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Green Revolution: first major policy area after elections?
2005-11-01 07:12:09
By Nimi Mweta
Sifting through the breadth of campaign promises to get something of a real indicator of what lies in store in terms of policies is difficult, for the wheat is always mixed with the chaff.
What is said for the sake of lifting a burden of expectations, the wish to be promised, is mixed with what the candidate(s) actually intend to do, assuming that this aspect filters into speeches as well.
They may cleverly try to hide it but not fully succeed.
The wish to conduct a Green Revolution has come up in a number of statements by CCM presidential candidate Jakaya Kikwete, and tends to give him an image of a modernist in the field.
Other leaders (phases, for that matter) either saw things in terms of a collective effort (first phase), changing marketing patterns (second phase) or infrastructure, loans (third phase). No one talked about a revolution in farming, changing the seeds and cattle.
The CCM candidate has mentioned these issues twice or thrice among the more intensely reported speeches of his, for instance at Meatu where he castigated nomadic livestock rearing.
He said neither the herdsmen nor the cattle remain healthy when they have to cover huge distances seeking pastures (and water), in which case the building of troughs may help out.
That may not have been revolutionary, unlike the Green Revolution idea.
Contributions towards zeroing on the Green Revolution as a major task may have come from various quarters, but there is no denying that the idea is in the air, as it were.
A recent expert was suggesting lately (in relation to using genetically modified seeds) that Africa missed the Green Revolution (in the 1960s and ’70s), and it should therefore not sit out on the Genetic Revolution (of the 1990s and first decade of this millennium).
And it is just recently that the mood has calmed enough to talk soberly about using the seeds.
For one thing, it is possible that the candidate has good working relations at the level of ideas with his running mate, or co-ticket holder if this rough US slang is avoided.
Dr Ali Mohamed Shein came from the Bandoung conference, the Indonesian city where the non-aligned movement was created about 50 years ago, bursting (critics will say bubbling) with ideas.
Part of it was the Green Revolution, and a wider view of it was getting Africa to adopt the ways of Asia - which developed fast in past decades while we soundly slept.
India for instance adopted the revolution in hybrid seeds in the 1960s and 1970s, and soon its agriculture changed, but we make small steps in research, to make our own varieties, etc.
There has been a wide introduction of heifers, but the supporting structure has lacked, market outlets are weak because incomes are too low since peasants are the majority of the country.
Bangladesh formed a People’s Bank to loan to the poor – on the basis of the private ownership of their plots of land, and collateral, unlike our land policy.
If the candidate and his co-candidate discuss the vision of economy they will follow, there is a chance that the doctoral credentials of the latter be brought to good use, in the sense of impressing upon the ’ticket’ what change the country needs, and how to go about it.
Yet there will be formidable bottlenecks since the temple guardians of the old order of technology and ideology aren’t hanging their gloves any time soon. They will take up in earnest any call to battle, to defend their cherished communalism of land, and local seeds.
While Dr Shein has been saying that Africa – and Tanzania for that matter – needs to take up the ways of Asia, to see how they changed their economies, the old older takes things in a half-hearted manner.
Indeed on this account it is uncertain if the ’ticket holders’ are themselves sufficiently clear with the sort of reforms needed, or it comes to pass that they are also drowned into the slogans of the old order.
For instance there is new wisdom that Asia developed fast because of education – not parcelling out land, or Green Revolution.
For one thing, it is also possible that the candidate (in particular) may have examined the whole problem of getting farming on a commercial framework – as this issue has been shouted about so much it doesn’t need a qualified economist to think about it.
Yet with the current tradition of taking livestock across large expanses of land, and peasants who have rights on village land and much of what lies beyond, how can land rights ever be accorded to investors?
So far neither Dr Shein nor JK have started thinking of parcelling out land, which would rapidly permit its being bought by investors, changing the market.
Whether or not ’reality’ will eventually compel the ’ticket holders’ to take quite radical measures to bring about change is uncertain. But there is something in JK that wasn’t there in Benjamin Mkapa’s campaign, where technique was scarcely at issue but firstly removing elements of bad governance and ’helping’ peasants.
NGOs and academic or other stakeholders, whose incomes are tied to such policies, insist it is the only way out.
They can’t pay attention to ’Asian examples,’ they merely want greater aid commitments, and chances that such methods can work, create local markets for industry, are next to nil.
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