African Green Revolution 2.0 - Agrilinks

Ag Sector Council Briefing

Going from 1 to 3 tons/ha in Tropical Africa, and Beyond: African Green Revolution 2.0 November 9, 2010 Participants Pedro Sanchez The Earth Institute at Columbia University

Sponsor United States Agency for International Development

Sanchez of 27 Moderator, Pedro Sanchez, Audience

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Moderator: So welcome today to the special seminar series outside of our normal ag sector council’s series. Today we are fortunate to have Pedro Sanchez from the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is director of the Tropical Agriculture and Rural Environment program and will today be speaking to us about tripling agricultural yields in Africa.

Pedro Sanchez: Okay. Thanks, _____. Can you guys hear me? Okay. Looks like this thing is working. Yeah. It’s a pleasure to be back here. I’ve started my career basically supported by AID and many, many decades at different places. But what I want to share to you is the fact that going from one to three tons per hector of maize, as the general crop, in Africa, is happening. It’s happening at a sufficient scale. We can say it’s serious. And then the other part is beyond, so what’s going to happen after that. Let’s see if I get my things straight here. By the way, I’d like to introduce my associate, Alison Rose. Alison came with me. Alison, you want to say hi? Yeah, okay. She works with me. So, okay. Well, if we look at serial yields in – all over the world, basically, they average about one ton per hector in sub-Saharan Africa, three tons per hector in Latin America, and South Asia, five tons per hector in China, and ten tons per hector in North American Europe. For those of you who think in bushels per hector, that’s over there, too. So basically, what we’re talking about is putting Africa where Latin America and South Asia is, going from one to three. These numbers, you’ll see ’em repeated many times in actual data. The overarching biophysical problem in sub-Saharan Africa is always been unhealthy, nutrient-depleted soils, not bad soils to start with, but they’ve been depleted nearly of nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon, and _____ border, either too much like the top right-hand picture there shows on a flat – this is water flower on a flat field in Mali during the rainy season – or too little. The story started when then Secretary General Kofi Annan asked my director of the Earth Institute, Jeffrey Sachs, to put together a UN millennium project to be a sort of a manual, what to do to accomplish all the millennium development goals which were launched in 2000 with great fanfare, but there was no action plan. My responsibility was to co-chair the hunger taskforce, one of ten taskforces, with _____. And



out of that, in conversations with then Secretary General Kofi Annan, he made a call for a 21st Century African Green Revolution at a meeting of African heads of states in Adis July 4th, 2004. So on July 5th, 2004. Out of that came the idea now of this an African Green Revolution. What Kofi said very much based on the hunger taskforce was that, “Yeah. We’ll have a _____ of increasing agricultural yields.” But unlike the old Green Revolution of the ‘60s in Asian and so on when I was a graduate student in the Philippines – I lived through that – this one will focus more on soil and water and also, of course, seeds, so germ _____, but soil and water being the two most common biophysical limiting factors. But it would also focus quite a bit on nutrition, especially child and maternal nutrition. It’ll also try to make markets work for the poor. Markets do not work for the poor, are not designed to work for the poor. They’re designed to work for the people who have money. And all of this done within environmental – suitable environmental systems, which is something we didn’t have in the Asian Green Revolution. Nobody heard of climate change or even erosion or biodiversity or any of that stuff. But, of course, we’re very sensitive to do it that way. And supported by enabling policies and very much by politics. And politics play a very large role in what I’m saying here. The main action since Kofi Annan made that announcement in July of 2004, several things happened. Some of them as a direct consequence, and some of them because of ongoing efforts. The African governments committed ten percent of their budgets to agriculture through the CADP program. I think you know what that thing is. And I think it was 2005. And let me say right now that those countries that are putting ten percent or more into agriculture in their national budgets right now, they are the countries that are really making major successes. Some exceptions, with those who took this commitment seriously are being the most – the countries where this Green Revolution is happening. Then the millennium project, we got the idea that after finalizing our report, let’s do it. And the idea was started with the millennium villages, and then two MDG support centers for policy advice. And that started in 2005. And this is basically led by the Earth Institute at Columbia University.



And then at about that time, too, there was a creation of agri, invented by the Gates and Rockefeller foundations, to make the Green Revolution happen. Kofi Annan is the chair of the board. And they have a very dynamic group of people and a fair amount of money, based in Nairobi. And then earlier this year, in April, the Global Food and Agricultural Security Trust Fund with a horrible acronym, came to being within an initial commitment of about $800 million. And now we’re hearing all sorts of good things about the Feed the Future at USAid. So we’d like to more about that. Again, nothing directly to with Kofi Annan’s goal, but maybe it did. I don’t know. But, anyway, there’s been quite a bit of action. And now I think we can quantify the goal of the African Green Revolution to go from one to three tons per hector by the year 2020, in ten years. And there’s a nature paper there in which is explain some of these things that I’m talking about here. This is what a one-ton-per-hector crop looks and what a three-ton-per-hector crop looks. One thing I want you to remember is how much open space there is here, and much of the soil is exposed as opposed to here. Let me talk first about the millennium villages. The idea was to ask what it would take for a village of about 5,000 people or so in a hunger hotspot, defined as a sub-national unit, a province, or a district, with more than 20 percent undernourished children under the age of five, which are usually disease hotspots and health – and poverty hotspots, too. So we were able to organize a system in which their villages in 14 clusters in Africa, each of them representing a major agroecological zone or farming system where hunger is pervasive. So this enabled us to work in _____ on a coastal artisanal fisheries, and very dry village in Toya near Timbuktu, in Mali. Ironically, growing – flooded rice of the Niger River, but that’s a priority. Tiby in Mali are typical Sahalian situation near Segu. As we go down in West Africa, Pampaida in Nigeria in the Northern Guinea Savannah, Ikaram, in Nigeria dry Savannah, Bonsaaso in Ghana in the tropical rain forest. On the other side, we have a cluster in Koraro, Ethiopia high and dry,



