Rich countries buy up agricultural land: who benefits?

I'm back from an exhilirating few weeks on the Obama campaign and haven't thought, talked or read about much else for the last month or so. But as the President-elect's team takes shape and the economic news has settled into a consistently - but predictably - gloomy pattern, I'm trying to find out what happened to some of the big issues from earlier in the year.

One problem that hasn't gone away is the global food crisis. The prices of key commodities may have begun falling, but the structural factors that led to their sustained increase over the last few years haven't gone away. A timely article from the Guardian sheds light on the practice of small, rich countries buying land in large, poor ones to safeguard their future supply of food.

The Guardian journalists do not hide their distaste for the deals, in which cash-hungry governments from Laos to Malaysia to Ukraine sell land to investors from Korea, Abu Dhabi, China and Saudi Arabia to grow food on a large scale. For smallholders who are turfed off their land, or don't have access to the advanced technology of the commercial farms, it's certainly a raw deal. But could there be a benefit to these deals that goes beyond food security for a few small countries?

In principle, there could be. Here is where the land is being bought. If the effect of introducing commercial agriculture to Sudan and Madagascar is a dramatic increase in productivity, the global supply of staple crops like rice and maize will increase and their price will fall. (The rice grown in Madagascar may go straight to South Korea, but South Korea will be able to reduce its imports from other countries commensurately). This could be good news for urban Malagasies, though not for the rural (rice-growing) majority.

A second benefit might come from technological spillovers. Small farmers in Africa and South-East Asia aren't an attractive market for new seed varieties or fertilizer, but large commercial farmers could be. I realize these spillovers are difficult to capture in practice, but surely having more commercial agridealers would be of benefit to everyone.

I don't want to suggest that these deals are good for everyone: some poor people will probably lose their land, the productivity gains may not be spectacular and the global price effect will be too small to notice. I just think we should look at each deal on its merits. Like the Chinese infrastructure deals, some are better than others. Like the Chinese infrastructure deals, we need more research into which ones.

Rice is back

The price of rice has stopped rising, for now, but the scramble to grow more rice has only just begun.

Agriculture ministers and scientists have been calling for a 'Green Revolution for Africa' for years. The Gates Foundation wants to fund it. Belatedly, the World Bank has agreed. The central focus seems to be on improved seed varieties, bred or modified for African conditions. A blog in the New York Times describes 'The Hunt for Super-Rice', a distributed computing project wherein unused time on personal computers is used to model genetic variations of rice. (This is the same technique as used to search for extraterrestrial intelligence and protein folding combinations).

By contrast, a friend has pointed out a low-tech approach to raising yields in today's edition of the same newspaper. Professor Norman Uthoff at Cornell University has developed a 'System of Rice Intensification' which relies on early and less dense planting. It may seem counterintuitive, but apparently yield can be raised without recourse to the flooded paddy fields or chemical fertiliser familiar from Asia. At a time when the cost of fuel (and hence fertiliser) has risen even faster than the price of the crop, this is welcome news.

As so often, however, the article skirts around the question of implementation. There may be isolated incidents of doubling or tripling yields, but techniques are even more difficult to disseminate than seeds or fertiliser: they need trained extension workers. Even if the System of Rice Intensification raises yields more cheaply or reliably than a 'Green Revolution', it will need a new army of extension agents to make it work. Unless it's so good that it can be spread by word of mouth. Maybe the best agricultural technology is the mobile phone . . .

Who wants to develop a low-cost rice mill?

Anyone visiting a West African village will notice the distinctive sight and sound of women pounding food to eat - yams, cassava or rice. As combine harvesters spread across Europe and North America and the green revolution throughout Asia, farming and processing practices in Africa barely changed. Rice mills, such as the one shown below, are the exception, not the rule, in rice-growing countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Does this matter? Not if pounding rice by hand yielded the same quality of rice as milling it - but it doesn't and it's hard work as well. The evidence suggests that African farmers continue pounding by hand because the alternatives are too expensive or simply not available. In some countries, women are actually going back to hand pounding, because their diesel-powered mills broke down or were sold for scrap to fuel a civil war.

There are various programs led by NGOs and the UN trying to change this, based on the belief that agricultural processing technology is essential if farmers want to move beyond subsistence and grow a surplus for sale. However, their efforts are generally uncoordinated, fall well short of what is required and may just hand out the same old technology that is inefficient and breaks down easily.


Now there are two exciting developments in this field. The first is a program sponsored by the Gates Foundation to create 600 agro-enterprises in Senegal, Mali and Burkina Faso using multifunctional platforms, essentially a diesel generator to which different machines (rice threshers or mills, peanut shellers and cassava graters) can be attached. It's a traditional grant-based program, but I'm optimistic because Gates is paying for it and they insist on value for money.

The second development - and one I am keen to join - is the spread of social enterprise models using new technology. New technology here means redesigning a product to make it simpler and cheaper: this is the One Laptop per Child model, not the MacBook Air! Typically these enterprises bring together engineers, designers and development practitioners and create some clever, cheap technology. The challenge, as always, is taking it to scale and getting people to pay for it.

There are some great organizations working out there: in the last few months, I have been introduced to the MIT D-Lab, the Extreme Affordability program at Stanford's d.school (d for design), KickStart and Design that Matters. Fortunately for me, Cambridge seems to be a hub for this kind of thing! I have also heard of Engineers without Borders and Practical Action. But nobody has developed a low-cost rice mill yet. Is nobody interested, or am I just not looking hard enough?

New Rice for Africa

Last week, I presented some of my work on agriculture in Liberia to classmates in the MPAID program. It's always nice to have a sympathetic audience, but there was some friendly criticism as well - not least, of my main suggestion that the fastest way to grow more rice is to provide traditional shifting cultivators with better seeds, rather than invest in rice swamps, irrigation and fertiliser. I cited Guinea as a country that has done so with some success, provoking some bewildered looks from my friends, since Guinea is still one of the world's poorest countries.

Imagine my surprise, then, to find that today's New York Times has a photo series celebrating rice cultivation in Guinea! Cultivating the 'New Rice for Africa' has, it seems, enabled villagers to grow 50% more rice without fertiliser and up to twice as much with it. Yet sadly, these wonder seeds (which are off-patent and non-hybrid, meaning farmers can keep some of their harvest for planting) are only being planted by 200,000 farmers in West Africa. This article tells you why. No surprises: it's roads, input supply chains and output marketing . . . again.

Rice in Ecuador: price control or export ban?

A few weeks ago, The Economist reported on the ever-rising price of agricultural commodities, including rice. What's good news for farmers is bad news for urban consumers and since cash crop farmers need to eat, they get hurt by higher food prices as well.

I've been spending some time in beautiful Ecuador visiting friends and picked up a copy of the local paper. Rising food prices are a major topic here as well, but the government's response is a little unusual: they simply banned rice exports.

Now, I could understand that if there were a real risk of people going hungry: Ireland famously continued exporting potatoes to England during the 'Potato Famine' of 1847. But since most of the poorest people in Ecuador are farmers, stopping them from selling their rice at the best price they can get seems like a bad idea.

On the other hand, banning rice exports will not lead to rice shortages in the short term, whereas price controls would, because any sensible farmer would just sell them abroad. So maybe it's the lesser of two evils?

Maybe, but beware the unintended consequences: Colombia, which used to import rice from Ecuador, has now imposed a ban on imports of other agricultural commodities! The same newspaper showed a farmer throwing lovely ripe mangos in a ditch, because Ecuador now has a mango glut. Simultaneous food shortages and other kinds of food going to waste? That's precisely what happens if you stop farmers from trading.