40 Chances

by Howard G. Buffett

  Farming is challenging under any circumstances. Clay laughs at the memory of working alongside his dad when he was a boy, and their machine shed did not have heat. In those days, his dad would farm with his brother and sons and work on equipment during the day, and then put in a full-time shift in a foundry at night. According to Clay, it taught him the value of both hard work and analysis. “Most farmers are used to getting a recipe from John Deere or Monsanto,” he reflected. “We want to say, ‘Be introspective on your farm.’ We don’t have a ‘system’ here. It’s not like following a twelve-step plan, and it will all work. There is no magic potion.” Each farm has different soil profiles and different conditions, and, therefore, each farmer needs to research options tuned to those conditions and adjust. “We use a different approach to experimentation. We’re trying to drill down to what makes a difference in yield.”

  Clay Mitchell believes, as we do, that when it comes to feeding people, soil is the world’s most vital asset. If you treat soil properly, erosion won’t claim it. And effective conservation techniques with a commitment to good stewardship can make our soil, as Clay put it, “an oil well that never runs dry.”

  Story 40

  A New Approach to Governance

  “I don’t want to put any pressure on you,” I said to former British prime minister Tony Blair, “but I had Shakira out here, and she did this perfectly the first time.”

  We were sitting in the cab of a harvesting combine on one of our foundation farms near Decatur. It was a windy, cool early fall day in 2012, and we’d just made one pass down six rows of roughly seven-foot-high corn. That was the easy part. This implement is fully GPS enabled and has auto steering. We pointed the combine header, which looks like a rack of torpedoes, toward the rows we wanted to harvest. Then we switched on the auto steer, and we collected around 150 bushels without having to touch the steering wheel. But at the end of the pass, we had to turn, and the maneuver demanded a quick switch to manual controls as we reset the line of the combine to harvest the next set of rows. Tony did a great job, although when he realized he’d run over a small section of corn, he grimaced and said, “Sorry, Howard, I’ve just cost you money there.”

  I often invite people I like and work with to visit our farms in Illinois. I like to make farming real for those who haven’t experienced it, especially when we are working together on issues related to food and agriculture. Inviting down-to-earth, sincere people to a farm is a fun way to get to know them better. Tony Blair is not only a brilliant, accomplished leader but also a good sport who doesn’t take himself too seriously. He arrived at the farm in jeans and boots, and, on our way to the cornfield, I asked if he’d ever driven farm equipment. A member of his staff ribbed him: “Please—he hasn’t even driven a car in twelve years!” Tony laughed as hard as the rest of us. And when we finished, he was excited to send a photo of the combine to his thirteen-year-old son, Leo.

  Tony Blair spends time in my combine, which I use as a rolling office. Photo: Howard W. Buffett

  More important, I find that everyone I host for a ride in a combine cab comes away from the experience more thoughtful about modern farming and food. There are a half dozen farming steps that a combine literally “combines”: from the cab, you see cornstalks fall and feed into the headers. Then the chains pull the cuttings into what’s called the threshing drum in the belly of the machine. There the kernels separate from the cob, and the chaff is blown out the back of the combine. I enjoy seeing the amazed look on my visitors’ faces as they glance directly back and see corn kernels or soybeans pile up in the clear window of the tank. In a matter of seconds, plant stalks taller than our heads have been reduced to a food item they instantly recognize. My guests start to realize that much of what they’ve eaten in their lifetime began as the plants we’re driving through, and, more than likely, that their food has touched the same kind of equipment. Food doesn’t come from the store. It comes from the soil on a farm. Until you see it, you may know that, but you don’t “get it.”

  It seemed only right to offer the former British prime minister this experience, because I’d had the pleasure at breakfast at our farmhouse that morning of discussing his area of expertise: high-level governance, which for a long time felt as foreign to me as harvesting corn is to him.

  In 2008 Tony Blair launched his Africa Governance Initiative (AGI) to create a different framework for working with African governments. He is trying to teach the basic principles of running a peace-seeking, effective, responsive government to the leaders of some of the poorest, most conflict-ridden and disorganized countries on the planet. As he explains, for so long, the rest of the world has focused on the flawed dictators and crises of Africa. We are discouraged by governments that seem corrupt or unresponsive to their own people. But he is convinced that a new generation of leaders offers an opportunity to change this narrative and look at this situation in a new way. I’m finding that his optimism is giving me hope as well.

  After he launched AGI, I had been hearing about the former prime minister’s efforts in Africa but had not paid close attention. In early 2012, while on an airplane I picked up a copy of a magazine with a cover story on him. I read that, so far, he’s been invited to work in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, and South Sudan, and he can point to some good progress. In Sierra Leone, for example, his team helped the government implement a health care initiative that has cut the number of children in hospitals dying from malaria by 80 percent.

