New York, New York
October 17, 2008
Mobilizing the
Next Green Revolution: Alleviating Poverty in the Age of
Climate Change
Judith Rodin,
President of the
Rockefeller Foundation
Laureate keynote address at The World Food Prize Borlaug
Dialogue
Thank you for the welcome, the privilege of honoring
Senators Bob Dole and George McGovern, and the
opportunity to speak here in Iowa. Iowa certainly finds
itself at the center of everything – as I imagine
Senators Dole and McGovern, not to mention Senators
McCain and Obama would affirm. This beautiful sweep of
heartland also became an adopted homeland of sorts for
the Rockefeller Foundation. Our own Norman Borlaug
carried the seeds of a Green Revolution from Cresco,
about 190 miles from here by car, to Latin America,
Asia, and now Africa. Norman’s work mobilized a miracle
that saved a billion lives. You could say, then, that
our tradition of agricultural innovation has roots
planted deeply in Iowa soil.
Just two years ago, I
had the pleasure of working with Norman, when the
Rockefeller Foundation sponsored the Africa Fertilizer
Summit in Abuja, Nigeria. He spoke with unrivaled
authority, admonishing that the Green Revolution had
three key ingredients: seeds, fertilizer, and
leadership. He challenged donors, ministers, and
presidents to devote the same intellectual,
institutional, and financial resources to the African
Green Revolution as their predecessors in Latin America
and Asia did a generation ago. I can’t help but think
that the world would be suffering less severe food
shortages and price spikes if more development agencies
and elected officials had answered Norman’s call for
leadership in 2006, rather than waiting for a food
crisis in 2008.
As I look out at the
audience and flip through the program, I’m also
delighted to recognize the more than two dozen symposium
speakers who were or are Rockefeller Foundation grantees
– and the many more here who trained for their careers
as Rockefeller Foundation fellows or Rocky Doc’s. We
thank you for serving as ambassadors of the foundation’s
goodwill and good-works around the globe.
You’ve heard a lot,
this week, about the Rockefeller and Bill & Melinda
Gates foundations’ joint aspirations to seed
transformational agricultural productivity in
sub-Saharan Africa, with many of you as partners. Since
launching AGRA two years ago, the Rockefeller Foundation
has contributed about $75 million and secunded some of
our best and brightest to the alliance. We’re pleased
that AGRA has generated early success, attracting
unexpected supporters and new collaborators. And while
our commitment continues, we also seek and support other
innovations across the field of agricultural
development.
Let me mention just
two. As many of you know, Rockefeller grantees were
first to harness biotechnology to fortify food’s
nutritional value – and not without controversy. Take
Golden Rice, for example. In the sixty-five years since
they began, we’ve funded the work of Golden Rice’s
engineers, Dr. Peter Beyer, Dr. Ingo Potrykus, and
others for more than fifteen of them. Golden rice
promises to alleviate the suffering of malnourished
children and the debilitating effects of beta-carotene
and vitamin A deficiencies – blindness and measles – in
particular. Its widespread distribution could save
almost 3 million children’s lives, while nourishing as
many as 300 million more – 40 percent of children under
age five, in the developing world, according to the
World Health Organization.
I’m delighted to announce, today, that we will
be providing funding to the International Rice
Research Institute – which we helped establish
almost fifty years ago – to shepherd Golden Rice
through national, regulatory approval processes
in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and the
Philippines. |
I’m delighted to
announce, today, that we will be providing funding to
the International Rice Research Institute – which we
helped establish almost fifty years ago – to shepherd
Golden Rice through national, regulatory approval
processes in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and the
Philippines. And we hope this is just the beginning.
This continues our historic relationship with IRRI, an
institution that has directly benefited billions of the
world’s poorest people. It also reflects our enduring
commitments to connect families with technologies that
can help them lead healthier, better, more productive
lives, to see innovation through to action and impact,
and to give great ideas, 90 percent down the road, that
extra 10 percent they need to reach their destination.
I’m pleased to announce
another grant this afternoon too. We know that even if
farmers breed better seeds and harvest more bountiful
yields, communities around the world will still suffer
food emergencies. As the food crisis worsened during
these last nine months, the United Nations World Food
Program labored tirelessly to help when and where the
suffering was greatest. A recent grant from the Gates
and Howard Buffet foundations will enable the WFP to
purchase local produce. It will increase emergency food
supplies, tie the smallholder farmers who produce them
with reliable markets, and spread new economic
opportunities throughout Africa. We commend our partners
for their leadership on this front.
Still, the rush on WFP
finances during this and other times of challenge may
lead to delays and disruptions in service for people and
for communities in dire need. In response, we’re working
with the WFP to develop innovative financing strategies
and new types of funding instruments for disaster relief
and food distribution. If successful, they can be
replicated and expanded in other development programs
around the world.
