This briefing will appear in two parts. The first reviews the tortured history of high-cost irrigated rice production in the Senegal River Valley, focusing on the severe economic risks that African peasants have faced since their flood-recession farming system was destroyed in the 1980s. I argue that the input packages of the Gates Foundation's Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) carry similar economic risks. The briefing then examines the profound effects on land tenure of the US Millennium Challenge Corporation's (MCC) projects in Mali and Senegal in order to demonstrate the risks inherent in land privatisation. The topics are closely related in the real world: in 2008 MCC and AGRA signed a formal memorandum of understanding to coordinate their ‘policy dialog’ with African governments (MCC-AGRA 2008).
The second part of the briefing (to be published in ROAPE's next issue) focuses on the perplexing question of why so many African governments are promoting what they call foreign investment, but rural communities call land grabs. It then zeroes in on the twists and turns of one village's determined struggle to resist a state-allied foreign investor and how civil society allies were able to help. The concluding discussion briefly pulls together initial evidence on the new Macky Sall government's agricultural and land reform policies and describes how African peasants and pastoralists are organising against policies they see as making them dependent on foreign-controlled inputs, worsening the risk of losing their land, turning their sons and daughters into miserably paid farm workers, and destroying both the environment and rural communities (Via Campesina 2012).
Introduction
In 2006, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation joined with the Rockefeller Foundation to make a major foray into African agriculture. Calling their programme an Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), Gates and Rockefeller focus on breeding and marketing hybrid seeds (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 2006, 2008). By 2012, AGRA had trained nearly 15,000 village-based agro-dealers to sell seeds, fertilisers and pesticides, most of which are imported (AGRA-Alliance 2012a). AGRA is also training African crop scientists at master's and PhD levels as part of an effort to improve local seeds by breeding what they claim are ‘locally adapted’ hybrid seeds. (Hybrids must be purchased each year.) In several countries, including Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana, AGRA has convinced governments to do research on the genetically modified seeds that Bill Gates enthusiastically espouses for Africa (Aarhus 2012, AGRA-Alliance 2012b, Barnett 2012).
Since its inception, AGRA has supported a range of African rural-focused non-governmental organisations (NGOs), but its work with African collaborators has not changed its focus on hybrid seeds, chemical inputs, and credit schemes that help farmers purchase seeds and fertilisers. This focus may be related to the fact that at the upper level, AGRA has extremely close personnel sharing ties with Monsanto and Syngenta, the world's largest producers of hybrid and genetically modified seeds, pesticides, and herbicides (Aarhus 2012, AGRA Watch n.d., Daño 2007).
AGRA's most prominent critics are African peasant farmers and pastoralist organisations such as the Network of West African Peasant Organisations and Producers (ROPPA), NGOs that work with peasant farmers to develop safe and sustainable agriculture, like Enda-Pronat in Senegal, advocacy groups like the Kenyan African Biodiversity Network that lobby against genetically modified seeds, and international NGOs such as the Pesticide Action Network. African peasant and pastoralist groups pointedly criticise AGRA's focus on expensive, foreign-controlled seeds, fertilisers, and pesticides as both economically unviable and ecologically dangerous (Fisher 2012, CNOP/Via Campesina 2011, Mittal and Moore 2009).
The critics argue that peasant family farming can only be sustained if there is a transition from petroleum-based chemical inputs to agro-ecological inputs, such as organic soil enrichment, natural pesticides, and seeds that can be bred, stored, and controlled locally (Hobbs and Powell 2011). For AGRA's critics, the starting point for sustainable agriculture must be local farmers' own analysis of problems and their joint development with scientists of potential solutions (Sow et al. 2010).
This briefing's analysis of the economic impact on family farmers of a multi-decade, AGRA-like investment in irrigated rice production in the Senegal River Valley contends that it provides a potent example of the economic risks of high-tech ‘green revolutions’ for the great majority of African farmers. The fundamental problem with the AGRA model of agricultural modernisation is the cost of inputs. When a large part of the harvest must be sold to pay for inputs, farmers need credit. But the risks of taking large amounts of credit can be very high: if disaster strikes (drought, locust attacks, family illness), as it so often does in Africa, peasant farmers run the risk of losing everything – their land, their livelihoods, and the communities that have helped them survive disasters for millennia.
Previewing AGRA's risks: the agricultural transformation of the Senegal River Valley
A high-tech green revolution to ‘conquer drought’ in the Senegal River Valley began after the devastating Sahelian droughts of the 1970s badly affected traditional farming and pastoralism. The next two decades saw a total structural change in the agricultural system.1 The massive investments in dams and irrigation to ‘conquer drought’ destroyed what had been a highly productive farming system in which the annual flooding of the valley deeply watered and fertilised the soil, allowing farmers to enjoy an abundant second harvest of food crops during the dry season. Two massive and very expensive dams constructed in the 1980s (the Manantali located in Mali 700 miles from the mouth of the Senegal River and the Diama located near the mouth) enabled hydrologists to keep the river level constant throughout the year. This allowed pumps to bring water to irrigation schemes in which rice could technically be planted in both rainy and dry seasons. The only problem was (and is) that it is not economic to plant rice in the dry season unless huge subsidies are available.
After the dams came on line in the mid 1980s, it was essential that every household have access to the pump-dependent irrigation schemes in order to replace the food supplies traditionally produced in flood-recession fields. But after more than 25 years of trying, the government has still not been able to build enough irrigation schemes to provide all families in the Senegal River Valley with an irrigated plot. The basic reason is that international funding for agriculture essentially dried up in the early 1980s, falling from a high of 19% of overseas development assistance in 1980 to a mere 3% in 2003 (Diouf 2011). Here then is a fundamental risk: an agricultural system that depends on foreign financing is unlikely to be locally sustainable.
