On the outskirts of Kigali, Rwanda’s biggest open air food market is bustling today and full of foodstuffs. There’s no shortage, but prices — particularly of maize flour — have climbed by as much as fifty percent in the last six months. While it’s easy to place the blame on oil prices, which have driven up transport and fertilizer costs and thus the price of food imports, the oil spike alone is not the cause. What the average Rwandan might not realize is that America’s thirst for energy is partly to blame for the increase in their cost of living.
Last week, lawmakers in the Senate and House began a bipartisan re-examination of their commitment to ethanol. The current spike in food prices has caused them to reconsider the validity of the idea that corn-based ethanol production provided the best short-term prospect for bolstering America’s energy independence. The facts are quickly becoming clear to Congress — including senators and representatives from corn-producing states — that ethanol is not the magic bullet it promised to be as recently as last year.
Far from it: With 25 percent of all U.S. corn production going to ethanol production, it has turned out to be the catalyst that’s helped transform the crisis in gas prices into a full-blown food crisis. This has been a disaster for the world’s working poor, but hopefully, our leaders’ eyes have been opened to the problem and the opportunities that exist for solving it.
One powerful long-term solution that needs our support is the suite of agriculture programs aimed at helping the world’s poor grow drought- and pest-resistant crops. As Keith Bradsher and Andrew Martin reported in the New York Times on May 18th, we have lost many of these programs to budget cuts due to our government’s and trade experts’ having been lulled by the plenty that American agriculture has always delivered. They outline how the U.S. is currently slashing, by as much as 75 percent, its $59.5 million annual budget for supporting global research focused on improving crops vital to agricultural commodities in poor countries such as rice, maize, and soy.
Despite the administration’s request for $770 million in emergency food aid, cuts continue to be pushed through. The World Bank, a longtime supporter of agriculture programs, has also dropped its commitment to crop research and development significantly over the past few years. This is terribly unwise. Global leaders now appear on notice that agriculture must be put back at the top of policy priorities. The UN just completed a conference yesterday loaded with recommendations that have long been known to policy wonks. Donald Kaberuka, the president of the African Development Bank and Rwanda’s former minister of finance pragmatically noted, “The test will be in implementing the solutions.”
Programs that allow the world’s poor to be self sufficient are smart on many levels. They allow more stability — indeed, those parts of the world with good agriculture programs have been less susceptible to the food rioting we’ve seen recently in the world’s poorer urban areas. Such programs are also more cost effective for American taxpayers since they cost less than emergency food aid. Most importantly, when they allow small farmers in Rwanda or Tanzania to grow hardy crops bred to be drought- and pest-resistant, these programs help the poor feed themselves.
They can also help local subsistence farmers make money and climb up from poverty into prosperity. Small farmers who work to meet local and regional demand end up putting more acreage into profitable cultivation, and the income they receive even allows them to invest in crops like pomegranates — a high-demand niche product for which wholesalers and food production companies will pay a premium.
The fruits of agricultural research projects — drought- and pest-resistant crops — cost less because they require less gasoline and other petroleum inputs, such as fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides, to produce. Locally grown crops can therefore provide cash-poor consumers with an inexpensive alternative to the now unaffordable crops being flown and shipped in from all over the world. It’s time for an African Green Revolution — improved seeds and practices that will increase productivity, self-sufficiency, and therefore, security. An African Green Revolution will not be as straightforward as Asia’s Green Revolution since there are new challenges — decreased rainfall due to environmental change, overpopulation, small farm size, and the AIDS pandemic — which Asia did not face. Nonetheless, helping farmers accustomed to living on the edge of starvation to be productive does not require heroic or financially untenable efforts. The Millennium Villages Project in Rwanda, for example, helped a community of several thousand farm families move from producing approximately 300 kilograms of food to 5 metric tons in the course of one season. All that was required was community leadership, advanced seeds, and good management. That’s a package of interventions that should be provided world-wide.
Making deep cuts to restore fiscal sanity in government makes sense, but great care must be applied when choosing which programs to cut, and which to keep. Just last week, John McCain spoke at length to an audience about pork barrel programs that needed to be cut: He mentioned agricultural research programs among those that must go. The presidential candidates need to consider the long-term costs to America in emergency-food-aid allocations and global security, and should think carefully before slashing. Divesting from agricultural programs while staring down the barrel of a global food crisis would be a decision certain to rank highly in the annals of poor public policy practices.
Josh Ruxin is a Columbia University expert on public health who has spent the last couple of years living in Rwanda, where he administers the Millennium Villages Project in Mayange. He’s an unusual mix of academic expert and mud-between-the-toes aid worker. His regular posts (including this one) can be found on the blogroll of Nick Kristof of the New York Times, and he has given his permission to be cross-posted here. Josh and EGR executive director Mike Kinman team-teach a global poverty module for Trinity, Wall Street's Clergy Leadership Project