Since this week’s theme
is “confronting crisis,” I want to talk for the next few
minutes about how we confront another grave and growing
crisis on the horizon: climate change. Weather and
climate remain among farmers’ greatest vulnerabilities,
as they have throughout history. But, today – as we
sense, as we know – is different. Decades of continued
climate change are on the way, regardless of when we get
emissions under control – regardless how many westerners
trade in Hummers for Priuses. You heard yesterday from
India’s Dr. Rita Sharma about the impacts of climate
change on agriculture. Subsistence slips further from
reach as climate sensitive, natural ecosystems
deteriorate – as vulnerable people in vulnerable places
lose clean water for drinking and fishing, protected
habitat for hunting and grazing, and fertile soil for
farming.
In Africa, especially,
global climate disruption jeopardizes local agricultural
yields. The people of sub-Saharan Africa have
contributed only 2 percent of global carbon emissions.
Yet, they will pay some of climate change’s highest
tolls. Livelihoods – lives – are at stake. The Nobel
Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change projects, with high confidence, that the
countries of sub-Saharan Africa will be among the most
severely affected by increased climate variability.
Researchers at the International Livestock Research
Institute suggest that, in the next decade, climate
change could shorten sub-Saharan Africa’s growing season
by several weeks and decrease yields from rain fed
agriculture by as much as half. Yale’s Robert Mendelsohn
estimates that small scale African farmers, who rely so
much on rain fed land, stand to lose $28 per hectare per
year for each one degree, Celsius, rise in global
temperature. If you earn less than two dollars a day,
that’s a devastating blow to your family’s well-being.
The risks will be
especially severe for African women – who we’ve talked
about so much this morning – who harvest 80 percent of
the continent’s food. Women already disproportionately
bear the burdens of malnourishment. They grow, buy, and
cook, but usually eat only after their husbands and
children. As food becomes scarcer and costlier, less is
left over, and it’s women – not men – who starve.
Climate change only intensifies women’s hazards. Men may
migrate to cities for their work, but, because of
climate change, the women who remain will spend more
time in the fields, harvesting less productive crops,
and walk further distances to gather fuel and collect
water. Because of gendered land tenure policies, men and
women have access to different kinds of resources. When
extreme weather events occur, men will still own their
land. Women’s wealth, however, is what they harvest. And
girls – not boys – are removed from school when families
can no longer afford uniforms, books, and enrollment
fees, or when they need extra help in the fields.
So what can be done?
First, we must implement resilient farming methods and
food supply systems. Second, we must implement pro-poor
adaptation and mitigation strategies. The good news:
there is substantial progress on the first front,
especially in breeding stress-tolerant,
climate-resilient seeds, improving irrigation and
increasing water-use efficiency – getting the most crop
from every drop – strengthening soil management
practices, and helping to build infrastructure and
output markets. These efforts must be better integrated
and coordinated within country and across climactic
regions.
On the second front, we
must do more to empower African farmers and African
institutions to mobilize the next Green Revolution in a
world that will continue warming. Let me touch briefly
on three new examples of Rockefeller Foundation work,
all of which fall under our $70 million initiative to
strengthen local resilience to the impacts of climate
change.
First, famers need
better and timelier seasonal climate forecasts to
prepare for adverse events like drought, and to seize
the new opportunities that climactically favorable
seasons may present. The science that enables this kind
of forecasting is improving by leaps and bounds.
Forecasting tools are growing more reliable. And several
African institutions are now working with the World
Meteorological Organization to construct these seasonal
climate projections.
The Nairobi-based,
Intergovernmental Climate Prediction and Applications
Center – ICPAC – is one such organization. It engages
some of the world’s best climate scientists in
developing seasonal forecasts, and then sharing regional
climate outlooks with ministries of agriculture,
extension agencies, and others who can spread the word
among smallholder farmers. In August, ICPAC hosted a
training workshop that brought together, from more than
15 African nations, the meteorologists who make
forecasts, the agriculturalists who need them, and
leading scientists from the United States, Europe, and
South Africa. Stunningly, for many, it was the first
time they met their counterparts within their own
country, let alone those from across the continent or
around the world. Now they’re being wired into African
science and research networks, with new capacity to make
excellent forecasts, and inform local adaptation
methods.
These forecasts,
however, will always be based on probabilities, and a
forecast that’s 70 to 80 percent reliable still leaves
farmers 20 to 30 percent uncertain. I don’t need to tell
anyone here that farming – and rain fed agriculture
specifically – is a risky business. To help reduce the
risk, the Rockefeller Foundation is scaling pilots on
weather indexed crop and livestock insurance for
smallholder farmers.
For example, we’re
partnering with the World Bank, ILRI, global insurers
like Swiss Re, and local insurers like FSD-Kenya.