very poor people, very stunted people in northern _____. In Kenya, we have Dertu, which is a _____ village, zero crops, all livestock only, and close to the Somali border, but it’s in the Kenyan part. And Sauri in Western Kenya, which is the oldest village, very intense high population. We have one in Ruhiira in Western Uganda, which is at high elevations, but more humid. One in Mayange, Rwanda. Oddly enough, in the drier part of Rwanda. I wanted it in the upper parts, but this was a cabinet decision. So that’s why we have it there. One in Mbola near Tabor in Tanzania, _____ base, _____ model. And two Malawi, one in Malawi, Gumulida near Lilangua, and one in Mwandama near Zomba. So each of each of these 14 clusters have anywhere from one to ten villages in it. So we have a total of 80 villages now. Roughly about half a million people. And we’ve been working them for as long as six years in Sauri, the first village, and as little as two years, the last village was in Toya in Timbuktu. The basis of the village work is completely leadership, but based by science. We go over there, ask people what their problems are. And one _____ development goals is a no-brainer. They are the same problems. And then the interaction is, “Okay. You want to work? You’re not going to get anything in cash. Everything you’ll get from us will be in kind, or sometimes even in loans. We’ll help you with what you don’t have, but you do basically all the work.” And the second thing that is based on science. So if some villages said, “We think that we should grow bananas, and I’d say pineapples in hot, humid, tropic,” you say, “No, you need somewhat higher elevation,” and so on. So it’s this combination which has served us very well. And it combines two opposite paradigms that the villagers are ignorant and don’t know anything, that scientists know everything, and the reverse. Scientists are – know everything, and the villagers do nothing. We just try to put these two things together. And it’s worked pretty well. The farmers, and just about all the villagers except the _____ village, said that their top priorities were to get agricultural input, namely fertilizers and hybrid maize seeds, or hybrids seeds of sorghum or – well, improved varieties of sorghum or rice or beans or other crops that they were crowing, and that they wanted a clinic. And I’m going to talk about the agricultural part here, but let me say that the clinics were built by the villagers, following the minister of health instructions so it



would be a proper clinic. And that, and other interventions in other sectors I’ll tell you a little bit more about. But when the beginning we said, “okay. We’ll subsidize the fertilizers and hybrid seeds, ’cause we don’t have any money. You’ll have to return back ten percent of your surplus to the local schools for school-feeding program. That was the first commitment. When that first truck full of fertilizer arrived in February 2005, and the bags of locally produced hybrid Western Seed 505 arrived there, people began to believe that this was serious and got to work on it very hard. Normally in this area – this is outside village. This is the way maize looks at tremendous phosphorous and nitrogen deficiencies. And, indeed, outside the village they average about 1.2 tons per hector, while in the village, average of 1,000 farmers was 5 tons per hector. They’d never seen that kind of food production before, and they were as proud as can be. And the people changed. The nature of the people changed when they saw hope. Parallel to that was the advent of an insecticide treating malaria _____ which knocked down malaria tremendously. And then other things. The kids were going to school because it was a meal that they could have there and so on, and many other things. So I combine here the average yields of seven millennium villages, from Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Malawi, Ghana, and Nigeria, and a total of 16 harvests between 2005 and 2007. Each of these numbers is a sample around a thousand farms. And what you see is – and, again, we’re using just the maize yields. There was some other ones, did sorghum and potatoes and whatever. The maize yields with interventions, fertilizers and hybrid seed, and extension, average of a little bit over four tons per hector with a range. Without interventions, it averaged 1.7 tons per hector, much better than the average 1 ton per hector. So the yield increases were of about 2.4 tons per hector. And we tried to calculate – and they all have ranges, you see? It goes from low to high. We tried to calculate what are the inputs cost without any subsidies, and market rates to produce an extra ton of maize. And we did it every year, but I’m presenting it here at April 2008 prices. Those were the peaks. That’s where it was the peak of both the food



and fertilizer prices. And the average is it cost $135.00 for – to enable these people, whoever pays for it – for these people to grow an extra ton of maize. And there was a range, you see, from very low in the most efficient areas, to very high in the least efficient areas. We look at the value to cost ratios as the same prices, and they average about four, again, with a range. The economists tells us that it’s above two – two or above, you’re fine. So this, basically, the – our yield data since then, my colleague, _____, has published a paper in Advance is Agronomy that I just have a couple copies with me here. Just I’m not quite whether it’s published yet, but at least we have the electronic version, updating this table with all sorts of crops and so on. I want you to remember that number, $135.00 to produce an extra ton of food – of maize. And comparing it with what the general accountability office says it costs to bring a ton of maize or wheat, whatever, at – as US _____ to a central section in Africa was $112 – $812.00 when this comparison was made about a year ago. So, it costs six times to do the old Chinese proverb, “Give people food, and they’ll eat for a day, as supposed to empower people how to produce food, and they will eat for a lifetime.” This has had already – many of you are familiar, this has had an impact on the ratio of food aid to technical assistance in agricultural in Africa already in the legislature here in this country. And, also, it’s given rice to the B4P program of the world food price – World Food Program and the Gates Foundation. We’ve done several baseline studies – I’m sorry – one baseline study before any interventions. One at three years, and one at five years that has already happening. And we don’t have a lot of the data completed. But for Year 3, we’re pretty much finished. This is, by the way, the reference in Advances in Agronomy. And some of the metrics that we had was the percent of households with maize yields less than three tons per hector, or the equivalent. And at the baseline was less than ten percent of the households who are reaching those yields. In Year 3, 78 percent. So two things. That’s very nice. It’s slower than that 4.3 average that I mentioned before. It’s fine. But the important thing is that this was not 100 percent. There is – we’ve found some farmers that were classified



