Within Our Grasp by Sharman Apt Russell

Author:Sharman Apt Russell [Russell, Sharman Apt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

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In 2006, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation began funding the continent-wide initiative Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), with the vision of an agricultural revolution that is African led and focuses on the African smallholder farmer. AGRA’s mission is to change farming “from a solitary struggle to survive to farming as a business that thrives.”

Maria Andrade, the plant breeder from CIP who developed the provitamin A–enriched orange-fleshed sweet potato, is a former AGRA board member. She points to Malawi’s vulnerability to drought and says that farmers growing crops like the orange-fleshed sweet potato and chickpeas will fare better than those planting conventional maize. Andrade believes that farmers want to diversify their crops but are held back by lack of support and historical prejudice. “When crops like maize started to dominate,” she wrote in 2016, “governments and the private sector accelerated that take-over by providing subsidies, research and other support. Meanwhile, other potentially useful crops like cassava and sorghum were neglected, sometimes acquiring derogatory labels like ‘poor man’s crop’ or ‘crop for marginal lands.’ It doesn’t have to be this way.”

Some people worry—many of them the same people who worry about GMOs—that the Green Revolution of the twenty-first century will look too much like the Green Revolution of the twentieth century.

In the 1960s and ’70s, the Rockefeller Foundation also supported the development of new crops and improved agriculture. At that time, population was rising very fast, as was the number of people living in extreme poverty. In fact, in a world of 4 billion people, half lived in extreme poverty. Never before in human history had so many people been so hungry. The fear was an increasing explosion of famine and despair. In response, plant scientists like Norman Borlaug, who later won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work, looked for ways to grow more food. They crossbred rice and wheat varieties for short dwarf plants that spent energy on producing grain rather than on leaves and stems, with stiffer stems to hold up the extra weight. Given enough water and fertilizer, these crops produced much higher yields.

In many ways, the first Green Revolution was spectacularly successful. In the 1980s, China, India, and other Asian countries surged economically, fertility began dropping, and by the early twenty-first century the world was back to fewer than a billion people—not 2 billion—in extreme poverty. That percentage was now about 10 percent of the global population, not half.

More economic prosperity meant that many of us would enjoy longer, healthier lives. In 2019, the top ten causes of death worldwide were coronary heart disease, stroke, chronic respiratory disease (bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma largely related to smoking); lower-respiratory infections (pneumonia and bronchitis); lung and trachea cancers; diabetes; Alzheimer’s disease; diarrheal infections; tuberculosis; and car accidents. In short, more of us worried about our hearts and lungs giving out in middle or old age rather than dying young of an infectious disease or in childbirth. Global innovations in health care meant that most people would live to be seventy.

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