Paul Collier’s dubious vision for developing country agriculture

by Alex Evans | Aug 28, 2008 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development

Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion, is amusing himself by taking shotguns to sacred cows on agriculture and development again.  This time, as Owen Barder points out, he’s on Comment is Free, where he regales us with his views on GM technology.  As you may have guessed, he’s not in quite the same place as Prince Charles:

[Europe’s] GM ban has three adverse effects. It has retarded productivity in European agriculture; grain production could be increased by about 15% were the ban lifted. More subtly, because Europe is out of the market for GM technology, the pace of research has slowed. GM research takes a long time to come to fruition, and its core benefit – the permanent reduction of global food prices – cannot fully be captured through patents. European governments should be funding this research, but it is entirely reliant on the private sector. Private money for research depends on the prospect of sales, so the ban has not only blocked public research – it has reduced private research …

It is conventional to say that Africa needs a green revolution. The reality is that the green revolution was based on chemical fertilisers, and even when fertiliser was cheap, Africa did not adopt it. With the rise in fertiliser costs as a byproduct of high energy prices, any green revolution will perforce not be chemical. What African agriculture needs is a biological revolution. This is what GM offers, if only sufficient money is put into research. There has as yet been no work on the crops specific to the region, such as cassava and yams.

What to make of his claims?  Well, first, I’m curious about his source for the assertion that Europe would have 15% higher grain yields if it permitted GM, as in fact, GM tech hasn’t actually made any major advances in yields for the three main cereal crops (wheat, rice and maize).

What’s certainly true that GM technologies can contribute to making crops more resilient to biotic stresses (pests, weeds etc.).  The second generation of GM research is now focusing on abiotic stresses like reduced water availability, soil salinisation etc.  But if life sciences represent one R&D approach towards more resilient agriculture, an alternative is ecologically integrated approaches like integrated pest management, integrated soil fertility management and so on.

What both approches have in common is moving away from the Green Revolution’s high-input approach and towards a high-knowledge approach instead.  But whereas in life sciences, the knowledge-intensiveness is concentrated at the top end of the supply chain – in R&D labs in biotech and seed companies – with whole systems approaches, the type of knowledge involved is both more participative, and more open to local adaptation.  Given adequate investment in extension services to train farmers, then, the latter approach can improve economic resilience as well as crop resilience – by reducing farmers’ dependence on expensive off-farm inputs.

Although there’s much to admire about Collier, when it comes to agriculture, his approach does sometimes come across as a bit, well, ideological.  Here he is in The Times a few months back, for instance, where he says:

 “The remedy to high food prices is to increase supply. The most realistic way is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically sophisticated agro-companies that supply the world market. There are still many areas of the world – including large swaths of Africa – that have good land that could be used far more productively if it were properly managed by large companies. To contain the rise in food prices we need more, globalisation not less.

Unfortunately, large-scale commercial agriculture is deeply, perhaps irredeemably, unromantic. We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing we grew out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues to contaminate our policies. In Europe and Japan huge public resources have been devoted to propping up small farms. The best that can be said for these policies is that we can afford them.

In Africa, which cannot afford such policies, the World Bank and the Department for International Development have orientated their entire efforts on agricultural development to peasant-style production. Africa has less large-scale commercial agriculture than it had 60 years ago. Unfortunately, peasant farming is not well suited to innovation and investment. The result has been that African agriculture has fallen farther and farther behind.” [emphasis added]

The remedy to high food prices is to increase supply?  Not necessarily.  Remember Amartya Sen’s sage observation on this point: food security is less about the overall quantum of food available than about who has the resources to access it: as he once put it pithily, “starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough to eat.  It is not the characteristic of there not being enough to eat”. 

So although we do indeed need to increase global food supply – by 50% by 2030, the World Bank reckon – that on its own ain’t enough.  The process also has to work for the three quarters of the world’s poor who live in rural areas, most of whom rely at least partly on agriculture.  Although these people should have benefited from high food prices, they haven’t – because they’re largely net food buyers, not net food sellers; because fertiliser costs have risen even faster than food prices; because they’ve got poor infrastructure; and so on.

Now, if you’re Collier, you probably think that the best thing for poor people in rural areas would be if they just packed themselves up and decamped to the nearest city.  But actually, the evidence set out in the latest World Development Report supports the opposite case.  Between 1993 and 2002, the number of people living on less than a dollar a day declined from 28% to 22% of people in developing countries.  The principal driver for this improvement, the report continues, has been falling poverty in rural areas (where poverty fell from 37% to 29% over the same period) – and 80% of the decline in rural poverty was due not to migration to cities, but simply to better conditions in rural areas. 

Countries like Vietnam show that ag-based growth, export success and smallholder farming can all come together in a virtuous circle: unlike most developing countries, Vietnam has done reasonably well out of high food prices.  But to achieve this, various factors need to be in place: infrastructure, access to credit, access to technology, functioning markets, risk management mechanisms, acess to assets backed up by effective rule of law and dispute resolution, etc. etc. 

But most small farmers in Africa have never had the benefit of these enabling conditions.  In this regard, they’ve been let down by their governments (who despite an African Union target of spending 10% of government budgets on agriculture, mostly spend less than half that level), and by donors (who largely forgot about agriculture until the food price spike, having allowed the proportion of development assistance spent on agriculture to fall from nearly 20% at its peak to around 3% today).

Perhaps it would be worth trying out what real commitment to making smallholder farming work could achieve in Africa, before jumping to the conclusion that the only way forward is to empty Africa’s countryside of people?