Key to feeding Africa called better farming

Baltimore Sun: Key to feeding Africa called better farming

WASH MELKASA, Ethiopia - Hussein Ibrahim walks solemnly past tidy rows of bright green cabbages, vines bursting with tomatoes and trees weighed down with plump avocados.

This modern, thriving farm - a rarity in drought-ravaged Ethiopia - filled Hussein with envy. Like so many other farmers across the Horn of Africa, he has no hope for his own crops this year.

"We are behind all the other people in the world," said Hussein, who tends his land in southern Ethiopia the way his ancestors did hundreds of years ago - with rain, if it comes, and oxen, as long as they're healthy.

To break out of endless cycles of drought, poverty and hunger, experts say, Africa desperately needs to modernize its age-old farming techniques. But the vast sums in foreign aid to Africa go toward feeding the hungry, and very little is left for improving farming so that Africans will cease to depend on handouts.

The situation is not impossible. A decade ago, a "green revolution" helped millions of farmers in Asia and Latin America emerge from poverty with basic innovations such as fertilizer, improved irrigation and hybrid seeds.

But Africa's farms, which employ more than half the labor force, remain one-fourth as productive as their counterparts around the world....

Comments

[VanSkaamper]

Unfortunately the Mugabe plan failed. Apparently it's not productive to confiscate land and chase all the farming expertise out of your country.

[Michael W. Kruse]

Mugabe is one scenario for disaster but there are a wide range of other issues at work as well. I'll get those eventually in my review of the "Bottom Billion."