How to transform African farming: Return to 'orphan crops'

Farming in sub-Saharan Africa could be transformed, but not by heeding calls for a new “Green Revolution.”

The 1960s Green Revolution, which averted famine in India and Latin America through the deployment of high-yield crop varieties, is often hailed as one of the greatest humanitarian achievements of the 20th century.

Yet this effort focused largely on globally traded staples, neglecting locally important crops. The outcome partly explains today’s global malnutrition crisis. The countries reached by the Green Revolution became massive producers of rice, wheat, or maize, but at the expense of the crop diversity necessary for well-rounded diets.

And it is large-scale producers who have benefited from production of those major commodities, while the rural poor have been left behind and become more vulnerable to hunger.

If sub-Saharan Africa is to benefit from advances in agricultural productivity in the 21st century, investments in the so-called “orphan crops” – sweet potato, cassava, and millet, for example – will be crucial for strengthening the poorest farmers’ livelihoods and improving nutrition.

For three months, I recently visited various smallholder farmers in Kenya. Many say that while decades ago their families grew a diverse array of crops valuable for local nutrition, nowadays they have largely shifted to maize production because of its promising global and local market opportunities.

Markets are vastly underdeveloped for crops such as sweet potato and cassava, the farmers told me. Yet these crops’ tremendous value to human nutrition makes it imperative to create local food markets for them. Sub-Saharan Africa has for too long depended on global food markets, leaving the continent vulnerable to high food prices.

The 2008 food crisis was a stark reminder of this danger. When Asian and Latin American countries restricted exports to ensure adequate food supplies for their domestic populations, African countries’ situation was exacerbated. The orphan crops hold an untapped potential to be part of national food-security strategies based on local food markets.

Public and private investments are needed at all points in the agricultural supply chain. It starts with the seed. Both international and country-level research will have to work on improving the productivity of locally-valuable crops, departing from a longstanding focus on major staple crops.

A key step  in this direction is to give farmers a voice in the agricultural research agenda. For example, farmers are represented in the work of the Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa (ASARECA). The farmers have been able to effectively expand researchers’ insights to include orphan crops in their work.

And recently the International Institute for Environment and Development convened a “citizens’ jury” in Mali that brought together farmers to make recommendations on agricultural research. They suggested that researchers focus on the production and storage of traditional seed varieties.

Next, the appropriate post-harvest technologies – such as storage facilities attuned to the requirements of particular orphan crops – must be in place so that farmers can avoid flooding the market. This ensures that farmers receive sustainable prices, and it shows the benefits of switching to an orphan crop. Farmers are unlikely to start growing a new crop if they’re not assured of their ability to access a market.

The importance of storage is nowhere more evident than in Ethiopia’s 2003 famine. Despite huge crop yields for Ethiopian farmers in 2002, the country was missing an efficient market to absorb those yields. The lack of storage facilities caused the surplus crops to flood the market, driving down prices to the extent that farmers had to curtail production because otherwise their costs would have far exceeded their sales revenues.

Farmers also need access to local food processors that add value to their crops. Having a reliable buyer avoids the sort of problem seen in Ethiopia in 2003. If the farmers are well-organized, they may even be able to garner a higher price for a crop because the market value of, say, sweet potato flour is higher than that of sweet potato alone.

That leads to the end of the supply chain: the consumer. Widespread nutrition education campaigns are crucial for creating more viable markets for orphan crops, especially when the public can learn that improving diets may be as simple as substituting sweet potato for wheat in a certain food product.

Indeed, these value-chain interventions are all inextricably linked. Work on the sweet potato in Uganda and Mozambique by HarvestPlus, a nongovernmental group that focuses on micronutrients, is a perfect example of such linkages.

With the goal of combating Vitamin A deficiency, sweet potato varieties bred by the International Potato Center have been introduced to households through local NGOs. The key, then, is to coordinate public and private investment so that it is tailored toward building opportunities for the most vulnerable farmers’ production of local crops that have long been neglected in Africa.

Daniel Bornstein is a junior at Dartmouth College majoring in anthropology and environmental studies. He has been in Kenya researching farmers’ access to seed as an intern with the World Agroforestry Center, which is part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. He can be reached at Daniel.Bornstein.14@dartmouth.edu