by the villagers are the destitute or the poorest of the poor, usually widows with very little land, and no matter what _____ they are provided with. Even if they are provided for free, they just can’t do it. They’re sick or they just can’t do it. So there is among the poorest of the poor that we’re dealing here. We’re dealing with the real bottom barrel that will always will have to be – have to receive some sort of safety net. But 80 percent or so then did not. Now households not having enough food for at least one month per year, dropped from 69 percent to 35 percent. That’s very good. But, again, there’s a third of the whole village’s households that do not have sufficient food at least one month a year. It used to be six months before and so on. So it’s not a – the point I’m trying to make is these are not absolute homeruns. But we’re following these numbers. The percent of stunted children less than two years old, which is a good indicator of chronic malnutrition when from a baseline of 50 percent to 36 percent. This, we’re very, very proud of. Of course, all these children were born after the project started. The percent of children less than five years old sleeping on their insecticide treated bed net went from 7 percent to 55 percent. Households with access to an improved water source and protected spring, the borehole, went from 28 to 73 percent. Households with access to improved sanitation, which basically means a concrete slab over a latrine, went from 8 percent to 45 percent. Households with mobile phone – cell phones – went from 5 to 31 percent, nothing to do with us. The project – that was done by them. Percent of the women with access to modern contraceptives – a certain improvement, but it shows just it’s a lot that needs to be done in this area. And the percentage of the births attended by skilled health workers which are midwives, increased fairly significantly. And there are many other metrics like this, but this will give you an idea of the project. Now, I want to talk about one country. Malawi is the first Green



Revolution country in Africa. Malawi. What’s characteristic about Malawi? There’s nothing really special about Malawi except it’s a very beautiful country. But it’s landlocked, extremely poor, and has all the problems of poor infrastructure, corruption, what have you. In 2005, shortly after the election of President Bingu wa Mutharika, he asked Jeffrey Sachs, myself, and others to come down and give him some advice, come down from Kenya. And he said to us, “I didn’t get elected president to be a beggar nation. And right now, my nation is 43 percent dependent on food aid. Do you have any ideas? Do you have any advice?” I said, “Why, yes, sir. The Hunger Taskforce says, in your case, subsidize fertilizers and hybrid maize seed.” You gotta talk to these people very – not very complicated terms. So he turned around to his minister of finance, Goodall Gondwe, and said, “Do it.” He came back the next day and says, “Well, I went to talk to the World Bank, to USAid, to DIFIT and all the donors and they said, ‘Absolutely not. Don’t you know we don’t subsidize African farmers?’” And he sort of say, “But don’t we know we also subsidize American and European and Japanese farmers to the tune of a billion dollars a day?” But that was then. That was then very much the dogma. And they said, “Absolutely not. Forget it. What a horrible idea.” So Bingu says, “Okay, fine. I’ll do it myself.” And he grabbed money from his treasury and provided a voucher to any farmer, large or small – this is, by the way, we’ll call it small subsidy. And the voucher says provides you to buy two bags of fertilizers, one for planting fertilizer and the other one for top dressing, and a few kilos of hybrid maize seed for open pollinated varieties at a 75-percent discount.” So it was a 75-percent subsidy. They still had to pay for it, but 75-percent subsidy. And what we saw there was really nutrients on the move. In spite of all the limitations that you can tell about the policy in Africa and governance, whatever, about one billion of the two million Malawians smallholder farmers were able to get a hold of the subsidy. And they were carrying the fertilizers on bicycles and the back of their heads, whatever. And the hybrid seed and _____ did a beautiful job in distributing that. The results is something to be proud of. I’m talking about the harvest year in Malawi when maize is harvested in April. So in April 2005, which was before the program started, Malawi only produced 1.3 million tons



of maize while their requirements were about 2.1 million. So that was a minus 43 percent. National average yields were 0.8 tons per hector, again, hovering around this number of 1. And officially it was a drought year. I’ll talk more about drought years. So the first year, production increased tremendously from 1.3 to 2.4 tons. And instead of a deficit, they had a small surplus. The maize yields – national average maize yields – these are not the experimental plots or millennium villages or anything else. This is just national statistics – just about double. It was a good – it was officially a good year as far as rains. Two thousand seven, then the donors began to get interested here. Actually, some of them claiming that USAid, but others ones that it was their own idea. Once I saw that, they began to pump some money into it, so it was much more efficient. And they reach 3 million tons, 57-percent surplus, and almost 3 ton per hector national average yields. And Malawi became a food exporter, exporting maize to Zimbabwe and selling maize to the world food program to support other operations there, and even becoming a food aid donor. They gave 5,000 tons to the Suto in Swaziland which were affected by droughts like the rest of Southern Africa. So it was just a total change. Two thousand eight went down a bit. Two thousand nine went up. This is also an election year, and the subsidy was made higher and the president was reelected by a landslide. But 2010, this year, became very important because it was the first drought year. ’Cause people we saying, “Well, you’re getting good yields and all that because the rains have been good.” And we’ve been saying to them, “Well, you have two kind of droughts. You have a nitrogen drought, basically, lack of nitrogen as a main element. And you have a water drought.” So this year, indeed, was a drought year, which technically is not a drought. A drought is when you don’t get enough rain to grow a crop. It’s not a drought. That happens in the semi-arid tropics, but not sub-humids like Malawi. What it is, is a series of dry spells – localized dry spells during the rainy season when it doesn’t rain for two or three weeks. And that can kill you if the maize is at the reproduction stages of growth. So that’s what it was. Still, in spite of all that, production went down, but 33 percent surplus with the yields averaged about 2 tons per hector. So even in a drought year, this was a success. And nobody’s talking about, “No, no. That’s because of the good rains.”



