Africa's Green Revolutionary - WI Amílcar Cabral Stays An Agronomist?

Amilcar-Cabral.jpg


(Sorry for the length, btw, sort of a favourite topic of mine)

Many people know Cabral as one of the foremost political theorists and authors active in the African liberation wave, with his writings being crucial to the "language of freedom" employed by others across the continent. A lesser-known aspect of his life was his outstanding work as an agronomist (which he trained to become in Lisbon.) Considered by his professors to be a prodigy and graduating 4 years early, he returned to Portuguese Guinea to start the Experimental Farm of Pessubé (then situated very far from the centre of Bissau) in a poor neighborhood at the periphery.

The Pessubé Farm was his point of departure from conventional agronomic studies in favor of new theories like those outlined by Norman Borlaug (a personal hero of Cabral) to start putting in practice a number of developments adapting Bourlag's thought to African conditions that would take decades to become part of the standard toolkit. He began a programme of experimentation based on the identification of cultivation techniques for different types of farming (compass, land demarcation, fertilization, and sowing period), of tests for various adaptations (rice, sugar-cane, mancarra, banana, cotton, and horticultures), of plagues and illnesses, valorization of local varieties of certain species like “jute,” and the introduction of new species well-suited to local conditions such as sesame, soy, and sunflower. He also began work on a number of high-yield strains of millet and sorghum, attempting to replicate Borlaug's successes on Mexican wheat with native crops, while resurrecting the cultivation of a number of "lost African crops" left unused by previous European agronomists.

Some developments he made went beyond those of Borlaug. Cabral was the first to experimentally question the system of agriculture based on monoculture, at the time - mancarra, which represented a danger to the economy as the annual crop price fluctuations in the external markets put the farmer in a situation of dependence, risk, and uncertainty. Furthermore, in the case of mancarra, monoculture provoked an irreversible degradation of the soil, especially through erosion. The dangers and limits of agricultural mechanization were exhaustingly addressed in a 1953 text, since he was confronted immediately upon his arrival in Bissau with a thesis very much in vogue that attributed the backwardness of Guinean agriculture to the non-use of farm tractors. He called attention to various aspects of technical and socio-economic order, including that of the majority of agricultural soils (slopes and upland) being of shallow useful depth and with a tendency for erosion, so that the use of the soil for tractors could prove to be prejudicial. He favored gradual mechanization instead of the aggressive crash mechanization promoted by his contemporaries, a position validated by modern agronomic studies.

For two and a half years, Cabral traveled all over Guinea, observing, studying, and writing on facets of Guinean agriculture, until funding for both his Experimental Farm and his Agricultural Commission was cut by the Portuguese government. Reportedly, one Portuguese offical directly told Cabral that "Lisbon did not care if Africans had food or not." Enraged by the lack of care from Portugal and with nothing but time on his hands, he got increasingly involved with the independence movement. In March of 1955, Cabral left Bissau in an Air France plane by order of the colonial political government authorities that accused him of exercising conspiratorial activities for the independence of Guinea. In 1959, at thirty-five years of age, he came to Bissau the same year that the massacre at the port of Pindjiguiti occured, a determining moment for Cabral in his understanding that the conquest of independence would have to be obtained by armed struggle and not by the peaceful resistance for which he originally strived.

So what would have happened if there was a different Cabral, one perhaps who had been given the sorely needed funding to continue his research? Would West Africa see a miraculous Green Revolution from his adaptation of new studies to local conditions? Would there be an earlier understanding of the harmful effects of monoculture agriculture on developing economies? Would many of Africa's "Lost Crops" now be popularly cultivated?
 
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So what would have happened if there was a different Cabral, one perhaps who had been given the sorely needed funding to continue his research? Would West Africa see a miraculous Green Revolution from his adaptation of new studies to local conditions? Would there be an earlier understanding of the harmful effects of monoculture agriculture on developing economies? Would many of Africa's "Lost Crops" now be popularly cultivated?
It’s an interesting question whether West Africa could have seen a major “Green Revolution” as Europe, Asia and Latin America did.

