Small-scale farmers.

I think the number is 50% of the farms in Africa are small-scale farmers.

But it seems that if you're looking at how do you actually increase productivity of

those farms, how do you improve or reduce food waste and

improve efficiency and efficiency of water, and all these other challenges.

It comes from larger scale commercial farming, if you're

actually going to be able to feed 9.6 billion people who all want hot dogs or

hamburgers or chicken or fish.

So does an investment in small scale farmer actually

reinforce some of the poverty that's in there?

How do you balance that out?

Because obviously there's political considerations.

People don't want these people moving to the city all at once because there

are challenges with that too.

>> Yeah, it's a great question.

[COUGH] I'd say you could look at a couple of models.

And the two that I would offer, it's not quite diametrically opposed,

but Brazil and South Korea.

And Brazil moved into middle income status

with investments in large scale commercial farming.

Some of it moving people off the land,

some of it clear cutting large swathes of the Amazon, and

a massive investment in green revolution technologies to propel themselves

into middle income status, and into an emerging market of country.

With great results at the macroeconomic level but large amounts of poverty, and

really no outlet for people who are leaving farming and

leaving, I shouldn't say farming, the rural economy.

There are a lot of people in rural areas who are not farmers.

Farming has spin-off jobs, but leaving the rural economy.

South Korea, on the other hand, managed a more

kind of measured growth of small scale farming into commercial farming.

And that's what a lot of people think is the way forward for

Southeast Asia, for Africa as primaries.

If you invest in increasing the productivity of small owner farming,

there's no question that productivity increases if labor is lower.

>> Yeah, yeah.

>> So over time these farms are going to become consolidated.

And labor will move to the cities.

More mechanization will, and mechanization is the other example.

If you look at traditional macroeconomic thinking, use more machines,

you're more highly productive.

So if you move away from large scale farm labor,

whether it's on small farms or large scale farms, to larger holdings,

more mechanization, productivity will necessarily go up.

Particularly if you're using better technology, seeds, water management, etc.

That's going to happen over time.

But if you invest in small-owner farms, and

you see a natural consolidation, and it'll create spinoff effects for

greater opportunities for transport and processing.

You can start to see the rural economy as a whole growing

with the spillover effects of a greater economic dynamism in the rural economy.

Which spills back to the urban economy as well.

It creates jobs in the urban economy if you've got more products and

transport and processing.

>> And how do you accelerate that?

>> That's the hard question.

>> [LAUGH] >> I mean, you could look at-

>> I've only given you easy questions.

>> Yeah, I mean you can look at the enclosure movement in Europe.

I mean that's what happened.

Europe went from really inefficient fiefdoms and smaller farms to

the enclosure movement and larger scale family farms in England.

And moving to commercial farms and people moving out into the cities

as the rural economy was generating kind of spill off effects.

And extra money to be invested in manufacturing.

But it hasn't, it was accelerated in Asia.

South Korea really did a great job over a couple of decades.

China is certainly accelerating this process.

Some would argue not as well as South Korea probably managed it.

But a lot of it has to do,

there's a policy that mentioned to all of this because it's all very complicated.

So what are the policy rules around land holding.

Many developing country economies have restrictions on the sale of land.

With the view that I think some people tend to idolize small holder farming and

I think if you haven't seen rural poverty up close, it's easier to idealize it.

It's just not about idealizing small holder farming,

I think the natural process will be consolidation of land holdings,

more heavier use of mechanization and technology.

And people will move off.

But we don't want people to move into Brazilian-style favelas without

economic opportunities.

You want to generate kind of greater economic dynamism.

And a big policy component, and this is how I got my start in this area,

I'm a lawyer, I worked on, I did my dissertation in law school on land

reform in Zimbabwe, and thinking about what is the land policy that facilitates

transfer of land from, farming is a business,

not everyone is successful from the non successful to the more successful.

And a phrase I love using is,

the problem with farming is you can't go out of business.

But if you're a small business in the United States and you're a failed

business, you go bankrupt, your creditors come, someone buys the asset, and

our capitalist system kind of pulls it apart and makes greater use of it.

If you're a subsistence farmer, you are a failed business, but

you have no way to get out of it.

And it is a policy framework that allows for

land to be purchased by a more successful farmer.

And hopefully you're generating opportunities either for

labor employment or for transport or for processing for

someone who hasn't been successful in farming.

>> So why isn't there land tenure reform throughout?

Because also in conservation this is one of the barriers to protection.

>> I think it's a legacy of a lot of

historical thinking that again idolizes the smallholder farmer,

that doesn't trust kind of the dynamism of the destructive aspects of capitalism,

that thinks the state has to go in and protect it.