This is how a lot of the maize looked in February of this year in Southern Malawi, which was the area most affected by drought. And what you see is a sea of green leave maize. And before in Malawi, it used to be all yellow. So the nitrogen drought was certainly over. So where are we now? ’Cause there have been quite a bit of very pointed actions also by Agra on other areas that I will discuss here, and many other actors, including the US Aid Missions. So the Green Revolution now in my opinion, is not yet at the tipping point. We estimate now that there about two million small holder households that are out of hunger and with achieving the three tons per hector threshold. And this has been the strippling of maize yields has been confirmed with tripling cocoa yields in Ghana and tripling camel milk yields per animal in the _____ village in Northeast Kenya. But, the trouble is two _____? Well, that’s very nice but there’s 69 million such households estimated hungry, smallholder-farming households in sub-Saharan Africa. So that’s just the beginning, but this has got to be multiplied by 3.5 times. So African Green Revolution 2.0, which was the topic of the American Society of _____ meetings last week in Long Beach, California. They were talking about all sorts of _____ terms of genomes and so on. Our vision now is certainly to continue and consolidate, and to do two things. One is improve smallholder farmers efficiency. And the other one is to scale up from 3 to 69 million households in the next 10 years. And we wouldn’t do that. The governments will do that. That’s the government’s responsibility. We’re not going to have any more villages. The villages are proof of concept. They will continue until the year 2015. And we have funding for that, more or less. So – but there is – this was very rough, brutal way of doing agriculture. Fertilizers, hybrid seed, extension, bang, bang, bang. Not very sophisticated. So now we want to do several new things. One is incorporate the organic input into a fertilizer base system which is just straight go to ground. A transition to high-value crops, or enterprises, because now farmers don’t need to put their older acre or whatever small size they have into maize to serve their needs. So shifting to tomatoes, dairy cattle, forest for dairy cattle, aquaculture and so on.



Pinning down many specific things with a digital solar map, adapting ourselves to expend a drier climates that are happening in most of Africa. Droughts, yeah. Well, when it comes to the other extreme, floods. That’s harder. A lot harder than droughts. Easy access to credit, and I mean really easy. The use agro dealer and cutting down harvest losses. So this is sort of our vision for the next ten years is things they have to be doing. Some of them involve research, many of them just involve extension and credit. So our organic inputs to a fertilizer based thing is that we know that technology for adding high quantities of nitrogen fixed from the air by using leggings either nitrogen _____ increase, such as Espania here, or nitrogen fix and cover crops such as _____. I worked for ten years as a Director of Ecraf, and one of my main actions was this. And we’ve done it. I mean, we had all the technology and specific trees and varieties of trees for specific climates and soil, blah, blah, blah, the same thing there. The trouble is after one or two years, this technology disappears. At that time, usually, Ecraf was buying the seed to multiply the trials. So when this improved _____ ceased to be a seed crop, farmers dis-adopted it. And, of course, I was very, very disappointed about that. And economists at Ecraf have confirmed that with some pretty ruthless peer-previewed papers. And it took me a while to figure out why. Actually, it was the second year after I finished my job at Ecraf, and wish I would have thought of this when I was director general of Ecraf. Fertilizers are very successful because we’re subsidizing them. We’re financing them. We’re not financing this organic _____. How ’bout of we finance the seeds and the knowledge and the other stuff that’s required for the organic inputs. Sometimes there’s an opportunity cost you have to sacrifice a crop to grow these things depending where you are. So I said, “Of course, stupid. Should have thought about that.” So this is what we plan to do now. It’s not only the reintroduction of organic inputs and – I mean, the data are so rich that you don’t have to do it in other experiments. But it’s just the funding of it, and we’ll figure it out. We’re trying to figure out where the nation governments, again, how to fund it. The Malawi government we proposed it and they said, “Yeah, we’ll do that, but only for green legumes.” And we said, “But, sir, green legumes, peanuts, soybeans, _____ and so on, are very greedy. They fix nitrogen from the air all right, but they take it mostly away with the seed. They



leave very little behind, maybe 20 kilos of nitrogen per hector.” Well, these things – sorry. Now I’m going to need your help, Dan, to go back. These things fix from 50 to 100 kilos of nitrogen per hector per year, and recycle all sorts of other nutrients, and do all sorts of other tricks. So – but that was their political decision. We went to Tanzania earlier this year, in February, where they also have a large subsidy system, finance, one third by the World Bank and two-thirds by the Tanzanian government. And they said the same thing. They says, “Okay. We’ll finance the green legumes, but not the other ones.” So this will take a little bit more policy work. Then there’s another major question either with fertilizers or with nitrogen-fixing legumes, we, in general, the international community, we’re loading Africa with nitrogen for the first time. So what are the consequences? Are we going to go through the same mistakes that we’ve done here of nitrate leaching into the waterways and _____ areas in the Gulf and all that, and emitting a lot of nitrous oxide to the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas or not? So what I’m trying to do now is to get enough resources to start quantifying right now what’s happening already in the villages in the air’s where they’re using nitrogen. We know how much they’re using, but we don’t know where it goes. To be able to say honestly, “Yeah. This is having a negative environment affect,” or, “No, it’s not having a negative environmental affect.” So the environmental consequences of using nitrogen, whether it’s from a fertilizer bag or an organic input it doesn’t matter, really. Well, it does matter. Apparently there’s more into emissions with the organics. But we’ll see. The point is, we need to get some good sound ecological data. There is new ways to make sure nitrous oxide with relatively inexpensive I would say, still expensive ways. And we love to do that. So that’s part of the story that’s the next ten years. The transition to have _____ crop and enterprises. This lady – you see here her smiling with her cell phone. She grows her five tons of maize. She’s one of the best farmers. So she’s – was building sheds for getting into poultry business, and somehow, gave enough money to her son to have a mill. And so she’s getting out maize agricultural. She’s beginning to get into agribusiness, and that’s a vision.