Although West Africa is more densely populated – and was even in 1980 – than Latin America, it is much flatter and has a greater supply of land (nothing approaching the Andes). It also has much less fertile soils than Hispanophone America or almost any part of Eurasia, so that adaptation to these ancient (though fertilised by dust from the Sahara and oceanic islands, unlike Australia) soils would be very difficult and probably uneconomic given the abundant flat land and extremely cheap labour.

Nonetheless, if there was genuine support and extensive funding by governments, there would definitely be a possibility of a Green Revolution in West Africa as actually occurred in Asia and Latin America, though its results would not have been appreciated by the rural sectors in Europe and North America.
 
It’s an interesting question whether West Africa could have seen a major “Green Revolution” as Europe, Asia and Latin America did.

Although West Africa is more densely populated – and was even in 1980 – than Latin America, it is much flatter and has a greater supply of land (nothing approaching the Andes). It also has much less fertile soils than Hispanophone America or almost any part of Eurasia, so that adaptation to these ancient (though fertilised by dust from the Sahara and oceanic islands, unlike Australia) soils would be very difficult and probably uneconomic given the abundant flat land and extremely cheap labour.

Nonetheless, if there was genuine support and extensive funding by governments, there would definitely be a possibility of a Green Revolution in West Africa as actually occurred in Asia and Latin America, though its results would not have been appreciated by the rural sectors in Europe and North America.

Very good points. The way I see it, the biggest boosts to the productivity of the region that Cabral could implement, without really pushing up against the limits of West African soil quality are
  • Higher-yield variants of the crops already being grown - not really upping the intensity of cultivation but getting more "bang for your buck" so to speak.
  • Introduction (or reintroduction) of comparable species that are well-adapted to handle local soil quality - pearl millet or sunflowers, for example.
  • Pushing for the organization of farms to be more cooperative again. Although Cabral detested the idea of Soviet style farm collectivization, being an agronomist himself, he was also a firm opponent of the European reorganization of West African farming practices to be more akin to Continental free-holding farmers when local food production tended to be communal. He conclusively proved at his test farms that local communal yam farms outproduced equivalent groups of freeholder farms at an almost 4:1 ratio. This would be less about changing the crop or soil and more about being organized more effectively.
 
The big issue for an African green revolution, as I see it is the lack of infrastructure connecting farms to urban or foreign markets. Lagos today imports more food from the US and the Caribbean than it does its own hinterland for just this reason.

That said, Cabral's ideas have some advantages over Borlaug's ideas so I can see the infrastructure thing more slowing down a Cabralist Green Revolution, not stopping it. Studying polycultures for the African environments and finding techniques to improve resilience would have real value and I can see them spreading. And of course, improved resilience for African subsistence farmers means more resources available for other things in Africa, so we may see better infrastructure developing and this encouraging market agriculture.

Poor soil quality will not, in my view, really hold things back. Modern composting techniques, better understandings of how plants interact with the soil, and biochar, which provides an alternative to clay particles in soil for low-clay soils mean that soil fertility is more a function of weather and the quality of human management, not a function of what kind of regolith a soil is based on. In other words, by the time the population in Africa has grown to the point when fertility is a limiting factor, there will also be a number of tools available to increase fertility.

fasquardon
 
The big issue for an African green revolution, as I see it is the lack of infrastructure connecting farms to urban or foreign markets. Lagos today imports more food from the US and the Caribbean than it does its own hinterland for just this reason.

I didn't know that about Lagos, but it really just goes to show how crippling bad infrastructure is. Guinea-Bissau is in a similar situation, if not worse, since the Portuguese were not very interested in development outside the environs of Bissau itself.


That said, Cabral's ideas have some advantages over Borlaug's ideas so I can see the infrastructure thing more slowing down a Cabralist Green Revolution, not stopping it. Studying polycultures for the African environments and finding techniques to improve resilience would have real value and I can see them spreading. And of course, improved resilience for African subsistence farmers means more resources available for other things in Africa, so we may see better infrastructure developing and this encouraging market agriculture.

