Food and water security in sub-Saharan Africa remain a challenge despite the region’s abundance of arable land and untapped water resources. In FSE’s final global food policy and food security symposium, water expert John Briscoe drew upon his many years of international field experience (including a 20-year career at the World Bank) to deliver a personal assessment of the issues facing Africa and suggestions for the way forward.

Improvements in infrastructure, agricultural productivity and investment are crucial for tapping Africa’s agricultural and development potential. And middle-income countries, such as Brazil, may have the most lessons to share.

Dams and the quest for water security

“Africa’s infrastructure is lousy,” said Briscoe, an environmental engineer and director of Harvard’s Water Security Initiative. “Crumbling roads, patchy supplies of electricity, and inadequate water storage are some of Africa’s biggest impediments to growth.”

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Africa has the potential to irrigate an additional 20 million hectares of land, but building that infrastructure is expensive and finding funding has become more difficult. Historically, the World Bank and wealthy countries like the United States have helped. But funding dams is now unpopular.

Meanwhile, middle-income countries - such as Brazil, India and China - are building infrastructure for water-enabled growth, and are filling the funding gap left by rich countries. Whereas the World Bank now finances about five dams, the Chinese finance over 300 dams outside of China in the developing world.

Sub-Saharan Africa has benefited from some of these projects, but still contends with an international NGO and donor community resistant to dam development.  

Big is beautiful – the case of Brazil

“Africa must increase its agricultural productivity, and a romantic emphasis on small, local, organic farming is not going to get it there,” said Briscoe.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s agricultural growth rate remains very low. In some countries, yields for staple crops like maize are actually falling. A deficit in knowledge to increase agricultural productivity is part of the problem.

Briscoe shared a telling observation of a Ghanaian CEO of a multinational company: ‘Once the best and the brightest Ghanaians went into engineering. Now they become anthropologists because NGOs dominate the job market and this is the skill they want.’ 

Briscoe pointed to Brazil as a compelling case for greater investment in agriculture and agricultural research. Between 1985 and 2006, Brazilian agricultural production grew by 77 percent.

“Much of this growth did not come from cutting down the Amazon, but by doing things smarter than it did before,” said Briscoe. “Over the last 30 years, through financial crises and changing political parties, Brazil sustained public investment in agricultural research.”

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Additionally, Brazil pioneered the use of “no-till” agriculture, now practiced by over 50 percent of its farmers. The culmination of these activities increased productivity while farming more sustainably.

An important contribution to Brazil’s productivity has been its utilization of genetically modified crops. Brazil chose not to eulogize the “small and organic” philosophy of many NGOs, but embraced new technology. Middle-income countries are currently eight of the 10 largest users of GMOs.

Brazil was also pragmatic when it came to scale. Brazilian farms are large. Thirty percent are large commercial operations producing 76 percent of the country’s output. Many environmentalists and small farmers perceived large agrobusiness as the enemy, but these large enterprises were also the grey geese laying the golden eggs for the country.

Understanding that there are no silver-bullet solutions, the Brazilian government sought innovative ways to support smaller farmers. For example, concessions for a large irrigation project in the Pontal were awarded to agribusiness operators that integrated at least 25 percent of irrigable land to small farmers as part of the company’s production chain.

Sugarcane

“Brazil’s success did not happen over night,” said Briscoe. “African countries must be patient and persistent, particularly with respect to public investment in agricultural research…and pragmatic and realistic about scale.”

Role for foreign investors

In the face of low levels of public investment in agriculture and non-existent or shallow domestic capital markets, there is a role for foreign direct investment (FDI) to play. FDI projects, such as international land deals, can help create implementation capacity by bringing capital and know-how, creating employment and developing infrastructure.

“But it is easier said than done,” said Briscoe. “Foreign investors, including the World Bank's International Finance Corporation (IFC), have struggled in sub-Saharan Africa because farming is a complex business.”

Briscoe noted a shortage of indigenous entrepreneurs, the small size of potential investments, and lack of access to markets have constrained IFC engagement and performance in sub-Saharan Africa.

While there are no shortcuts for Africa, Briscoe insisted optimism and a determination to move faster are needed. Africa must decide whether to follow the prescriptions of the advocacy community or, like Brazil, pursue an opposite strategy.

“Will Africa focus on its real problems, ‘the politics of the belly’?” asked Briscoe. “Or will it succumb again, to the western ‘politics of the mirror’?”

Stanford scientists joined colleagues in presenting California Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday with a consensus statement sounding the alarm on climate change and urging action on pollution, population growth, overconsumption and other global environmental challenges.

The document, which was signed by 520 scientists from 44 countries, warns that Earth is rapidly approaching a tipping point, and if nothing changes, "we will suffer substantial degradation."