Now I want to talk about water and irrigation and the looming water crisis you hear all about, and especially with climate change. In most areas of Africa – not all of them, but in most areas of Africa – translates into more variable rainfall and into less rainfall. So first, let’s get our metrics straight. Only three percent of the cropped area in sub-Saharan Africa is irrigated. It’s very little. And people say that should improve – that should increase. But sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t have a geomorphology large river basins, and so on, that Asia and Latin America have. And now the Nile Basin is narrow. All the large rivers, you don’t have it. Latin America, for similar reasons, is also low. And where you have a high prevalence of irrigated agricultural is in South Asia 38 percent and in China, 50 percent. But what are we here in this country in North America and Europe? Nine percent, not that far off from Africa or Latin America. We always have a feeling, you fly across a coast and see the _____ ground systems. Man, there’s a lot of irrigation going on. But the statistics show that over 90 percent of our agriculture in this country is rain-fed. The total dependence on soil moisture. So, yeah, we advocate small-scale irrigation whenever possible, particularly drip irrigation with cradle pumps to lift up the water from a well in high-value crops such as kale, absolutely, and especially during the dry season as much as this is possible. In Koraro, Ethiopia, which is 500 millimeter rain a year situation, semi-arid high lands, farmers have literally moved mountains stone by stone, almost in biblical terms, and developing the _____ to control gullies and to deviate the water to the crops or developing ponds – holding ponds like this that forces the water to be stored in the subsoil. And then they lift the water out of the subsoil with shallow wells. Best play to store water, by the way, is in the subsoil because you have no evaporation losses. So a lot of these things are sort of mid-size, but sort of small, we’re into that. We’re not into large-scale dams _____ like that. And, again, this is what the farmers – this is what the community wanted in both cases. Here, they wanted the structures – the previous picture was from Western Kenya. They wanted the drip irrigation. So they got it as a loan. But then let’s go back to Malawi, and you recall this nice slide I put



there with very green maize, very tall, beautiful. Well, this was a couple a kilometers away from that, and actually a millennium village called Nambandi, where there was a total crop failure. It would be a total crop failure. And this is the dry spells. And then you’re trying to figure out where would the dry spells would be. What makes a dry spell a dry spell? Well, you may have sandy soil, or in this case, there’s some mountains over there on a rain shadow and so on. So one of the questions a girl in Malawi was asking is, “What are the probabilities of having these dry spells, and when and where? Because maybe we should advice these people to grow kasva, for example,” something like that. We go to another project we have, which is called Afsis, digital soil map of Africa and the world. It’s going on. It’s financed by the Gates Foundation. And we’re a few months away of having the first digital soil map of Malawi at a resolution of 90 by 90 meters. And we _____ their classification of the soil _____. We talk about probabilities of having more than 90 percent sand, or probabilities of needing phosphorous fertilizer and so on, and probabilities is all probabilistic now of having dry spells. And a pixel at that level of resolution is 0.8 hectors. So it certainly works. This is going fairly – pretty well, pretty well advanced in Africa. Google is now beginning to partner with us. We’re using their infrared spectroscopy for most of the soils data. And what we hope is in a few – I don’t know – months or years, we’ll be able to get a smart phone with a spectrometer in it, and you can cut a hole in the soil, shove it, get the wavelength, and get it interpreted by somebody who knows about that, just like we’re doing with health. The open data kid, smart – there are already some – I took pictures of this last week at exhibitions here already hand-held spectrometers in the market here. So we’ll try to put that there. Now the other thing I learned this from the literature. Johan Roxon, from Sweden, compiled literature in a unique way. And look exactly – and this is serial yields tropical and temperate, every data set and serial yields he could get. And look at data where there was _____, rain-fed agriculture. So at one ton per hector, you get tremendous amount of evaporation and every little transpiration. In other words, the soil is exposed and most of the rain – most of the soil moisture you have in the soil



regardless of where it came from, will be evaporated instead of transpired. So your percent transpiration is 13 percent. But at three tons per hector, you may recall that the crop canopy was closed in the picture I showed. The situation varies tremendously. And instead of having only 13-percent transpiration, you get 63 percent transpiration on the average. This increases, of course, if you get to five and ten tons per hector is better, but the big jump is here. This is not well known because in school we never were talking when we were talking about soil moistures, yields of one ton per hector. We were all talking about 10-20, the high end of yields that we’re used to here in this country. But _____ had the imagination to do this. And we need to confirm it, but I’m pretty sure it’s for real. So going back to the original picture I showed you, in this 1 ton per hector crop, you lose 87 percent of your soil moisture, whatever it is to the air. And only 13 percent goes through the plants, and it’s basically the opposite. So one of the ways – one of the best ways to adapt to more adverse climate change and less water, is simply have good crops, bigger varieties, well fertilized, whether organic or in-organic; it doesn’t matter. And this actually is what Rockstrom and other hydrologists say. I’m almost finished, but one other last one is EC _____. And I mean easy. We’re partnering with Opportunity International, an NGO that brings a mobile bank to the villages. And they bring in a pickup truck full of things, and they crank up a generator, crank up their computers, and anybody with $5.00 in Malawian kwacha can open a bank account. They get a smart card, better than my hotel here in Washington, because it has a thumbprint, and it has a photograph. And they can begin to borrow and save and so on, and getting to a modern system. It’s a fantastic thing that Opportunity International has that. Now the problem lending people money for things like fertilizers and hybrid seed. It’s not microcredit because we’re talking about $135.00 for an extra ton or so. It’s not $10.00 to buy a sewing machine. And the banks have been very, very reticent to lend to people who have no collateral. And those are the small farmers. So agra in this case, decided to credit guarantees. They guarantee about 50 percent of X