The regional impact of a Cabralist Green Revolution might be even more benefical than Borlaug's elsewhere - at this time, the economy of Guinea-Bissau is almost entirely agricultural (but also includes forestry and fishing.) Guinea-Bissau produces its own food, and farming is largely based on local subsistence. Any improvement of agricultural productivity generates an increase in the prosperity and food security of a majority of the nation's inhabitants in a way that's hard to match in an industrialized country - this is true for much of the neighboring West African nations as well.


Poor soil quality will not, in my view, really hold things back. Modern composting techniques, better understandings of how plants interact with the soil, and biochar, which provides an alternative to clay particles in soil for low-clay soils mean that soil fertility is more a function of weather and the quality of human management, not a function of what kind of regolith a soil is based on. In other words, by the time the population in Africa has grown to the point when fertility is a limiting factor, there will also be a number of tools available to increase fertility.

How soon do you think soil improvement could be implemented on a large scale?
 
Another challenge is the periodic civil wars which has destroyed infrastructure and kill young people in West Africa who other wise would have been productive members of society. In my opinion, in order for a Green Revolution to succeed, there needs to be a more stable political environment. Otherwise the farms get looted and burnt.
 
Another challenge is the periodic civil wars which has destroyed infrastructure and kill young people in West Africa who other wise would have been productive members of society. In my opinion, in order for a Green Revolution to succeed, there needs to be a more stable political environment. Otherwise the farms get looted and burnt.

I'm going to push back on this line of thinking a bit here, not because I disagree with the idea that more peace would be beneficial, but because there's some assumptions implicit in this that I feel don't hold up to scrutiny.

Although post-independence West Africa has been plagued by authoritarianism and repeated coups, often resulting from the new nations inheriting a fundamentally broken colonial system rife with institutionalized violence and severe underdevelopment, West African farmers generally lived much the same lives as they have during the latter days of colonialism. Coups at the top or the exchanging of one military government for another rarely impacted the mass of subsistence farmers who made up the most of the nation too severely. Several West African nations, such as Ghana, Benin, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Togo, Cape Verde and Guinea have never even seen the "periodic civil war" you describe. Among those that did: Guinea-Bissau's civil war was short and saw the most violence in the capital, not the farming hinterland.

The extraordinary violence of the Sierra Leonese Civil War, the Liberian Civil Wars and the Biafran War (what you seem to be envisioning as the norm across West Africa) is in actuality rather rare, when you get down to it.
 
Some interesting information I came across while looking further into Cabral's agronomic studies: one of the hybrid cultivars of sorghum that he had some initial success in growing was a strain that combined the Pessubé Farm sorghum's high-yield with the "sweet-stalk" sugar storing traits of an Indian variety of sorghum. Though it seems like Cabral was doing this to allow for production of both sugar and grain from the same harvest, a bit later, it might become clear how useful this would be as a source for biofuel. Quoting from the book Lost Crops of Africa:

"At present, ethanol is made from either sugarcane or maize. In the future, however, sorghum is likely to also be a prime supplier. The stalks of certain sorghums are just as packed with sugar as are sugarcane's. Their juice contains 13-20 percent total fermentable sugars. They can yield about 6 percent alcohol. Sweet-stalk types are sparingly distributed across sorghum-growing areas of India, where people chew the green and tender stems like sugarcane or make syrups, molasses, sugar, or confections from them. They were once a major source of sweeteners in the southern United States. Now, however, they have a rising potential as sources of fuel. All in all, sweet sorghums are important for future ethanol production because they have:
• High biomass yield;
• High percentage of fermentable sugars;
• High percentage of combustible materials (for fueling the processing);
• Comparatively short growth period;
• Tolerance to drought stress; and
• Relatively low fertilizer requirement.

Moreover, sweet sorghums may also produce grain for food or feed (Cabral, 1954.) Indeed, as sorghum is one of the most efficient plants, and as it produces fermentable sugars as well as grain, it seems almost ideal for producing both energy and food. Technologies used in the sugarcane industry can be applied virtually without modification. Sweet sorghum has a number of potential advantages over sugarcane. For example, it is adapted to many growing conditions, unlike sugarcane, which is restricted to tropical climates. It requires less water and fertilizer. It can be planted more easily (from seeds not stems). And it also has a potential for low unit costs because it can be fully mechanized and the fields need not be burned (unlike sugarcane fields). Sorghum's advantage over maize (in which the grain is converted to alcohol) is that it produces sugar rather than starch. As a result, sorghum juice can be directly fermented without the expense or delay of an initial hydrolysis."

