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Home > Programs > Trade and Agriculture > Africa: Challenging 'New Green Revolution' |
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Food First executive director Peter Rosset, senior analyst Deborah Toler, and board member Miguel Altieri recently spent a week in Washington carrying forth our campaign to have agroecological alternatives taken seriously by the "Washington Consensus" powers-that-be, or at least to prevent the forging of broad consensus for the "New Green Revolution" pushed by the World Bank, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, Global 2000 and others. These institutions want poor countries, especially in Africa, to go beyond the first Green Revolution of hybrid crop varieties and agrochemicals, adding free trade and biotechnology. The problem is that even as the first Green Revolution boosted crop yields, hunger increased, in part because the technology itself favors large farmers over peasants, driving the poor off the land and destroying their livelihood. Now we are told that the poor need even more fertilizer and expensive, genetically engineered seeds of dubious safety. The final nail in their coffin, as we see it, is that the New Green Revolution removes the remaining barriers to dumping Northern food surpluses in poor countries; a practice that inevitably exacerbates poverty and hunger as local farmers are undercut and go out of business. As a vocal minority at the Keystone Conference near Washington, which had been designed to build consensus among key players on international food security, we debated heavy hitters from the World Bank, FAO and elsewhere, drawing grudging admiration for our articulate arguments. We argued that agroecological crop production methods, based on local techniques like intercropping and building up soil organic matter, offer a better way to increase the viability of Third World farmers, allowing them to feed their nations in a self-reliant manner. We followed up the Keystone Conference with an external review visit to our mainstream "alter-ego", the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), which receives about ten times more funding than we do at the Institute for Food and Development Policy (IFDP). IFPRI is the lead think tank for the international agricultural research centers (the "CGIAR system"), parents of the Green Revolution, and their "2020 Vision" program acts as lead-ideologue for the New Green Revolution. We critiqued them on issues of biotechnology, trade liberalization and top-down research practices, while holding out the opportunity for them to collaborate with those of us in the non-governmental organization (NGO) community, to examine the alternatives we propose in greater depth. Institute for Food and Development Policy |
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