One of the things that we were very proud of when I was in the Bureau for

Food Security was, we even call it that.

I forget the title.

A land security project in Ethiopia, where the Ethiopian government has a very

antiquated, in my mind, socialist mentality.

We have to protect the farmer, we can't allow them to sell their land.

In fact, we can't even allow them to own their land.

The State owns all the land.

[LAUGH] So, The evidence is clear.

If people don't own, if they don't have the title to land, they don't invest.

I mean, it's true.

People who rent don't invest as much in their property as people who own.

That's true whether it's your household or it's your farm.

So if you give people title to land, you see investment in the land go up.

A poor farmer who has $10 has to decide, what do I do with that?

Do I pay for my wife to go to a doctor?

Do I buy booze?

Or if it's a woman even.

So if it's a woman farmer, because more than half of farmers in Africa are women,

do I pay for my child to go the doctor?

Do I try to get into another business because farming is really hard?

Do I try to do hairdressing?

Or do I invest in the farm?

If she can't own the land, she's not going to invest in the farm,

and it's not a surprise that the farm doesn't do better.

So you have to provide the policy packets so she's going to invest.

So in Ethiopia, we had a program to convince the government to give people

certificates of occupancy, which just say, we the government accept,

I forget that if the period was 20 years or 30 years, it wasn't forever.

We accept that you have a right to be on this land.

>> Wow. >> That's really minimal.

>> Yeah. >> But we saw even with that little bit,

people's investment went up.

One of the biggest challenges to food security are really around,

focus on the people who are most vulnerable.

So, for instance, I measured farmers in southern Ethiopia.

Northern Kenya, southern Ethiopia,

everyone is aware of the droughts in the horn of Africa.

Those are, by anyone's reckoning, among the most vulnerable people in the world.

Every five years or so, there's a major drought.

And the international community sends massive amounts of

food aid to that region.

A lot of those people are growing corn.

Corn is not a highly drought resistant crop.

Those people are- >> Why do they grow the corn?

>> It's a very interesting, let me get back to that in one second.

Another vulnerable area would be southeast Asia where people are growing rice and

they're getting floods.

In one respect, so there's a big international debate, so

a lot of research dollars, and a priority, is more drought resistant corn.

If you could develop more drought resistant corn and get it to the farmers

in the horn of Africa, you move the needle probably more significantly than

any other single intervention in addressing global food security.

Other people would say, there is drought-resistant corn,

it's called sorghum.

[LAUGH] Maybe they shouldn't grow corn, and things would be better.

>> [LAUGH] >> It gets you to, as you said,

we're in a co-op here.

And food is also a cultural phenomenon.

And people's tastes for food have shifted over time,

and this is another big area we can get into.

Corn is not an indigenous crop in Africa.

I spent eight years living in Africa and

I used to always ask people where they think corn comes from.

I've never met an African farmer who said corn comes from the Americas.

They all think it's an indigenous crop in Africa, but it's a crop from the Americas.

And it's not appropriate for large swaths of the world where it's grown.

>> And becoming less appropriate with climate change.

>> Becoming less appropriate with climate change.

Now, there's research that could make it appropriate, we,

the international community and the private sector and

public sector, could develop drought resistant strains of corn.

People eat it because it's tasty, it's convenient.

Sorghum is harder.

It's hardier and harder to prepare and less tasty.

And there's, I don't know, it's probably, I'm guessing,

over a hundred years of people consuming corn across Eastern Southern Africa.

It's become part of the diet.

And there is a convenience part of this.

I mean, particularly for women, there's a gender aspect.

Rice is the same thing, so we're seeing as people move up the income

scale they move from sorghum, and millet and traditional crops in Africa, to rice.

Which is in many cases an inappropriate crop

because it requires large amounts of water.

But if you're a woman in West Africa, where they grow a lot of rice,

and you've moved up the income scale, and you have a job, and

your life is not about spending the whole day crushing up millet to make porridge,

rice that you can throw in a pot, put some water and it's ready in 20 minutes is

a huge aspect of convenience like a washing machine, like a television.

And it's considered tastier.

It's associated with a higher income.

So they're all- >> And if you have less time preparing

food you actually have more time- >> More time to do other things.

It's also corn and rice tend to take less time to prepare than other crops and

they're tastier in a lot of people's minds.

It depends on, I mean in the United States people are moving away from those

crops and towards quinoa, and chia seeds and sorghum.

>> Thanks in part to USAID, right?

>> Yeah [LAUGH].

