BRINGING HOME THE SEEDS
Bungoma, Kenya
It’s been Christmas in February this week for thousands of smallholder farmers in western Kenya. Seeds and fertilizer for the imminent planting season arrived.
They were carried in the backs of 400 10-ton trucks, the bags stacked neatly and handled with care. It is the most precious cargo for the smallholder farmers of Africa, who rarely have had such timely access to hybrid seeds and fertilizer.
But these aren’t gifts. They are part of a package of technology and advice provided by the One Acre Fund under a payback plan. It also includes micro-insurance, to protect the farmers and their investment against crop loss due to bad weather. The One Acre Fund, founded by American social entrepreneurs five years ago, serves small African farmers who have been woefully underserved in past decades even though they make up the majority of Africa’s population.
Precious cargo indeed, for with the proper seeds and the proper application of fertilizer – and with good rains -- One Acre farmers double their maize yields, helping them to feed their families, send children to school and expand their land holdings.
“This is the most exciting day for us,” said farmer Rasoa Wasike, who was helping to allocate the seeds and fertilizer at one site. “This is a new beginning for all of us.”
Seeds and fertilizer are the key ingredients in an African Green Revolution. Especially the seeds. Improved hybrid seed varieties, so crucial in the agriculture transformations in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Latin America, have been very slow to make their way across Africa. Seed researchers estimate that less than 20% of African maize comes from hybrid seed; in contrast, hybrid corn blanketed American fields a half-century ago. As a result, Africa’s yields of maize and other important staple crops remain far below the yields in other parts of the world.
“Why is the seed so important?,” asks Joe DeVries, the head of the seed program at the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, a joint venture of the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations based in Nairobi, Kenya. “Fertilizer has lower return on investment if you’re not using the good seed. But if you use the good seed with fertilizer and other inputs, BOOM, you get a big difference.”
One Acre Fund provides the seed and fertilizer to farmers early, in sufficient amounts and at a better-than-market price. Farmers on their own usually wait until the rains begin to fall to go to the market for their seed and fertilizer; there, they often find the varieties they prefer are unavailable or in short supply, and prices raising daily as the planting nears. By buying in bulk directly from seed companies, One Acre negotiates lower prices and early delivery. For instance, two kilograms of seed from one of the companies retails at 232 Kenya Shillings, while One Acre buys it for 216.
While the trucks were being loaded, Andrew Youn, One Acre’s founder, climbed to the top of a mountain of fertilizer in the One Acre warehouse in Bungoma. As he watched the workers load the bags into the trucks, he shook his head in astonishment.
“It’s pretty ridiculous,” he said. “In our first year, we couldn’t even fill one truck. This year, it’s 400. Hopefully in five years we’ll laugh at how small this was.”
One Acre, which has been growing exponentially each year, has huge ambitions. It hopes to be serving one million farmers by the end of the decade. Even that, though, is a fraction of the market of underserved smallholder farmers in Africa.
This week’s seed and fertilizer deliveries represent the shift in hunger-fighting priorities embodied in President Obama’s Feed the Future initiative, a shift from sending emergency food aid to feed to the hungry to creating the conditions so that the hungry can feed themselves. “The idea of bringing in food aid is totally absurd rather than empowering people to grow their own food,” Youn says.
The seeds have arrived. Now the wait is on for the rains, so the farmers can begin to do just that.
NEXT: More from Kenya.
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