Africa needs a brown (not green) food revolution

What Africa needs is a revolution that mobilizes people to focus on local inputs and practices that produce food that grows in healthy soil (maybe a "brown revolution") and that enhances the social and economic fabric of the community and nation. Guess what? That brown revolution is possible and sustainable right now.

For Africa (and all grassland regions of the world), the work of Rhodesian-born Allan Savory should be top priority. Mr. Savory and a team of Zimbabwean staff at the Africa Centre for Holistic Management in Zimbabwe have achieved promising results using livestock they already had as their No. 1 tool.

They have also achieved successful results over the past five years without spending one dime on expensive research into seeds, genetically modified organisms, root manipulation, climate change adaptation, herbicides, fertilizers, or pesticides, and without special planting or harvesting equipment.

Instead, they focus funds on educating local people in practices that blend some older pastoral knowledge and techniques of animal herding with new understanding of how grazing animals, soils, plants, and organisms coevolved and function in a healthy state.

Savory's approach also means building soils, using the seeds and simple tools already available to them, and enhancing the community's social fabric. Consider the impressive results so far on lands Savory's team owns just south of Victoria Falls:

•More grass than the livestock and wildlife can consume each year on 6,500 acres.

•Increased carrying capacity of that land.

•Increased yields by three to five times on crop fields in local villages.

•A fully restored river system. The Dim­ba­ngombe River in Zimbabwe, seasonally dry for 30 years, now flows perennially and supports fish and crocodiles. More water is flowing through the valley than has ever been known to flow before.

•Increased herds of buffalo, elephants, and other large and small native game.

So profound has this work been that Savory and the Zimbabwe team have just received the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award for "a solution to one of the world's most pressing problems." They have proved, on the ground, that desertification can be reversed while producing increased income and building social good. Private-land owners around the world who have adopted Savory's ideas have experienced similar results.

If we are truly serious about helping Africa, we will not go the route currently being promoted under the Green Revolution II – no matter what appearance of sincerity, talented corporate management, or amount of money there is behind it. Does this mean we should not support technological innovation? Of course not.

But what we must do is find and support those technologies that not only solve a problem or achieve an objective, but also maintain or enhance the social, financial, and biological fabric of the whole system over the long term.

• Shannon Horst, CEO of The Savory Institute, has worked in agriculture in Africa, the US, and other regions for 20 years. She was the Africa desk editor at the Monitor from 1984 to 1985.

Want to explore more? Try these related articles:

• China's green leap forward
• The Monitor's View: Plant a second Green Revolution
• Taking the fire out of farming in Africa
• Blog: A meteor helps reveal West Africa's troubling drought history

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