted UCLA computer scientist Judea Pearl, who won the computing field’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, the 2012 Turing Award, is the father of the late Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who, while on assignment, was kidnapped and then killed by a militant Pakistani group in 2002.

  Judea Pearl’s contributions have been in the field of artificial intelligence using “Bayesian networks” to illustrate causal dependencies. The idea is to use computers to think more like humans by helping them reason through data with uncertainties and limitations. Dr. Pearl’s work is also giving scientists a new way to better determine causal relationships when many variables are at play, which is essential for analyzing the field of conflict and development. Texas A&M economists are weighing relationships between everything from terrorism and commodity prices to child survival rates. “Dr. Pearl’s work is making it possible for us to see connections we couldn’t see before,” says Dr. Kibriya.

  In one exercise, Dr. Price’s team exposed a major problem with food aid shipments to Sudan, where 40 percent of the population is undernourished, according to the FAO. Alarmed by the conflict in Sudan, some international agencies were sending wheat there, not realizing that wheat is eaten mostly by privileged people living in urban areas. According to Texas A&M’s analysis, the wheat shipments expanded domestic supplies, which lowered bread prices, and primarily benefited the rich. Thus, the aid gave no direct help to the poor, who produce, eat, and sell mostly sorghum and millet. And more perversely, the analysis shows that violence increased because of the disparities. This disconnect reminds me of the frequent mismatches that occur with monetizing food aid shipments: food grown and shipped for the purpose of feeding the poorest people can end up making breakfast muffins in fancy urban hotels.

  According to Dr. Price, it will probably be a few more years before his team has enough detailed data on the different types of foreign aid to use Dr. Pearl’s methods to their full potential. I anticipate that the results, when we get them, will help us advocate for smarter ways to provide aid, whether it is more money for agricultural development in postconflict countries or determining how to distribute aid so that it reaches the poor more efficiently. USAID is funding the center with a grant that we are matching, bringing together seven universities to work collaboratively on combining research and in-field development. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recognized the work as “harnessing science and technology to save and improve millions of lives around the world.”2

  Some forty years after Borlaug’s Nobel Peace Prize, we know the ties between conflict and hunger have grown only tighter. According to the World Bank, people who live in fragile and conflicted nations are more than twice as likely to be hungry as people living in peaceful, developing countries.3 Today’s armed conflicts are more likely to cause hunger emergencies than they did during the Cold War, in part because they are displacing more people for longer periods of time. Likewise, we’re seeing more and more examples of food insecurity generating instability. Since 2008, street protests fueled in part by food-price shocks have helped to upend governments in countries all over the world, from Haiti to Madagascar to Tunisia.

  Unless we take this reality more seriously, we face a future with more of the same. One person in eight in the developing world is chronically undernourished, and most population growth in the coming decades is expected to come from the developing world. By most assessments, food prices will likely stay high and primed for the sorts of spikes that fuel rioting by the urban poor and competition for land.

  The world’s developed nations are as worried as ever about poor nations spawning conflict, and they are as convinced as ever that one cure is development. Their combined annual spending on foreign aid has climbed by nearly two-thirds to roughly $130 billion since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001. Many of the countries on the receiving end of foreign aid are agrarian societies battered by hunger and conflict.

  Yet foreign aid for agricultural development—helping smallholder farmers in poor nations grow more food—is still small compared to the amount of foreign aid going into the developing world for other institutions such as governance, education, health, and physical infrastructure for transportation and communications. According to the World Bank, the share of development assistance devoted to agriculture dropped from 17 percent in the 1980s to just 5 percent by the eve of the food crisis that began in 2007.

  IMPERFECT ACCESS TO RESOURCES A COMMON TRIGGER

  Ed Price has been in Afghanistan helping to rebuild th
e extension service for an agriculture sector so devastated by several decades of war and Taliban rule that the country now depends on foreign food aid. This turn is tragic for a country that used to be a net exporter of food and was once a leading exporter of raisins.4 The war was particularly hard on three million pastoralists known as the Kuchi, whose migration routes for forage were blocked by fighting. They’re struggling to rebuild their herds of sheep and goats.