million dollars to several banks, including the equity bank in Kenya. And with that credit guarantee the formal banking system, equity banks, are giving loans to people and they have yet to ask agri for their guarantee. In other words, they’ve been _____ to get their money at the same rates. So this is bringing people into the market. The Agra dealers, the fact that this little dupas that sell you a Coke or pack of cigarettes or a few eggs, they are now being trained to sell fertilizers and hybrid seeds and cradle pumps and all that. So and putting all these things including the subsidized fertilizer through the private sector. That’s really working well. And this is the work of Agra. Now we’ve got a problem. And this is the larger grain borer is a horrible pest of stored mace. It gets into your bag of maize that you harvested. Within a week, all you see is flower. And it’s a new pest in Africa, relatively new. Unfortunately, introduced for the world Food program. And it’s go bad that in several countries it has a nickname, and that nickname is Osama and that’s what they call this thing, Osama. I think one of the priorities at least for this next step or 2.0 Green Revolution is to really focus on this and other process of harvest losses, whether they’re pre-harvest losses, or post-harvest losses, they seem to be losing about 30 percent of our crops during that time. So if that could be reduced to ten percent that would be a tremendous increase in food security. So I think we really have to get serious on storage and on harvest losses. And this character, it’s a nasty one. Now I talk about the technology and now the scaling up. There are major natural scale-ups going right now, actually surprisingly large. That’s because the president is _____ in these countries have been to the millennium village have seen that and have said, “We want to do the same.” Well, it varies. They don’t always do the same. But the government of Nigeria has a program – I don’t think it has a name yet – but of 115 local government agencies which are – this is a unit sort of below a district, scattered in the 36 state, so every other politicians are happy in Nigeria. And putting together 20 million people. They will have a millennium village-type situation supporting health, education, and agricultural. Their budget for that is $750 million a year of their own treasury coming



in from debt relief. This is not a donor thing. This is their own money. And we’ll see what happens. If it’s based on the millennium villages in Pampaida in Northern Nigeria and _____ in Southern Nigeria. And they’re very committed. They’re very serious. I’m not sure what the chances of success is for a country as complicated as Nigeria. But if it can happen in Nigeria, it will happen everywhere. And, by the way, Nigerians are getting more serious about this stuff. Some of the bad reputation is a little bit passé. But anyway, we’ll see. They have gotten into a contract with the Earth Institute for us to provide them technical assistance and we’re doing that. Now in Mali, the president went to the village in Nurusegu and says, “I want it done, lock, stock, and barrel.” And he has a program called Initiative 166 which is 166 communes. Communes are about districts of Mali. Again, all over the provinces, but with a much lower number of people because Mali doesn’t even have 20 million people. But it’s a full millennium village’s project model with education, with infrastructure, with gender, with environment, the works. And he’s finalizing getting the funding from the World Bank. They don’t have the cash _____ Nigeria does. In Tanzania, they’re focusing on agriculture only with an investment of about $300 million a year. About a third of it from the World Bank, and the rest from their own national treasury. And Malawi, the input supports continues. And there could be other possibilities with global trust fund now that we have a new initiative Feeding the Future. This is what I wanted to discuss with Ambassador Braveling later today. Let’s go with the winners. And the winners – that’s not the picture of the winners. But let me go back – sorry. The winners are relatively well-governed countries that are serious about agriculture. And they put their money where their mouth is because they are over ten percent of their budget in agriculture. Those are the ones I like to work with, not the ones who talk and talk and talk and do little, or the one _____ or places like Zimbabwe and Somalia and so on. So part of the idea was try to get this ball rolling. And Jeff Sachs led an organization of a conference in Belajio in February in which we got major players both from the donor side and the countrysides deciding – who decided to create this fund for global agriculture and food security.



Little did we know that we would have the current aid administrator there and the current head of NIFA there, Roger Beechy. They were there in their previous capabilities, so they know all about this. They’re totally familiar with it. And the Gates Foundation has contributed. The USAid has contributed to this fun. And now it’s more – it’s larger. We’ll see. It’s very nice to see these large numbers, but these large numbers are just a fraction of what is needed. So as Tanzanian minister of agriculture said, “We know what to do. We’re putting our money, but we don’t have enough to do the whole job. So if you help us, that’s fine. If not, we’ll just do less.” And so my conclusions about all this – I appreciate your time here – is certainly this African Green Revolution is not yet at the tipping point. It’s not yet something that will just roll by itself. It’s about three percent of the job done. But the political moment is very, very good. More – I calculate that more than half of the sub-Saharan Africa countries have governments that are serious about agriculture. And as I said before, work with the winners, the hell with the losers. And there are more donor countries and institutions are also getting serious, and it’s the same thing. Work with the ones who are serious. Agra is the only institution fully dedicated to the African Green Revolution to serve supports. That’s something that Norm Berlog didn’t have in the 1960s. He did it himself. We at the Earth Institute work in very close partnership with them and look forward to partnership with you folks. So thank you very much, and I’m delighted to answer questions as long – as much time as you have. Thank you.

[Applause]

Moderator: Thank you, Dr. Sanchez. Now it’s open for questions and answers. I’ll pass the mic around. If you can give your name and organization before asking your question, that’d be greatly appreciated. And for those online, this is an opportunity to also type in your questions for Dr. Sanchez to answers. All right.



Audience: Hi. My name’s Marsha Brown, and I’m with the US Aid Knowledge Services Center as a government contractor. And my question is what sort of role for increasing the capacity of agricultural research in these countries do you find for the new African Green Revolution 2.0?

Pedro Sanchez: The question is training. I think this is going to be one of the largest investments leader because, basically, it’s going to be a new generation of _____ extension workers, researchers, NGO people and so on, to get in tune with some new techniques like the digital soil map and this business of using your cell phone and so on, operating very, very differently. I do believe in public extension services, and I know that there are many people do not, and so on. I’ve seen these people when they go to the millennium villages and they have a motorcycle and a laptop computer, they go to town. They know what to do. They know how to work with the people. So – but if they just have to be sitting in their offices because all they get is their salary and nothing to work with, that’s useless. So the possibilities of following the Ethiopian model, which is sort of this barefoot three-extension agents, one in soils and water, one in crops, and one in livestock, I think that’s been very successful there. Those people are not going to leave the village or it’s not going to be any talents leakage. And supported by more technical people, I think it’s huge. Now I’m in a hurry. I’m not saying that we should bring a thousand graduate students for them to get their Ph.D.’s at US universities or European universities. I think – I mean, that’s good in itself. But that’s a long-term issue. Things are happening now. And the need for training are going to be – are major. Okay. Yes. Yeah.

