80
emerging duality of Africa’s New Agriculture is not
one in which the production is either small-scale or
large-scale but rather may well innovate new mod-
els in which large-scale commercial systems link
to smallholder production through technology,
financing, and know-how spillovers. An emerging
policy concern is how to devise mechanisms to
ensure that positive benefits of large-scale agricul-
ture accrue to small farmers. Creative policies may
foster these linkages through promoting innovative
outgrower schemes that support modern input
provision and extension advisory by large-scale
farms to the small-scale farming communities
nearby, for example.
Engaging for the New Agriculture
The scope and reach of the New Agriculture for
Africa requires a broadening of engagement of
types of actors and interventions beyond that
required in the traditional model of agricultural
development. Thus, New Agriculture requires
aiming beyond ministries of agriculture and
national agricultural research systems to engaging
with the private sector, trade organizations and
outlets, end users and processing industries, tele-
communications providers, energy sector, infra-
structure service providers, the financial sector, and
information content providers, as well as educa-
tional institutions and civil society.
In turn, the New Agriculture requires a new
organizational approach in development interven-
tions. In other words, development institutions
engaged in promoting agricultural transforma-
tion for a New Agriculture in the New Africa
must look and feel different than institutions
organized around traditional thinking regarding
agricultural development. Thus, an orientation
toward a more tech-savvy and business-oriented
agricultural transformation must be more corpo-
rate- and business-minded itself. And the internal
profile of skill sets, perspectives, and approaches
must also adapt to more cross-cutting, business-
minded, investment-ready mindsets and develop-
ment approaches. A more cohesive and integrated
approach is required within relevant development
institutions. This is, of course, an immediate and
perhaps vexing challenge when most of these insti-
tutions have spent decades building narrow silos
with refined tunnel vision on topics such as plant
breeding, soil technology, water conservation, and
post-harvest management, among others.
To achieve the cohesive perspective required,
there is perhaps merit to the Integrated Rural
Development approaches of the 1970s, in which
multidisciplinary teams sought to work on com-
mon concerns. The key difference in the pres-
ent, however, is that the unifying principle is the
market-driven approach and engagement with the
private sector. This approach leads to interesting
synergies, such as the case of a value chain linking
large-scale global buyers like Walmart, who may
set product standards and specify agronomic prac-
tices; in-country market institutions that enable
delivery of goods; domestic industries that provide
value-added processing; public-sector agricultural
agencies that support the delivery of seeds and
inputs; and even NGOs to support extension
service delivery.
A change in strategic orientation is also
required. Because the New Agriculture is by its
very nature a model of integrating different actors
and interventions into a common and coherent
framework, the orientation of agricultural devel-
opment organizations must be seen themselves
as catalysts, knowledge brokers, and coordina-
tors of action, rather than sole implementers.
In other words, the traditional agricultural
development model in which the development-
institution-managed programs and projects, such
as a seed multiplication project or a post-harvest
PRESSURE ON THE PLANET | 103
74
management project, must give way to taking on
the role of the “broker” of integrated solutions
that involve the roles of private seed companies,
NGOs (as development partners working with
extension agents), technology companies (creat-
ing new mobile or other solutions to link actors
along the chain), private-public schemes (for
innovative financing), and end-user entities
(providing know-how and uptake on the post-
It is the will of the leadership
and the power of the vision for
this New Agriculture that will
determine its success. Is Africa
ready? Certainly.
harvest output). Thus, in the above example of
the value chain, development institutions can
play an important role in linking the actors
together and supporting the success of the whole
chain’s performance rather than focusing on
interventions with one or more links within the
chain. Key concepts for development interven-
tions to achieve the New Agriculture are partner-
ships, leveraging, and innovation.
Investing in the New Agriculture
Leveraging.
Agricultural development institu-
tions need to be aggressive in their pursuit of
sustainable impact that is oriented toward the
New Agriculture. Much like their private inves-
tor counterparts, public development institutions
need to intelligently seek out winning ideas to find
those that will produce tangible and sustainable
results. These institutions’ roles are no longer to
create often-unsustainable agricultural projects
but rather to fill the gaps in providing the needed
financial and technical support to partnerships
that ensure the best possible sustainable returns on
investments in New Agriculture. Such an investor
orientation requires a precise knowledge orienta-
tion and a clear focus on the bottom line. The
notion of maximizing returns in terms of impact
outcomes is based on the core idea of leverage
through brokered joint initiatives with private and
non-private partners.
Such an investment mindset also requires
casting the net wide to incubate winning ideas
but also the ability to quickly hone in on what
works and what does not to make early triage
decisions. To effect this transition in approach,
core institutional capabilities in leading agricul-
tural development institutions would need to be
strengthened in terms of sharp business acumen,
a keen performance-monitoring capability, and
a relentless focus on results. An investor men-
tality would aggressively seek partnerships and
innovative mechanisms to deliver ever-improving
results. This might entail, for example, leverag-
ing the “Manual Distribution Channels” that put
bottles of Coca-Cola in the hands of consumers
across rural Africa to similarly enable the efficient
distribution of small sacks of fertilizer and seeds.