But it gets very complicated when you bring in the sociocultural aspect of this

and people's tastes.

>> We invest a phenomenal amount in subsistence farmers and

small scale farmers in the developing world, but it doesn't seem like

they have the resources or the capital to do the types of improvements

that would help us get to the productivity that we need if consumption is going up.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on what should our policies be

with regard to subsistence farmers.

Because it seems much more of a political issue than it does a productivity issue.

>> Right.

Well, I think a lot of our thinking is kind of wrong headed on this.

In the sense that, a friend of mine at MARS summed it up recently.

His name is Aaron Shapiro.

He said MARS isn't going to buy certified poverty.

And what he meant by that is we're not going to buy a certified crop

produced by a family whose children are malnourished or stunted.

That is just abhorrent to us.

Why would we ever do that?

So we've gotta figure out another way that either they can

be integrated more through the value chain, so that

they benefit from some of the valued added by selling to the same place all the time,

so that they become maybe a equity holder in that place.

Or they get lower credit terms, or lower input costs, or whatever,

so that they benefit in different ways.

We also need to focus on things that are not just the cash crops,

the food crops as well.

So one of the things we did with MARS and the Beijing Genomic Institute and

Kneepad in Africa, is to actually identify the 100, turns out to be 101,

most important food crops on the African continent, and map the genomes.

Because these crops have been neglected, they're called orphan crops,

because nobody's ever really done modern plant gridding with them.

>> Why does China care?

Beijing Genomics Institute has like 178 super high level Illumina sequencers,

or something like that.

>> Even more.

>> That can do- >> They have more in one square box than

the US has in the entire country.

>> So why do they care about this?

>> I think they see it as a kind of aid issue.

They see it also as an intellectual issue.

And what we've agreed is that all of this

information will be put in the public domain.

None of it will be patented.

Now if you look at all the food crops that have been basically sequenced and

the information that's been available to date is 57 crops,

and that's all where there's patents,

and there's all kinds of controls that companies have around the research etc.

Well within three years we're going to add 100 to that,

that'll all be in the public domain.

And now we've just been asked to do the same thing in India and

to take crops there.

Because just to take a step back, focusing on these crops lets us

look at how to increase production in the places where we have the most poor people,

where we have the most potential for population growth and

economic growth, and we're going to need more food going forward.

Why wouldn't we focus on the crops that they already grow?

It just makes sense.

But also, a lot of these crops are already really productive

from a calorie point of view.

So maybe what we really need to be thinking about is putting more nutrients

in them or putting more protein in them.

And we can do that now, that's workable.

>> How should we get that protein from?

>> Well, I think what

genetics are going to be acceptable in which countries is going to vary a lot.

But for me it's not if genetics, it's which genetics.

And I don't know if you saw, but just yesterday I saw a release that the head

of government in India has announced that they're going to embrace GMOs.

And they've been doing research on it for some time already and

they're going to bring that out into the public domain.

Well China is now, Brazil is, the US is.

This is something where different countries are going to make different

decisions about this.

And it doesn't all have to be GMOs.

We can do productivity with these crops.

We can double productivity by just doing 100 varieties of the same thing, and

looking at the variations.

Drought tolerance, the same thing.

Disease resistance, same thing.

Putting nutrients in is a little more complicated, that's going to be different.

But let me just frame this a little more starkly.

Most of the money going into research now by the big seed companies is around corn.

It produces 5% as many calories per

hectare per year as bananas in Costa Rica.

And bananas in Costa Rica produce a third as many calories as sugar cane in Brazil.

So corn produces one sixtieth as many calories as sugar cane.

One twentieth as many as bananas.

Why do we spend so much time on trying to increase productivity

In corn rather than increasing nutrients in bananas or nutrients in sugar cane?

>> Again, is that behavioral or cultural issue?

>> I think it's because the big seed companies started in temperate zones

where farmers can only produce crops for a certain number of months.

And corn is one of those 100 to 120 day crops, 90 to 120 day crops.

Soy is even less time.

So you can grow it in different kinds of areas.

What we need to look now going forward at

what are the crops that are produced in the tropics?

And particularly what are the tree crops.

Where now we can use genetic mapping to double and

triple tree crop production in 10, 20 years.

We couldn't do that with conventional plant breeding, but now we can.

So how do we make that happen faster?

Because tree crops have a lot less impact on the planet.

There's not as much soil erosion.

You don't do tillage.

You don't have all the downstream siltation,

all the effects on reefs and on marine fisheries.

You can really reduce that if it's done right.

Subsistence Farming

Innovation and Design for Global Grand Challenges

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