Word: africas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Pimentel, a professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell University, that was published in 2005, found that organic farms produced just as much corn and soybeans as conventional farms. While they required more labor, the cost was more than offset by savings in commercial nitrogen, insecticides and herbicides. In Africa, where labor is cheap and capital scarce, the benefits would be magnified. According to Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva, past green revolutions boosted production of wheat and rice at the expense of other food. Using land for cash crops, she argues, actually decreased total food production. "You're losing because...
...Odiambo's backers, green means agricultural bounty. The Kenyan shopkeeper is one of hundreds of agricultural dealers who have been given credit and training by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), a high-profile effort to boost the production of small-scale farmers through better agricultural technology. Funded by the Rockefeller and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations and chaired by former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the group takes its name from earlier green revolutions in Latin America and Asia, where the introduction of hybrid seeds and chemical fertilizers is credited with rescuing hundreds...
...Africa, AGRA is funding scientists working on new seed strains, bankrolling the breeders who produce them, and helping wholesalers expand their inventory. Most importantly it's enlisting locals like Odiambo as free-market agriculture extension officers, training them in the proper use of seeds and chemical fertilizers. "The farmer will leave the shop with the product, and also the knowledge of how to use it," says Esborne Baraza, who coordinates AGRA's efforts in western Kenya...
...Spring onions serve as natural pest control. Legumes fix nitrogen to the soil. Cow manure produces biogas for the farm's stove. Farm owner Josephine Kizza says her project has introduced organic techniques to 180,000 Ugandan farmers. "In the Western countries, organic farming is expensive. But here in Africa, it is very cheap...
AGRA, for its part, says it has learned the lessons of Asia's experience. Africa's farmlands are divided into small, impoverished plots and scattered across a diverse ecological landscape. What works just south of the Sahara is likely to be very different from what would be successful in the Ethiopian highlands or the Congolese tropics. Rather than try to impose a transition to large-scale, industrialized agriculture, AGRA is providing small-scale farmers with a variety of products for use in traditional planting. The idea, says Joe DeVries, director of AGRA's seed program, isn't to supplant existing...