It might entail leveraging Africa’s mobile-money
revolution to enable production financing or link-
ing to a private weather-satellite service provider
to create a mobile application aimed at weather
forecasting. Another example of innovative
investment would be to create a variant of Linux
open-access source code for the development of
on-farm breeding trials. In the case of software
development, open-access software is made pub-
licly available on the Internet, enabling anyone to
copy, modify, and re-distribute the source code
without paying royalties or fees, as a form of
104 | USAID FRONTIERS IN DEVELOPMENT
80
community cooperation. This approach has led
to many important technology applications, and
beyond, in health and science. Applied to plant
breeding, it could allow sharing of innovation and
a more rapid spread of knowledge.
Innovation.
In the somewhat organic
approach in which complex actors and interactions
form the fabric of the New Agriculture, innovation
is key. Innovativeness requires drawing on new
energy and new sources of inspiration and leader-
ship, particularly through tapping the roles of
youth, women, and entrepreneurs, young and old,
male and female. Innovation is not a top-down,
hierarchical matter. Rather, innovation emerges
from within the logic of the partnerships and the
key conduits that enable these partnerships to
thrive and sustain themselves. A perfect example of
this is the crowdsourcing that has changed the way
news reporting is carried out, with power shifted
from the external journalistic eye observing and
reporting on an event to the collective experi-
ence of those reporting as participants within
the event. Similarly, perhaps it is Africa’s farmers
themselves who lead the way in driving innovation
in the New Agriculture, rather than those whose
external expertise has conceived the problem and
the solution from afar. Perhaps it is the synergy
that emerges between private service providers and
those who use the market mechanisms that is the
ultimate driver of change rather than either of the
parties themselves.
But an innovation mindset also requires
a willingness to take on risk. In the process of
constant re-invention and continuously new
configurations, an important role for the enabling
public-sector development institution is to provide
a means to absorb some of the risk associated with
innovation. For example, much like the Sand Hill
Road venture capitalists spawned the Silicon Valley
dot.com entrepreneurs by creating the conditions
for technology innovation labs, public-sector
agricultural development institutions can promote
such innovations through creatively devised inno-
vation grants and incubator projects.
Leadership
Finally, what of the leadership required for
the realization of this ambition of the New
Agriculture for the New Africa? Leadership in
its many forms, from political to organizational,
will drive the required change in mindset and the
necessary re-structuring of development institu-
tions and policies in this arena. Coherence is not
easy to achieve and requires dogged commitment
from the top.
Leadership and vision are required to bring
about a New Agriculture mindset that reflects the
dynamic, youth-oriented, cutting-edge, technol-
ogy- and market-savvy agricultural transformation
that is sought. It is this leadership that is critical
for bringing about the infrastructure, educa-
tion, policy reform, and implementation needed.
Within development organizations, ministries,
and private-sector partners, talent acquisition
is all important in this effort to enable the New
Agriculture to be driven by Africa’s brightest and
best, those who are ambitious and eager to make
a difference, are passionate about the power of
transformation, and dream of an aid-dependence-
free, prosperous new Africa.
It is the will of the leadership and the power
of the vision for this New Agriculture that will
determine its success. Is Africa ready? Certainly.
Eleni Z. Gabre-Madhin is the Founder and CEO
of the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange. The views
expressed in this essay are her own, and do not neces-
sarily represent the views of the United States Agency
for International Development or the United States
Government.
PRESSURE ON THE PLANET | 105
58
Joe Dougherty
The Revolution Must Be Green:
Feeding the Future through
Sustainable Innovations
T
here are nearly a billion hungry people
on our planet, and many more will be
arriving soon. The population of Africa
alone is expected to double by 2045, bringing
perhaps another billion people into an increasingly
crowded world.
1
If current trends continue, many
of those people will be born into poverty, facing
malnutrition from their first days on the planet.
Meanwhile, higher incomes in China and India
are raising demand for more resource-intensive
foods, like meat and dairy. Together, a growing
population and changing consumption patterns
will continue to push food prices upward, aggra-
vating the plight of the poor and hungry. To close
the widening gap between supply and demand for
food, several studies suggest that world agricultural
production will have to double by 2050.
2
Donor organizations have been rising to the
challenge, investing billions of dollars to help
1
2
3
“Miracle or Malthus?” The Economist, December 17, 2011, 81.
Jonathan A. Foley, “Can We Feed the World and Sustain the Planet?”
Scientific American, November 2011, 62.
improve agricultural productivity in develop-
ing countries. Their efforts are aimed at the
right target. As the Director of the University
of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment,
Jonathan A. Foley, explained recently in Scientific
American, farmers’ yields (output per unit of
land) in much of Africa and other parts of the
developing world are far below those of farmers
in more advanced regions. Closing this “yield
gap” for the world’s top 16 crops can increase
total food production by up to 60%, he esti-
mates. Reducing waste in the global food system
might add another 30%, says Foley.