Audience: [Inaudible comment]



Pedro Sanchez: The question is phosphate supplies in Africa. Well, they’re getting larger because the most important deposits are really being commercialized, they’re being privatized. The best stuff comes from Minjingo in Tanzania. That’s the nicest rock phosphate that there is. And it’s now a private company and they’re blending with nitrogen and potassium and so on. I see a lot more action. Luckily not everywhere in Africa you need phosphorous. You basically need phosphorous around Lake Victoria basin in the Sahal and a few other places. Even Malawi, I really question whether phosphorous is needed there or not. They’re using it. But I think supplies are good. Agra is working in trying to cut down fertilizer costs not by the cost of a bag of fertilizer, ’cause this is a globalized commodity, but by reducing the transaction costs from the ports to the final users. And my colleague, Bashir Jama, who heads the Agra Sole Health program is just finding tremendously ridiculous obstacles that with a little bit of policy change can be taken care of rather quickly. So we hope the effective price of fertilizers will go down simply because these transaction costs will go down. But there’s plenty of phosphorous in Africa, and it’s good quality. Yes.

Audience: Dr. Sanchez, thank you very much. That’s very encouraging. I was glad to see at the end that you did talk about fertilizer use efficiency because I think as we all agree that 80 percent of Africa is very challenged in their soil asset and being able to use fertilizer efficiency is oftentimes just a big of a problem as getting the fertilizer itself. We’ve seen cases where yields will actually go down over time if the soil’s not amended. So could you talk a little bit more about increasing fertilizer use efficiency? And, secondly, given that there’s a lot of Agra forestry going on which does increase – which does amend the soil and would increase fertilizer use efficiency, would you not consider starting to work in these areas where you’re seeing huge adoption of Agra forestry? I’m speaking mainly of the Sahal and East Africa.

Pedro Sanchez: Yeah. Two very important questions. Let me tackle the last one first. I don’t see huge adoption of Agra forestry. Well, I like to see the



numbers, but of course, I’ll be delighted if what I’m saying is wrong because I was responsible for _____ for ten years. So I’d be delighted. I believe in Agra forestry, all that stuff. By all means, an area where there’s a large adoption of Agra forestry, use it, and even increase it by subsidizing the Agra forestry just like we do with the chemical fertilizer – I mean, seeds or something. ’Cause in the other places, the farmers tell us. The best farmers stick with it. In the village of Sauri where I worked a lot when I was a _____ where Agra forestry was all over the place, almost 60 percent coverage. Now maybe ten percent of the farmers are using it. They are the best farmers, and they’re making a lot of money. And all the promise of Agra forestry, boy, they’re receiving it. They got it. They got it right, and they’re doing it. But it’s just the minority. It’s just the minority. So we have to promote Agra forestry more so. And I think in my opinion, the key issue is not the technology. It’s not the science. It’s lack of financial stimulus. Fertilizer use efficiency in Africa, I presume it’s pretty low. I haven’t really looked at that. And you’re absolutely right that when you’re dealing with a very scarce and expensive resource – fertilizers are very expensive. But you get your money’s worth. The returns of fertilizers are very high, too, so it’s worth spending. But, still, it’s an expensive commodity. By the way, I’ve heard people saying farmers – African farmers cannot afford fertilizers. I think what they mean is they cannot afford fertilizers if they pay cash, pay in cash. Well, you know what? I don’t know of any American farmer who can afford fertilizers if he or she has to pay it in cash. [Laughs] So a lot of this is financing. A lot of this is no different from here. We have to increase the efficiency of fertilizer dramatically, and in many things, one, some of the things are the more obvious ones like dates of planting, timely application of the right fertilizer, spacing of the crops, your basic _____ can do a lot. I’ve seen fertilizer recently applied. You can still see the little balls of urea in a maize crop that’s already tasseled. Well, that’s obviously a waste. So there is a lot of that. But together with the organics that we need for doing good farming, that we need to add carbon to the system, and so on, I like – I expect a major use in nutrient use efficiency in Agro.



Audience: When I was speaking of Agra forestry, I was asking it as a complement to fertilizer. In other words, as a means to increase efficiency, rather than a substitution. So I was just wondering if you guys had thought about – in fact, your efforts at eCraft have been successful. We can send you some good data on that. But Agra forestry as a complement, as an amendment to increasing efficiency of fertilizer.

Pedro Sanchez: Yes. And there is even some data, not sufficiently powerful, but some data that shows that Agra forestry does increase fertilizer use efficiency. So there’s something there. If you add more carbon, if you add more nutrient recycling, it would make sense that you would increase it. So, for sure. Now in other places, let’s say – one thing Agra forestry cannot do is recycle phosphorous. It can recycle – it can grab nitrogen from the air and recycle potassium and most of the micronutrients. That’s why we’re not worried about potassium for the time being. Eventually, it’ll happen, but not phosphorous. Phosphorous will have to come out of a fertilizer bag as far as we know. But that could be the subsidy. The subsidy is if you use this Agra forestry system, here, you get a bag of rock phosphate or something.

That that could be part of the subsidy. But, yes, we have to increase. There is another issue that is coming to the fore now, the non-responsive soil. Soils that do not respond to fertilizer for whatever reasons. And there are a bunch of reasons. The most obvious one is the soils are fertile enough and that’s no problem. But that’s not the case in Africa. We have found with doing the digital soil map in Mali, that if you have less than 80 percent of your records, organic topsoil, organic carbon value, your probabilities are very high you will not get a phosphorous _____. And I interpret as probably compaction, the physical parts of soils. And there are a lot of these non-responsive soils. We’re starting a project with TSPF and trying to categorize the non-responsive soils. And if the yields are low, make them responsive. It’s a very important point. Yes, ma’am.



