Word: agra
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...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...
...AGRA also has its critics - those who support a revolution in an entirely different shade of green. For them, the fact that African farming hasn't changed in over a century is a feature, not a bug. It provides an opportunity to replace industrial farming with organic practices that can be just as productive, but far more sustainable. At the St. Jude Family project in southern Uganda, double-decker animal pens open onto corn, cabbage, bananas and crawling green beans. The earth is contoured to reduce runoff and erosion. Spring onions serve as natural pest control. Legumes fix nitrogen...
...would benefit Africa. For some farmers, commercial solutions - of the type promoted by Odiambo - will be the best way forward. Others might be better served by organic techniques. The key will be giving each grower the opportunity to make a comparison. So far, the more organized and better backed AGRA is the group getting its message...
...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...
...activists like Meredith Niles, a campaigner at the U.S.-based Center for Food Safety, point to links between AGRA and agribusiness giants such as Monsanto. "They're clearly tied to the companies that are going to benefit from selling more fertilizer and more seed," says Niles...