  I began learning more about Tony Blair’s approach at a point when I was frustrated by the lack of progress on many of our projects in Africa aimed at reducing food insecurity. Another statistic was bothering me too: in 2003, African heads of state had gathered in Maputo, Mozambique, and signed the Maputo Declaration, which pledged to increase public investment in agriculture to a minimum of 10 percent of their national budgets and to raise sector growth by at least 6 percent by 2008. On a continent with hundreds of millions of subsistence farmers, and where more than half the population in most of the fifty-four countries depends on agriculture for survival, my opinion is that even a 10 percent investment in agriculture by any country is woefully inadequate. It should be at least 30 percent, and it should include investment in infrastructure such as roads, storage facilities, credit systems, and other tools designed to help farmers access markets. At the time (and I believe it is still true as I write this in mid-2013), only Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Malawi, Mali, Niger, and Senegal met or exceeded the 10 percent target.1

  I thought, “How can anyone from outside any of these countries overcome this basic gap in commitment? How can our foundation help create a new, progressive agricultural climate in countries where the leaders refuse to invest in their own people? If they won’t support their own agricultural systems, what can we achieve? Would it be better in the long run if I make adherence to Maputo the minimum criterion for us to get involved, and try to increase pressure on governments to invest in this sector? Or should I pull back altogether and increase my attention to other food-insecure regions such as Latin America, where, in my experience, more governments are better attuned to agriculture?” These are not easy questions to answer.

  THE CONVERSATION IS CHANGING, SO SHOULD WE

  But as I read the article on the former prime minister, I was struck by the themes he addressed. Africa, he said, has been in crisis for decades, but we have to stop responding to crises by just handing out aid. He said a new generation of emerging leadership was different: better educated and more focused on trying to get these countries to be active players in the global economy. His tone and his optimism were clear, but he also had a new way of thinking about development. I started paying more attention to his speeches and efforts, and I thought the gist of his thinking came through particularly well in a 2012 speech he gave to the CEO Africa Summit in London. In this speech, called “A New Approach to a New Africa,” the prime minister explained why he thought there was an opportunity right now for progress:
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  Twenty years ago, a conversation with African leaders would often be dominated by the legacy of the past, often a colonial legacy. Today there is impatience with such a dialogue about history. There is instead an urgent desire to focus on the future.

  Governance has traditionally been the poor relation of the development community, usually consigned to broad brush civil service reform programs, training days and the like. Actually in its proper sense it is utterly fundamental. And in the modern world, it is the one thing that, unlike capital or technology, simply can’t be imported. It means prioritizing; focusing; putting in place the people and the systems to deliver. There is a mass of footloose capital looking for an outlet for investment today. Whether they come to country A or country B depends, of course, on things like resources, such as oil or minerals; but it also crucially depends on having in place a proper system for attracting that investment, treating it predictably, having a legal system that functions fairly and it depends on a minimum level of infrastructure.

  The old way, where the rich world gives and the poor world passively receives, looks increasingly out of date. African countries must be in the driving seat of their own development, setting the priorities and making the decisions. Where aid is needed, it should get behind these priorities and use and strengthen the government’s own systems. I believe, with the right kinds of support and the right policies, Africa can be free of dependence on aid within a generation.2

  In the face of conflict-related crises and starving children, discussion about governance had always seemed abstract to me. The immediate need to feed people or help them restart agricultural systems seemed more critical. But one of my forty-chances lessons is that after a decade of supporting different aid projects and agricultural initiatives, it is often governance-related issues inside a country that undermine otherwise important and valuable efforts, rendering them temporary at best, or, at worst, useless.

  We recently sent one of our foundation program officers to evaluate some of our funded projects in several poor and conflict-ridden countries, including Sierra Leone, Liberia, DRC, and South Sudan. His report was noteworthy for the number of extreme experiences he had on a single trip. In the northeastern region of DRC, he learned that a rebel-controlled group had started demanding that all NGOs and developmental organizations pay taxes to them, violating the laws of the official DRC government and forcing most NGOs in the area, including staffers of the N2Africa project he was visiting, to leave the region at least temporarily. “For emergency and relief purposes, some NGOs fly their staff via cargo planes into this region for a few days, deliver all the emergency items, and then fly them out as soon as the delivery is complete,” he reported.

  In South Sudan, meanwhile, his vehicle was stopped on the road to the capital city of Juba. He had to wait an hour while a United Nations team demined the road. In Liberia, he took a photograph of a giant mud pit pretending to be a road. He’d been sloshing and bouncing along on it for more than six hours to review a test field on a seed project. In the photo is a Land Cruiser SUV stranded up to the running board in red mud.