FSD-Kenya is creating an insurance package that
reimburses input costs should farmers lose their crops
to an independently and objectively documented weather
event. FSD-Kenya aggregates large pools of farmers by
region, thus considerably lowering the price of
insurance per farmer. While the insurance is provided by
private companies, it takes added subsidies from civil
society and the public sector to make these policies
more accessible and affordable for smallholder farmers.
Because the insurance is weather-indexed, the payout
thresholds are simple and clear. And the benefits will
flow through the entire agricultural value chain.
Take the case of
Josephine Okot, the founder and managing director of
Victoria Seeds, in Uganda, a full line seed company that
provides smallholder farmers with high quality seeds for
vegetable, cereal, legume, and oil crops. We invested in
Victoria Seeds through African Agricultural Capital, a
Kampala-based investment fund that serves small scale
farmers. Josephine obtains licenses for new crop
varieties, contracts with cooperatives of women farmers
who multiply the seed, prepares the seed in affordable
packages, and markets these packages throughout Uganda –
including in the country’s strife-torn northern region,
where many of her family members still live. When our
Board and I visited with Josephine in March, she told us
that climate challenges pose the greatest risk to her
business’ profitability. If the rains don’t come early
in the growing season, farmers don’t buy seeds. If the
rains don’t come late in the growing season, then
farmers can’t afford to pay for the seeds they already
purchased on credit. Either way, Victoria Seeds, loses.
Whether-indexed crop insurance will be a huge help.
But another variable in
the risk-reduction equation are climate projections that
provide sufficient, geography specific detail. You heard
from Rockefeller Foundation grantee Roz Naylor, who,
along with David Lobell, developed overlapping global
circulation, crop production, and ecosystem function
models. These are critical. They provide a comprehensive
view of how, by 2030, climate change will affect five
staple crops in a dozen extremely poor regions of the
developing world. One alarming finding? Maize production
in southern Africa could diminish by as much as
one-third. Think about what this would mean: a third
less of southern Africa’s staple food. Professors Naylor
and Lobell are collecting additional data and refining
their modeling so they can calibrate their projections
to other agro-ecosystems.
Now, all these
strategies – linking up seasonal forecasting networks,
developing new crop insurance products, and projecting
climate change’s repercussions for specific crops in
specific places – must be intentionally tilted to reach
smallholder farmers in the most vulnerable communities.
These tools and technological advances must not only be
accessible to the elite – including large scale farms,
though they need these solutions too. We must assure
that resilient, entrepreneurial people – despite
conditions of poverty – can mitigate risk and seize new
economic opportunities that climate change may create.
We know this is
possible because we watched it happen in our previous
work, which opened doors to credit for a new type of
entrepreneur: agro dealers, typically women, selling
seeds and fertilizer to smallholder farmers. Take Janet
Matemba, from the village of Lumbadzi in rural Malawi.
Janet owned a small, remote roadside stand that sold
sodas, soap, biscuits, and cooking oil to area farmers.
Six years ago, a representative of the Rural Market
Development Trust, one of our grantees, approached her
about selling agricultural products. She hesitated. What
did she know about agriculture? It would mean learning
new skills and – more intimidating still – making a
relatively substantial upfront investment. But Janet
eventually decided to take the chance. She studied
business management and earned her certificate in agro
dealing. With the help of a guaranteed credit facility,
she purchased fertilizer and seeds from wholesale
suppliers. She broke those packages down into smaller
sizes and sold them to local farmers. Now, she turns
significant profit, reinvests most of what she earns
into growing her business, and hires many of her
neighbors. Janet Matemba and so many like her embody the
potential for retail entrepreneurs to replenish depleted
soils, create viable agricultural marketplaces, and
strengthen Africa’s self-sufficiency. Janet Matemba,
Josephine Okot, and countless other women have
demonstrated considerable courage. They are able, active
partners. They nourish and build communities with their
bare hands.
Today, the challenge of
climate change may afford new economic opportunities to
industrious, resourceful women, like Janet and
Josephine, if we maintain focused attention on assuring
economic growth with equity. For instance, during the
last few years, the international carbon trading systems
have expanded prolifically. These institutions allow
emitters in developing countries to sell emission
credits to companies in and governments of
industrialized ones. Last year, the market facilitated
over $63 billion in exchanges. But in Africa, as in
emerging economies around the world, the carbon markets
are yet to work for the women and families laboring in
the fields and tending the forests.