  “I believe that agricultural scientists have an obligation to reduce the causes of conflict. The roots of so many problems are about the imperfect access to resources,” says Dr. Price.

  Our foundation also launched the Institute for Economic Stability (IES), in Maryland, to explore in more detail those development approaches that had been successful in Iraq and Afghanistan. Through this new institute, IES will develop practical case studies and explore lessons learned, which will inform the military and the development community at large.

  I don’t know that this research will ever help answer the toughest questions, such as when it makes the most sense to construct a building in a war zone. For our part, we accepted the risks and built the facility; photographs we have received show that it is equipped and operational as of this writing. Based on reports we have received, it is already a source of pride for the community. Nangarhar University is one of the most important agricultural resources in Afghanistan, and the new facility boasts plenty of room for growth, offering new courses in agronomy, soil science, animal science, horticulture, and extension. We believe it is essential to study the impact of aid and the dynamics of conflict so that we can make better decisions across the broad landscape of development. But it’s also a good feeling to know that those courageous farmers and educators we broke bread with in the midst of a war feel more empowered as they work toward a time when their children will have greater opportunities—hopefully in the midst of peace.

  PART 5

  * * *

  Reasons to Hope

  My wife, Devon, often calls me the most pessimistic optimist she knows. Sometimes I get discouraged and it is frustrating, sometimes heartbreaking, to travel to different areas of the world and meet people in distress and realize I cannot figure out how to help them. However, the grim mood usually doesn’t last long. I am an optimist at heart and I am constantly inspired by people, organizations, and ideas that are improving the food security outlook in creative ways. In this final section, I’ve chosen some powerful reasons for hope, from an entire country’s systematic progress in turbocharging its agricultural sector, to exciting new entrepreneurial models and internet-enabled tools, to some inspirational individuals who are charting new and innovative paths. More and more, I’m excited to see innovators craft ways to address food insecurity and poverty that are based not so much on pegging success or progress to purely monetary terms, but rather on whether the people of a community or a nation possess the freedom and resources to make choices to improve their own circumstances.

  Story 33

  Opening What Once Was Cerrado

  The corn growing on Ricardo Gomes de Araujo’s fields was so thick that I waded rather than walked between rows to watch his combine harvesting the eight-foot-tall stalks. Ricardo’s farm, Bull’s Leather, sits on more than two thousand acres of land about fifteen miles from the city of Londrina in the state of Parana, Brazil. As a farmer, I was impressed.

  It was the spring of 2012. Rolling hills of soybeans, wheat, and citrus groves surrounded us. Another field nearby featured green corn plants just inches tall. Where I farm in Illinois, the more distinct seasons mean that there is time for just one corn crop each year. Ricardo will harvest twice.

  Ricardo speaks Portuguese, but he talks and looks like any tech-savvy farmer from the American Midwest. He drove out to meet me in a pickup truck. He wore blue jeans and a knit shirt, and he was toting a laptop holding years of his crop data. His operation is comparable in size to mine. We both plant genetically modified seed, and we both use high-horsepower mechanical implements.

  The difference between us is that I farm some of the best soil on the planet, and he started with some of the worst. What Ricardo has accomplished in terms of the variety and volume of food grown is impressive, particularly given the serious technical challenges of growing cereal grains in this climate and on acidic, tacky, and heavy clay soils. This soil quality holds true for Brazil in general. I’m always looking for good development models, and for a number of reasons, Brazil represents what a country committed to agricultural development can accomplish.

  Brazilian farmers have shown they can build a significant, productive agricultural system and reduce hunger in their country despite farming some of the most difficult soils in the world. Photo: Howard G. Buffett

  In the last three decades, Brazil’s leaders have put together smart and motivated agricultural research that is paying off. What’s more, the government has developed an entire ecosystem of supports and policies for large-scale, sustainable agricultural development. Leaders of countries grappling with food insecurity in some of the most difficult farming regions in the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa, should find reason to hope in what has worked in Brazil.