  You can always try to plan or work around any one of these specific situations, and yet ultimately inadequate infrastructure and these governments’ inability to keep order and set priorities for development undermine virtually all development. I sometimes think Americans hear phrases such as “Africa has poor roads,” and it’s like hearing “New York City’s Times Square is crowded on New Year’s Eve.” They nod in agreement, even though they have no idea what it’s like to operate and move around a country with villages that cannot be accessed in any practical sense except on foot or perhaps by animal cart or motorbike. But for countries such as Sierra Leone or South Sudan, the roads are such significant impediments to getting anything done, yet often nobody in government owns the problem. There is no organized assessment of the roads’ current state or what a better system would look like. Government ministers may ask would-be investors in the country to build roads as opportunities arise, but often those roads are one-offs that get built to a mining area or a destination of interest to the investors. They aren’t designed according to a long-term plan. Our program officer’s report was another reminder to us that all the high-technology and smart seed development and committed individuals such as Joe DeVries or Ed Price cannot get traction, literally or figuratively, in situations where the roads are so muddy or otherwise impassable that commerce simply stops—unpredictably.

  These are huge barriers to progress, and there are times when even the best-intentioned individuals say with a sigh, “Here we go again. TIA.” But Tony Blair is pointing out that many of Africa’s new generation of leaders want to do the right thing for their people, and we should figure out how to help them, beginning with very basic organizational help and assessing what skills are needed. AGI often uses a quote from 2011 Nobel Prize winner President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, from her 2009 book This Child Will Be Great: Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa’s First Woman President. President Johnson Sirleaf talks about how a population “bypassed by education for so long, who have been deskilled by years of war and inactivity,” just does not hold the skill base or capacity to get an array of seemingly basic things done. “. . . There you stand, trying to rebuild a nation in an environment of raised expectations and short patience, because everyone wants to see change take place right away. After all, they voted for you because they had confidence in your ability to deliver—immediately. Only you cannot. Not because of the lack of financial resources but simply because the capacity to implement whatever change you have in mind does not exist.”

  ORDER AND PROCESS

  The term capacity is key, as we talked about in the story about our water initiative. As President Johnson Sirleaf points out, there may not be a single person in a small, developing country with the necessary skills and training to address a critical situation. There often is no resource or manual of what corporate managers call “best practices.” There is no established, accepted method for setting priorities and creating systems to manage projects from beginning to end. Many governments have never used the most basic governance tools such as meeting schedules and public calendars. Staff positions have been doled out by patronage and tribal connections rather than filled by experienced or trained personnel. Some ministries just depend on individuals coming to the government office and waiting their turn on a given day to be seen and discuss an issue. The loudest and most persistent actors get the attention.

  Tony Blair and his team have convinced me that reliable, repeatable governance processes are crucial. They don’t appear miraculously when a new administration is elected. The advantage of the AGI model is that it can operate at two levels: Tony Blair will go only where governments invite him to go. But once that step takes place, he can stand shoulder to shoulder with a country’s top leaders. They respect his experience and stature and listen to his thoughts on the importance of good governance and the priorities that create a stable foundation. And then AGI dispatches skilled teams to work with counterparts at the key ministries. These are the front lines where it is crucial to institutionalize systems and procedures so that basic, critical priorities such as infrastructure improvements don’t always end up subordinate to whatever crisis is simmering on any given day. AGI’s work is focused not specifically on agriculture but on helping governments set priorities and then manage toward those goals. Improving livelihoods and shoring up infrastructure—everything from roads to electricity to water management—are key to reducing food insecurity, so I discovered a lot of overlap in the governance issues Tony Blair is focused on and those that would reinforce and support what we are trying to accomplish as well. Specifically, we have decided to help fund AGI’s efforts in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Both have been ravaged by conflict and we are familiar with their issues because we have funded initiatives in both countries for years. We understand why, without progress on the governance front in those countries, there can’t be sustainable
progress in improving food security.

  Every country must summon the particular will and discipline to invest in its own people, own its own challenges, and benefit from its own success. Tony Blair’s attitude and approach represent a new way of thinking and attacking some of the underlying fundamentals that are pushing these conversations in a positive direction. He’s doing what our foundation cannot do itself, but what we believe must happen for our work to be successful.

  Epilogue

  A Pessimistic Optimist Returns to Prague

  In the summer of 2012, I traveled to Prague because writing this book reawakened so many memories of our Czech exchange student Vera Vitvarová and that pivotal post–Prague Spring summer of so many years ago. HWB went with me, as he had heard me talk about this time in my life as leaving such a lasting impression.

  Today Vera has four children and is a social worker who assists young individuals with disabilities. Her father, Milos, died recently at the age of ninety, while her mother, eighty-six, was doing pretty well. About seven years ago, Vera moved out of the flat where I had stayed, because she had adopted a son with some physical disabilities, and it was too difficult for him to navigate to the top floor.

  It was fun to reminisce about our experiences together: standing in line at the grocery store and having to boil water for everyone’s once-a-week bath. Vera reminded me that I had complained bitterly when we could buy only a couple of Coca-Colas at a time from a hotel (literally the only place in Prague where Coke was sold) because they were expensive. She laughed over the fact that I had wanted to buy two dozen! I met her children, including one of her sons, who is a big, strapping guy. I smiled at Vera and made a gesture flexing my muscles about him. “Strong!” I said. “Like his mama!” she growled back at me.