Kyoto Protocol rules do
not formally recognize that sustainable agricultural
practices could mitigate carbon emissions and climate
change. So, it will be critical to reform Kyoto’s Clean
Development Mechanism at the United Nations Framework
Convention in Copenhagen next year. This is among the
easiest, but most important modifications that delegates
can and must make. With this single reform, governments
and donors could direct funds from the carbon markets to
reward local, terrestrial carbon sequestration. With
this single reform, women like Josephine Okot and Janet
Matemba could tap into a torrent of economic
possibility. We have partnered with COMESA, the Common
Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, to enable their
advocacy in Copenhagen for this pro-African policy. And
we’re one voice in a rising choir, elevating the
connection between carbon sequestration and poverty
alleviation. Strengthening resilience to climate change
is a poverty reduction strategy.
With the Clinton
Foundation and World Wildlife Fund, we’re laying the
groundwork for more exact carbon measuring and
monitoring systems, building more effective
institutions, and promoting new financial incentives.
These incentives could reduce deforestation, which
leaves roughly the same carbon footprint as all the
cars, trucks, and planes in the world. These incentives
could also encourage reforestation, ecosystem
restoration, conservation tillage, and other practices
that boost soil’s organic content. Agro forestry,
integrating nitrogen-fixing trees in crop production
practices, is another important ingredient in the
recipe.
If the global community
joins together to include these practices in the carbon
credit system, we will generate multiple, mutually
reinforcing opportunities to generate greater wealth
across sub-Saharan Africa and throughout the developing
world. The benefits must not go exclusively to
governments. They must go to smallholder farmers, to
women, who, the data affirm, are much more likely than
men to reinvest their income in nutrition, health,
education, and family farms or small businesses – a
finding seen in studies of countries diverse as
Bangladesh, Brazil, Cote d’ Ivoire, Ghana, Indonesia,
and South Africa to name just a few.
Progress always springs
from the seeds of daring ideas. In the 20th century, our
forbearers joined together, marshaled the energy and
ingenuity of scientists and donors, and ignited a Green
Revolution. More than half the people on earth today eat
rice and wheat varieties containing genes introduced by
Rockefeller Foundation scientists in the 1960s.
When they began,
however, the skeptics said such an achievement was far
from reach. Take India, for example. In the 1960s, the
US Food for Aid Program shipped 5 million tons of wheat
to India every year. One 1967 bestseller called India’s
food situation “hopeless.” Another leading scholar
characterized the notion of Indian self-sufficiency as
“fantasy.”
We know – now – that,
thanks to Norman Borlaug and countless others, India’s
wheat crop increased from 11 million tons to 60 million
tons. But let’s pause for a moment and imagine the world
without this historic accomplishment – not just a world
without Dwarf Wheat in India, but without increased food
supplies in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and around
the globe. This would be a world with more, not less,
poverty and disease, a world with more frequent refugee
crises and forced migrations, a world with more regular
conflicts over scarcer resources.
A generation later, we
face challenges equal in size and significance. But we
cannot solve these 21st century challenges with 20th
century ideas and technologies alone. We must continue
to innovate, continue to invest in innovation, and the
Rockefeller Foundation is committed to this crucial
effort.
Imagine the
possibilities if we do. Imagine family farms in Africa
that look – that produce – like family farms in Iowa.
Imagine more women, like Josephine Okot and Janet
Matemba, sowing the seeds of their communities’ renewal.
Imagine a Norman Borlaug for every African country, for
every country around the world. And then stop imagining
– and listen to one of her stories.
Two years ago, Annet Namayanja identified a
genetic trait in bean seeds that strengthens
their resistance to root rot. Through cross
pollination, she then bred that trait into two
new varieties of beans that are hardier and
better adapted to the central Ugandan soil and
climate. |
Annet Namayanja grew up
in Kiboga, a small farming town in Uganda’s rural,
impoverished, central region. As a Rockefeller fellow,
she studied agriculture, earned a master’s degree, and
is now pursuing her Ph.D. at Makere University. Several
years ago, she began researching the common field bean,
so nutrient-rich that it’s called “the poor man’s meat.”
These beans grow rapidly. Farmers can cultivate two,
sometimes three crops a year. They provide essential
income for women and families like Annet’s.
Just two years ago,
Annet identified a genetic trait in bean seeds that
strengthens their resistance to root rot. Through cross
pollination, she then bred that trait into two new
varieties of beans that are hardier and better adapted
to the central Ugandan soil and climate. Not long
thereafter, we received an email from Annet. She
explained that the farmers in her village had devised
names, in their local dialect, for her two new bean
varieties. They call the first “mulwanisa” or
“endurance.” They call the second “musahura,”
“restoration,” or “replenishment. And these are
precisely the qualities that communities like Kiboga,
the world over, need today more than ever: the endurance
to anticipate, prepare for, and recover from the
terrible local impacts of the global climate crisis; the
restoration of economic opportunity and
self-sufficiency; and the replenishment of faith in the
promise of a better tomorrow. This is a wonderful
vision, and one within reach. I’m honored to thank all
of you for doing your part.