  The Portuguese name for the tropical savanna that covers one-fifth of Brazil is cerrado, which means “closed.” That’s how intimidating this vast savanna region of reddish acidic soil was to early settlers. They didn’t even bother with it. Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, European immigrants came to southern Brazil and tried to open it to farming, but their reliance on traditional plowing methods was a disaster. Unlike the deeper, more structured loams of Europe, Brazil’s soils were fragile, low in organic matter, high in aluminum (which is toxic to some plants), and subject to intense rainstorms that would liquefy plowed and planted soil and send it flowing into the rivers.

  The northern fertility belt in which the US is located produces nearly 60 percent of the world’s corn and 45 percent of the world’s wheat,1 but Brazil is well south of that. The fertile zones can span dry desert areas to a few high-altitude polar zones, but mostly they have a temperate or continental climate with defined seasons, adequate rainfall and aquifers, annual freezes that wipe out many pests, and soils that still have a relatively deep layer of mineral-rich topsoil with a healthy component of organic matter. As we move toward the equator, however, those conditions change. The higher year-round temperatures mean that organic matter decays so quickly on the surface that it doesn’t easily nourish the soil structure, which tends to be either sandy or high in clay content. There are many more bugs and fungi that thrive in a more humid climate without freezes. And as the Europeans discovered in Brazil, the torrential tropical rains can wreak havoc on planted fields.

  To understand the magnitude of what has happened in Brazil, realize that it was not about following a recipe that worked elsewhere. Farmers cannot just transplant an agricultural system designed for a fertility belt environment to the tropics or to a savanna with weathered soils. One of the reasons I object when people talk about addressing hunger in a place such as Africa by “exporting” American high-yield agricultural practices is that farming doesn’t work like that. We’ve had several hundred years to develop seeds, techniques, knowledge, equipment, and planting strategies that work for our climate and geography. Other regions of the world need techniques and inputs optimized for their own conditions, and then communicated and taught to farmers through agricultural extension agencies. This is a long-term undertaking that demands commitment.

  THE WILL TO TAME THE SOIL

  Brazil’s rise as a farming power was a deliberate strategy of its government, starting in the 1970s. For Brazil to have space to grow, it had to move inland from the coasts and from its long-settled southern region into its vast interior. But with that migration had to come a way to grow food to support the population moving there. Brazil set up a government corporation in 1973 to pump money into agricultural research. This corporation is called Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária, which is Portugue
se for Brazilian Corporation for Agricultural Research. EMBRAPA’s original mission was to figure out how to farm the cerrado region. Soon Brazil was employing thousands of agricultural researchers and spending more on agricultural research and development (R & D) than even developed countries such as the United Kingdom and Canada. It now has an annual budget of about $1 billion.2

  EMBRAPA researchers figured out that applying large amounts of lime would tame the acidity of the soil, making the cerrado more hospitable to crops. EMBRAPA also modified Africa’s species of the perennial grass Brachiaria to grow in Brazil; it serves mainly as forage for feeding cattle but it has unique properties that help it raise nitrogen levels in poor soil. And to conserve the improving topsoil, EMBRAPA promoted no-till practices, which are now used on 80 percent of the cerrado cropland, and can reduce soil erosion by 75 percent. Ricardo, for example, plants cover crops in between harvests to replenish organic matter, improve the structure of the soil, and prevent erosion. These crops also help keep the heavy clay soil from becoming impossibly dense. Traditional farmers often plow to loosen up compacted soils. “I try to fight compaction biologically, with plants,” Ricardo told me.

  But the biggest breakthrough, arguably, came at EMBRAPA’s soybean research facility just down the road from Ricardo’s farm. Brazil needed the soybean to work into its crop rotations because it is capable of forming a partnership with microorganisms to take nitrogen from the air and fix it in the soil. That limits the need for chemical fertilizer. Since the soybean evolved as a temperate crop, it is hardwired to use seasonal changes in daylight unique to that zone to cue its growth stages. Planting a temperate soybean in the tropics would produce a plant too small for mechanical harvesting. But EMBRAPA researchers managed to breed a high-yielding tropical soybean, called Cristalina, which swept across the cerrado.