Bill Gates's Foundation Is Leading a Green Counterrevolution in Africa
jacobinmag.com
jacobinmag.com
While I don't have enough knowledge on the subject to comment directly on article, I want to ask, based on the above, does it make sense to invest in small-scale farms?
That assumes some combination of extreme social mobility and a steady state population. We have a growing population and the benefits of much of our industrial production to go a fraction of that population, so it doesn't work out.
According to the UN, there were about 2 billion people living in ~475 million rural small farm households in 2015, which by definition are "poor and food insecure and have limited access to markets and services" [1] so they wouldn't reap the benefits of industrialized agriculture. Most estimates have the global human population breaking 2 billion circa 1927 so we have more subsistence farmers alive today than there were human beings alive a hundred years ago (!!!)
The birth rate inversion in developed countries is a well known phenomenon [2] so many of the subsistence agriculture dependent populations are organically growing in contrast to most of the developed world which is only growing through immigration.
Throw in all the market distortions like water pricing and oncoming climate change... where this goes, nobody knows.
So while AGRA may have issues, and the article does suggest a few, I'm very confident that a plan to keep most people stuck as low-productivity subsistence farmers will be worse. No strategy for "distribution of power resources and control over agricultural inputs" will overcome the fundamental problem that a nonindustrialized farm of staple crops produces too little value to keep a family fed and happy.
It's almost like it was always about the profit. Strange
And the impact of these grants is overrated. A billion in the whole of Africa is a drop in the ocean. It is more of an experiment really, to see if technology can help, but the problems there are deeply political.
- Prioritizing on cash crops (corn, soy) instead of the traditional nutrient-rich crops which are more suited for the region
- Furthermore, the reduction of crop diversity might have lead to worsening of soil conditions
- Force-selling expensive equipment and materials (hybrid seeds, synthetic fertilizers) made farmers fall into debt, which could lead to a contraction of the farmer workforce
Although there needs to be a much more thorough study than this article to get the bigger picture, I think the main issue here is hamfisting American ways of mechanized farming to African land. With different soil, climate, and socialeconomic conditions, blindly modernizing agriculture might just not work on Africa.
Perhaps one conclusion to consider is not "it didn't work" but rather "the real objectives were different from the publicly stated ones."
That is called a "hyperbole".
> There are dozens of documented examples of Gates doing that sort of thing
Unless you explain what you mean by "that sort of thing", then there really isn't.
"The UN FAO have linked this increase in undernourishment in particular to the rising extent of conflict-affected countries (which is often a leading cause of famine), and compounded by climate-related factors such as the El Niño phenomenon (which can inflict both drought and flood conditions)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(magazine) - "Jacobin is an American socialist quarterly magazine based in New York"
I had no clue about this situation but it doesn't look very well. Introducing continent-wide IP-law for seeds, getting farmers into debt by having them used only approved fertilisers and then showing virtually no productivity increase against the baseline shows no redeeming quality to the program.
But hey, Gates will be declared a saint in the next 10 years so who is this little mag site to comment?
But yeah, important thing is that the western upper-middleclass has a convenient boogeyman to vilify in a digestible form for day-time viewing.
Is this supposed to be some kind of defense?
The program is supposed to improve agricultural yields and they claim it did not. Is the program just about helping Western investments? So the investments result in unchanged yields?
What I have implied here, in case it is not clear, was that the Jacobin either willfully misinterprets facts or makes constant pleas to emotion of sheltered Westerners to sell their store-brand let-them-eat-cake progressivism.
If the outcome was a net 0 compared to the baseline those investments and surrounding legal changes didn't improve things.
If you are looking for concrete examples of how you are being manipulated by the article, then to name just a few example:
- The article drops analytical rigor just at the exact moment when it benefits their narrative. For example, the 2020 goal of the initiative was a projection based on certain assumptions. To say if the project has failed or not according to those projections, the assumptions must hold. Funnily enough the article doesn't list those assumptions anywhere or address whether those assumption still hold true, or even if they were valid to begin with.
- The article uses language to imply malice, where there is none. For example: "Moreover, freedom of choice is restricted: in AGRA projects in Kenya, small-scale farmers are not allowed to decide for themselves which corn seed they plant and which fertilizers and pesticides they use on their fields." Gasp, horror. An investor wants you to follow their rules. How dare they. Jacobin should be on the barricades that VCs don't allow you to spend their money on a new Porsche, because that limits your startups freedom of choice!
- The article talks about agroecology as if it's as of now a viable alternative. Unless there's tons of investor capital lined up behind it, it really isn't. In fact, these aren't even comparable things.
The whole idea of introducing IP law for seeds to improve yields then show a 17% increase, just like the baseline, seems a monumental mistake.
The fertilizer situation is questionable too. If they put so many conditions then they should also guarantee some outputs. Otherwise there's no risk for them, only the farmers. But I grant you that whole section seems a bit shallow.
You set a pretty high bar to criticise such huge initiatives. They can fail based on the externalities they create, not only as a model that guarantees an output given some assumptions.
And that would be a fair criticism. The problem I see with the article like this is that if we are talking about problems that need immediate or at least short-timescale solutions, you often don't have an optimal choice. You might have a choice that's somewhat less shitty. All the hand wringing isn't productive in the best case, and is a deliberate political tactic in the worst.
Hence, I think that the "angle" situation is a serious one. There are a lot of right-wing and left-wing outlets that push an angle that often muscles out any objectivism out of a topic.
> The whole idea of introducing IP law for seeds to improve yields then show a 17% increase, just like the baseline, seems a monumental mistake.
IP laws for seeds are a mistake in general, in my opinion. The optimal solution would be to either soften or repeal IP laws for seeds. Can we attain that short to midterm? Probably not. Does that mean that nothing should be done? No. So we are left to work in a space with solutions of varying shittiness, which still worthwhile to engage.
> You set a pretty high bar to criticise such huge initiatives. They can fail based on the externalities they create, not only as a model that guarantees an output given some assumptions.
I don't think so, but that is more the result of how I understand the word "fail". I think it is fair to say that the initiative has failed to achieve the hoped for results due to reasons A, B, C, etc., one of which is that the initial assumptions have proven to be wrong. That way it is pretty transparent.
The ever intelligent and witty veteran journalist P Sainath breaks it down clearly. [1]
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Indian_farmers%27_prote...