Audience: I have a question from the Webinar. And this is from Robert Nevan who is a USAid consultant. He states, “The success you describe are essentially the application of agronomic practices that have been recommended for at least two decades. What has changed to create the current success, and what political pressure points need to be acted upon to move beyond the tipping point?”

Pedro Sanchez: What has changed is the political will. Is it a political will of the farmers, the political wills of the leaders of these countries that I said I are reasonably well governed. I think that’s the biggest change. Also, the donor community has changed. Up to Malawi, the World Bank would never utter the word “subsidies.” And with that, most of the other donors came along and followed the World Bank. So _____ Washington consensus. That is just let the market work purely. Well, the subsidized farmers here, because of the Malawi experience and a lot of arguments we and many other people have had with the bank in their – what it was, in their 2008 assessment on agriculture. They did say subsidies maybe okay. [Laughs] One of my friends at the World Bank, they _____ says, “Well, finally got it through.” [Laughs] So the second thing, for sure, is the changing mind in the donor community of – that you really have to subsidize whether it’s bed nets or HIV AID treatments or fertilizers for the poorest of the poor. I don’t think the science has changed much. This is not a scientific breakthrough. We knew most of this before. That’s it.

Audience: – talking about organics and the availability of organics. And I’ve not seen where these organic materials are going to come from for building organic carbon early in the soil, because I see us training in this manner, another generation of inorganic fertilizer users without thinking over the long term and moving them maybe more towards organic production where we can wean them off of fertilizers eventually so that they don’t have this big cost and we have limitations on phosphorous and potential for hypoxic situations and those kinds of things.



So where is the organic material going to come from and how is this going to work throughout a little longer term?

Pedro Sanchez: It’s very good question. The organic materials in smallholder farms in sub-Saharan Africa which here nitrogen depleted, are going to come from soils that have received mineral fertilizer, because you’re not going to grow any of this stuff without phosphorous. So, academy, mineral fertilizers are pretty good precursor of organic fertilizers. And we have data that shows _____ mineral fertilizer alone, the organic carbon content of the soil is increasing simply because you have more residues and so on. So organic versus inorganic to me – first, let’s look at it from the plant’s point of view. The plant couldn’t care less whether that nitrate or phosphate ion comes from a piece of manure or a bag urea or whatever. The soil cares. The organics provide carbon. The inorganic do not. Fertilizers do not. Chemical fertilizers do not provide carbon, but the organics do not. And we need carbon. What we do need is on one hand, they are the ones who have the carbon, or they are the ones with the lowest nutrient concentration, 2 to 4 percent nitrogen dry weight, if you are lucky, as opposed to 46 percent nitrogen dry in a bag of urea, transport costs related to that and so on. So they have the advantages and their limitations. So I want to use both. Actually, I don’t know a successful farmer in this country who relies only on mineral fertilizers. They always have organic fertilizers of different kinds. So let’s be sensible. Let’s get the ideology out of the way. Let’s be sensible and have a combination. Another problem with the organics which you don’t see much in the organic _____ fortunately is that it takes time and space to grow the stuff. And that is – that provides an opportunity cost for something else. So let’s do it sensibly. My favorite organic situation is to grow this in – improve tree fallows, plant them after the second whetting of maize in the rainy season. And they do take off during the dry season because their roots go deep. And you’re using time in which you cannot grow crops, and then you can



harvest them the next time around and incorporate all sorts of organic things. That’s one that is zero transport costs and very high level. But it can get too high. There is an experiment in Malawi that eCraft started about 20 years ago. And many of you have seen it’s. At the Mokoko Station. It’s different types of _____ fallows, versus nitrogen fertilizers and so on. There is a paper now in the mill which they have calculated much nitrogen do we receive _____ fallow. How much nitrogen does _____ fallows are adding per year. And it’s an astronomically – about 290 kilograms of nitrogen per hector per year. That scares the bejesus out of me, because the maize crop may not need any more than 90. And where is the other 200 going to go? So sometimes – okay, sometimes [laughs] we may be adding too much organic. I think in this case, we certainly are. The trouble with organics, is you cannot measure it. So you know what how much nitrogen is in a bag of fertilizer. But in your crop of fallow _____, unless you are a scientist and take some soil samples or land samples or something, you can’t measure. So we have to both. An let’s get out of the rigmarole of one is better than the other one, and all that. That’s reasonable. Let’s have some sound agronomy there. And I think that _____.

Moderator: Well, thank you all for –

Audience: Here.

Audience: Yeah. To be sure the increases in production and productivity in Malawi is clearly a success story. But I just wonder, what impact is that having on the national budget of Malawi? In the United States, and some other countries, we can afford one might say the subsidies. The political process makes that possible. What is the situation in Malawi on that front, and is it sustainable? How long is it sustainable? Is there data on that?



Pedro Sanchez: Okay. The situation in Malawi is during the first years, the president really took money out of other sectors, including health. So I think he’s done some damage that way. Although, that hasn’t been quantified. Now with the donors coming in and so on, that’s probably all even. We certainly see that in – with the minister of health in the millennium villages collaboration and so on. But in the beginning, yeah, there was a tradeoff, and he had the gutsy thing, which he says, “I’m going to take money out of –” I don’t know where he got it – the Department of Defense or the Department of Health. But I know that the health budget suffered. So there are tradeoffs. I don’t think it’s right now. When is it sustainable? That’s a matter of definition. Are subsidies sustainable for farmers here in the states? It’s almost a rhetorical question. We know darned well, that in the next farm bill, there are no subsidies. Whatever government proposes that is going to be out of business. It’s going to be thrown out because of the political values of subsidies. Try to get rid of a subsidy for electricity, for pumps to irrigate in India. The government well fall. So subsidies is not the best way to do it, but it’s I think the most realistic way _____. And everybody does it.

[End of Audio]

African Green Revolution 2.0 - Agrilinks

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