Native crops offer way to combat food insecurity in Africa

With new tactics, US envoy seeks to boost resilience

Cary Fowler once helped build an Arctic vault to save the world’s great variety of crop seeds from extinction. Now, as the State Department’s global envoy for food security, he is trying to plant a new seed in US foreign policy.

Instead of urging developing countries to grow only huge amounts of staple grains, including maize, as American policy has done for decades in Africa, Fowler is promoting a return to the great variety of traditional crops that people used to grow more of, such as cowpeas, cassava, and a range of millets.

He calls them “opportunity crops” because they’re sturdy and full of nutrients.

The effort is still in its infancy, with a relatively tiny budget of $100 million. But at a time when climate shocks and rising costs are aggravating food insecurity and raising the risks of political instability, the stakes are high.

Fowler’s boss, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, said last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the idea could be “genuinely revolutionary.”

Traditional crops are more nourishing for the consumers and for the soils in which they are grown, according to Fowler, and they are better at withstanding the wild weather brought by climate change. The problem, he says, is that they’ve been ignored by plant breeders. His goal, through the new State Department initiative, is to increase the agricultural productivity of the most nutritious and climate-hardy among them.

The initial focus is on a half dozen crops in a half dozen countries in Africa.

“These crops have been grown for thousands of years in Africa,” Fowler, 74, said in a recent interview. “They’re doing something right. They’re embedded in the culture. They really supply nutrition. If they have yield problems or other barriers to commercialization, frankly, by and large, it’s because we haven’t invested in them.”

Critics say that while a focus on crop diversity and soil health is welcome, breeding crops for the commercial market may do little to improve the health and well-being of small farmers in low-income countries. It’s still unclear who would produce the seeds, whether farmers would have to buy them, to what extent the new seeds need chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and whether genetically modified seeds would be included.

Fowler’s office said individual countries would set their own guidelines on what kinds of seeds would be permitted in their territories and how they would be procured.

“There are some interesting hints or nods in the right direction: the focus on crop diversity and nutrition, Indigenous knowledge, a focus on neglected crops,” said Bill Moseley, a professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., who has worked on agriculture programs with the US Agency for International Development and the World Bank. “What’s really important is that you think about a poor farmer and what are their constraints and how do you develop something that’s really useful for them.”

Food has long been part of the US foreign policy arsenal.

In the 1960s and ’70s, the US-led Green Revolution focused on producing more food — specifically more maize, wheat, and rice — using fertilizers, pesticides, and hybrid seeds. Maize yields, for instance, soared, thanks to investments in plant breeding. In much of southern and eastern Africa, maize became the major food grain.

“We focused on traditional and Indigenous crops, because they haven’t gotten the focus ever before,” Fowler said. “This program is not about telling farmers when to grow or telling people what to eat. It’s about presenting options.”