3
Together,
those two steps, which donors and developing
country governments are already pursuing, would
virtually eliminate the global food deficit. That’s
the good news.
The bad news is that closing the yield gap will
not be easy. In many tropical countries, it is becom-
ing harder to grow food. Yields are falling rather
than rising in some areas, due to desertification,
Foley, “Can We Feed the World,” 64–65.
106 | USAID FRONTIERS IN DEVELOPMENT
45
Haitian vendors sell fresh produce and meat in a busy open-air market in Petion-ville, a suburb of
Port-au-Prince, in December of 2010. In the aftermath of the devastating January 2010 earthquake, donors
such as USAID have worked with farmers to help increase their crop yields. | AFP Photo: Thony Belizaire
erratic weather patterns, and other effects of global
warming. In other places, soil erosion and pollution
are the culprits. Large investments will be needed
just to help farmers in those regions maintain their
current yields, let alone improve them.
To make matters worse, agriculture itself
is the biggest contributor to global warming.
Dr. Foley estimates that 35% of greenhouse gas
emissions come from farms—more than from
all the world’s cars, trucks, and planes combined
or all the world’s electrical generation.
4
In many
countries, agriculture is also a leading source of
localized environmental disruption—eroding and
depleting soils, contaminating and draining water
sources—thus reducing even further the planet’s
capacity to feed a growing population. So our
efforts to increase production in the short term
might prove to be counterproductive in the long
4 Foley, “Can We Feed the World,” 63.
term, actually making it even more difficult to
grow enough food in the future.
How can we escape this paradox? It is clear
that agricultural sector growth, no matter how
inclusive, will not yield sustainable improvements
if we pursue the same unsustainable path that
farmers in developed countries have followed.
Modern industrial agriculture has achieved high
yields, but only at great cost in terms of waste,
pollution, and the increasing application of vast
amounts of energy, water, and other resources. As
Albert Einstein famously said, “We cannot solve
problems by using the same kind of thinking we
used when we created them.”
In order to close the yield gap and “feed the
future” into 2050 and beyond, developing coun-
tries must leapfrog industrial agricultural technolo-
gies and adopt less wasteful and more sustainable
approaches to growing food. The key to doing so,
of course, is innovation.
PRESSURE ON THE PLANET | 107
73
The importance of innovation comes as no
surprise to forward-thinking donors like USAID
and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, both
of which have made it a cornerstone of their
approach to agricultural development and food
security. Innovations, however, are not always
good. There are two ways in which an agricultural
innovation might not be as beneficial as it initially
seems. First, it might simply not work as well as
intended. For example, a new, drought-resistant
variety of maize might not deliver the promised
yields, or consumers might not like the way it
To close the yield gap and
“feed the future,” developing
countries must leapfrog
industrial agricultural
technologies and adopt less
wasteful and more sustainable
approaches to growing food.
tastes. A competitive market will eventually weed
out this type of unsuccessful innovation. If farmers
do not achieve higher yields or find that their cus-
tomers do not like the new maize, they will stop
planting it. These experiences are both inevitable
and valuable. Markets evolve through experimen-
tation and learn from failure.
The second type of unsuccessful innovation is
actually dangerous. Some products and practices
seem to be successful because they create value
for those who buy or use them while generating
profits for those who sell them. However, they
only appear to be beneficial because their true costs
are borne by neither buyers nor sellers, but pushed
off onto others in the form of pollution, erosion,
depletion of common resources, or some other
form of what economists call negative externalities.
Markets—even transparent, competitive ones—are
not very good at weeding out these “bad innova-
tions,” often conspiring to prolong them even
after the damage they do becomes obvious. DDT,
for example, was not banned in the United States
until 1972—more than 30 years after it was intro-
duced and 10 years after Rachel Carson’s Silent
Spring made its dangers widely known. Today,
farmers along the Mississippi River still apply mas-
sive amounts of chemical fertilizers, even though
their runoff has created a 6,500-square-mile “dead
zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, destroying a rich
source of seafood as well as the livelihoods of thou-
sands of fishermen.
5
To help developing countries leapfrog waste-
ful and unsustainable technologies, and therefore
to succeed in feeding the future, governments and
their donor partners must strike a delicate balance.
They must promote a wide range of potentially
good innovations—knowing that many of them
will fail—while preventing bad innovations from
coming to market and creating vested interests
that would perpetuate harmful technologies.
To promote good innovations, developing
country governments must make their agricultural
policies more predictable and less distortionary,
which in turn will make markets more open and
competitive. Open, competitive markets encour-
age innovation. Governments must also invest in
public goods like roads and research. Donors should
support governments in taking these steps while
continuing to invest in promising new agricultural
5 Monica Bruckner, “The Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone,” Microbial Life:
Educational Resources, serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/deadzone/
index.html, accessed March 27, 2012.
108 | USAID FRONTIERS IN DEVELOPMENT
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