Could there eventually be a West African biofuel industry emerging from a combo food/fuel variety of sorghum raised at Pessubé? Presumably Nigeria would have little need for this, oil-rich as they are, but fuel insecurity is a large problem in many areas of the region that might be mitigated thanks to this.
 
Any improvement of agricultural productivity generates an increase in the prosperity and food security of a majority of the nation's inhabitants in a way that's hard to match in an industrialized country - this is true for much of the neighboring West African nations as well.

Well, what use is increased productivity if there's no way to trade the increased production or to store it for lean years? To be useful, leaps in productivity need better infrastructure.

I think the parts of Cabral's work that reduce the severity of disaster will at first be more important. If famine is reduced and better fed people are able to resist disease better, then villages and countries will be better able to accumulate wealth to invest in the infrastructure improvements that would then allow farmers to profit from higher production.

How soon do you think soil improvement could be implemented on a large scale?

That's really hard to say. There's several interacting factors here:

1) when would there be a serious demand for soil improvement techniques in a given region of Africa.

2) how developed are the roads and markets when that demand hits? If it is easy to import industrially produced fertilizers from the developed world, why not do that?

3) how much does Cabral staying in agronomy advance the available techniques? While we're in the position now where we know how to make just about any area of land as fertile as the weather will allow it to be, much of the research that allows that is very new - like "in the last 20 years" new. Then again, much of that research was building on things already known about, but not understood.

I suspect that it would be an ongoing process even in the present day of such a TL. There'd be market-orientated factory farms near the roads and railways. There'd be lots of people using improved versions of subsistence farming where soil fertility was raised by better crop choices and crop rotation schemes. And there'd be the small group of people who used the very, very latest science.

When you have the necessity and the knowledge of what to do though, it is possible to take exhausted, nutrient poor soils and get them to near their maximum potential fertility in about a decade of good management. In the modern western world, this involves accepting a decade of lower yields, which needless to say is very hard on the pocketbook. So it is hard to transition from a mature factory farming system to state-of-the-art organic farming. But if the transition is from subsistence farming, well, a decade of slowly improving yields is a good thing, so the main barriers are passing on skills and things like security of land tenure.

Could there eventually be a West African biofuel industry emerging from a combo food/fuel variety of sorghum raised at Pessubé? Presumably Nigeria would have little need for this, oil-rich as they are, but fuel insecurity is a large problem in many areas of the region that might be mitigated thanks to this.

I could see fuel alcohol being useful in Nigeria too. One of the issues my Nigerian friends like to moan about is how all this oil being extracted doesn't get used much for the benefit of Nigerians... Being able to ferment your own fuel to run a simple tractor (perhaps one that you own a share of, together with your neighbours) massively democratizes machine power.

For two and a half years, Cabral traveled all over Guinea, observing, studying, and writing on facets of Guinean agriculture, until funding for both his Experimental Farm and his Agricultural Commission was cut by the Portuguese government. Reportedly, one Portuguese offical directly told Cabral that "Lisbon did not care if Africans had food or not." Enraged by the lack of care from Portugal and with nothing but time on his hands, he got increasingly involved with the independence movement.

You know... I was suddenly reminded of some of the past discussions I've participated in about how Portugal could have kept its empire.

I wonder if being interested in Africans' food would be a sufficient change? Portugal funding Cabral would keep him out of Guinea's independence movement, and advancing agronomy would, well, be evidence of good government to their colonial peoples that might convince others to stick on in the empire... (I don't know how much this is true in the Portuguese colonies, but in the British and French colonies, often the main driver pushing locals to seek independence was not being governed by foreigners, it was being governed by people who couldn't be bothered to do a good job and who couldn't easily be held to account by their neglected subjects.)

fasquardon
 
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