Forty-eight Stanford scientists endorsed the statement. Rosamond L. Naylor, director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment, was one of eight faculty members who helped draft the statement.

"By the time today's children reach middle age, it is extremely likely that Earth's life-support systems, critical for human prosperity and existence, will be irretrievably damaged by the magnitude, global extent and combination of these human-caused environmental stressors, unless we take concrete, immediate actions to ensure a sustainable, high-quality future," the scientists write in a summary of the statement.

Before receiving the statement, Brown said it's important that scientists communicate clearly to the public.

"We're in a war here in the contest of ideas," he said. "You have to reach people who are skeptical, disinterested and maybe even somewhat hostile."

Later, he urged those who support the statement to spread its message.

"You have to become missionaries," the governor said.

The statement, "Maintaining Humanity's Life Support System in the 21st Century," offers broad-brush solutions for challenges including climate change, loss of eco-diversity, extinctions, pollution, population growth and overconsumption of resources.

"It's important to start fixing these problems today – not next week, next year or next decade," the statement's lead author, Anthony Barnosky, a University of California-Berkeley integrative biology professor and Cox Visiting Professor in Stanford's Department of Environmental Earth System Science, said before the event. "We want to deliver this message to every world leader in government, business, religious institutions and people in all walks of life. These are big problems, but they are fixable."

Among the scientists who joined Barnosky on the stage when he presented the statement to Brown were Stanford Woods Institute Senior Fellows Rodolfo Dirzo, Paul Ehrlich, Elizabeth Hadly and Stephen Palumbi, as well as Anne Ehrlich, a senior research scientist in Stanford's Biology Department.

"This statement deciphers decades of science describing how humans have radically changed the planet," said Hadly, one of 23 senior fellows at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment who signed the statement. "I hope it helps policymakers of California and the world practice effective global stewardship."

Among the statement's recommendations:

• Replace fossil fuels with carbon-neutral energy sources such as solar, wind and biofuels
• Promote energy-efficient buildings, transportation and manufacturing systems
• Plan adaptation measures for climatic impacts such as sea-level rise
• Recognize the long-term economic benefits and intangible gains that accrue from protecting natural ecosystems, and act accordingly in dealing with pressures such as overfishing
• Improve the efficiency of food production and distribution
• Slow and eventually stop world population growth by ensuring access to education, economic opportunities and health care, including family planning services, with a special focus on women's rights

The effort grew out of a conversation between Brown and Barnosky, lead author of a 2012 paper warning that Earth is approaching a tipping point beyond which the planet's climate and biodiversity will be radically and unalterably changed beyond anything humanity has known.

"Governor Brown asked me last year why, if global change is such a big deal, scientists are just publishing in scientific journals and not translating their findings into terms that policymakers, industry and the general public can understand and start to address," Barnosky said.

"In 30 years, there are a few things that people will credit us for doing now or bemoan our failure if we don't," said statement co-author Stephen Palumbi, a professor of biology at Stanford and director of the university's Hopkins Marine Station. "Grappling with climate change, and stopping it, is the best gift we can give the future, because unstopped it will crack our society and impoverish our children."

The statement's signers include two Nobel Prize winners and dozens of members of national academies of science around the world.

In addition to Naylor, the other Stanford faculty who helped write the document were Gretchen Daily, Rodolfo Dirzo, Anne Ehrlich, Paul Ehrlich, Elizabeth Hadly, Harold A. Mooney, and Stephen Palumbi.

The 40 other Stanford faculty members who signed the statement are Kenneth J. Arrow, Khalid Aziz, Sally Benson, Carol Boggs, Meg Caldwell, Page Chamberlain, Craig Criddle, Larry Crowder, Lisa Curran, Giulio De Leo, Rob Dunbar, Marcus Feldman, Scott Fendorf, Tad Fukami, Christopher Gardner, Deborah Gordon, Phil Hanawalt, Craig Heller, Martin Hellman, Jamie Jones, Pat Jones, Donald Kennedy, Julie Kennedy, Jeffrey R. Koseff, Eric Lambin, Stephen Luby, Gil Masters, Perry McCarty, Sue McConnell, Michael McGehee, Fiorenza Micheli, Jonathan Payne, Kabir Peay, Dmitri Petrov, Erica Plambeck, Terry Root, Ross Shachter, Robert Street, Peter Vitousek and Charley Yanofsky.

Join us for our final Global Food Policy and Food Security symposium Thursday, May 23. John Briscoe, Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Environmental Engineering at Harvard University will lead a lecture on Water and agriculture in a changing Africa: What might be done?. FSE fellow Jennifer Burney will provide commentary.