The stages of structural adjustment and the crisis of liberalised agriculture in Senegal
The history of peasant irrigated rice production in Senegal from the 1980s to the present shows what can happen when peasant farmers' choices (what to plant and how to grow it) are determined by government and international lenders with little, if any, input from farmers. To better understand how this works, it is important to recall the historical context. For nearly a century, a great many colonial and independent governments in Africa used export crop agencies to control the prices of both agricultural inputs and outputs with the dual objective of maximising returns to the state and keeping urban food prices low. Peasant incomes have been so tightly squeezed that farmers have rarely been able to finance even moderate agricultural investments on their own. And today, even though Senegalese rice farmers manage their own village irrigation schemes, the economics of their enterprise is highly dependent on government policy, which is itself highly influenced by international lenders and international prices.
Since the very beginning of rice production in the Senegal River Valley in the 1970s, the government's rice promotion agency, Société d'aménagement et d'exploitation des terres du delta et de la vallée du fleuve Sénégal (SAED), has had a critical role in assisting rice farmers both technically and economically. In the 1970s and 1980s, it provided seeds, fertiliser, and fuel for the irrigation pumps on credit. It then purchased enough of the rice harvest to permit farmers to pay off their debts. For nearly two decades, inputs were subsidised. But even with subsidies, farmers had to sell a quarter of their harvest in order to pay their debts (Seck 1991).
In the mid 1980s, the World Bank began imposing its infamous structural adjustment policies, policies that progressively undermined the farm-level economic viability of irrigated rice production. In 1986, the bank abruptly abandoned its policy of encouraging African governments to use input subsidies to promote ‘modern’ agriculture and began to prohibit subsidies. Without subsidies, farmers had to sell a third of their rice harvest to pay their debt to SAED (ibid). What was left could only feed the typical 10-person family for about six months. Farmers had to scramble to purchase more food from non-farm earnings. Some migrated to the city during the dry season. Some sent their sons to seek work in Europe (Koopman 2007, Dahou 2008).
Why did farmers not abandon rice production and return to traditional flood-recession agriculture which, when rains were adequate, offered excellent yields and free fertiliser in the form of silt from the river? The answer is simple. They couldn't. Even though the rains were returning, the traditional flood-recession system had been all but destroyed when the dams came online in the mid 1980s. Technically, the upstream dam managers could have created an artificial flood by releasing large amounts of water from the dam's reservoir during the natural flood period. This would have allowed farmers to engage in both irrigated and flood-recession agriculture. But an artificial flood was never produced. Instead the three governments that control the dams (Senegal, Mali and Mauritania) have prioritised the maximisation of hydroelectricity output at all times (Koopman 2007).
A major goal of structural adjustment was to cut back government spending. In Senegal, a primary target was the government rice parastatal, SAED. By the late-1980s, the agency was forced to fire its extension agents and the mechanics who serviced the village irrigation pumps. Rice production declined. Then in the early 1990s, in what was perhaps the most devastating move for poor farmers, the agency had to stop providing inputs on credit. A new agricultural bank was created with World Bank assistance, but its profit orientation made it all but inaccessible to peasant farmers. So if rice farmers were to be able to pay for seeds, fertiliser, and fuel, they had to send their sons out of the village to seek cash incomes. The economic shock was magnified in 1994 when France made a unilateral decision to devalue the West African franc. Prices of imported inputs immediately doubled. This was too big a blow for most family farmers; huge numbers were forced to abandon their irrigation schemes. By 1995, of the 72,000 hectares of irrigated land in the valley, less than 30,000 were cultivated (Adams 2000). Incredibly there was even worse to come.
In 1995, when global rice prices were falling, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) pressured the Senegalese government to adopt a policy of ‘total liberalization’ of the rice sector (Tardif-Douglin, Metzel and Randolph 1998). The government rice agency had to stop buying rice so that private traders could take over. Predictably, private rice traders did not take over. Making a profit when village roads were often impassable was too difficult. Better to just import rice, especially when world prices were low. In 2003 I saw hundreds of bags of unsold rice stored in village sheds. This was the ultimate disaster: rice farmers could not purchase inputs for the next season because they could not sell their harvest. That year only 15,000 hectares of the 80,000 hectares of irrigation schemes constructed since the 1970s were cultivated – less than 20% (Sambe 2007). Production languished for the next five years.2
Government's about-face – the return to producer subsidies
After the near collapse of rice production and the food price riots (in Senegal and elsewhere) that followed a massive spike in the international rice price in 2007, former President Wade, like many other African leaders, defied the international lenders by reinstating producer subsidies. Since 2008, subsidies have been high – 50% for fertiliser and even higher for seeds. Farmers responded by increasing planting from the low of 15,000 hectares in 2003 to a record high of 72,000 hectares in 2011 (Agence de Presse Sénégalaise 2012a). Rice production reached a record 630,000 tons of paddy (unhulled rice) by the 2010–2011 harvest (Mbodj 2011). But the boom was not to last.
Soon after the massive subsidies were in place, corruption and smuggling problems began (Faye 2010, Mbengue 2010, Ndiaye and Ngom 2010a, 2010b). To deal with this problem, President Wade decided to transfer input distribution to Japando, a ‘union’ of peasants and pastoralist organisations he had personally created in 2009 in order to counter the growing power of the legitimate peasant movement, which is highly developed in Senegal.3 By late 2011, rising international fertiliser prices, Japando's incompetence, and continued smuggling resulted in the near total disappearance of subsidised inputs. The price of a bag of fertiliser more than doubled (Kane 2011). Rice farmers had to cut back drastically. The 2011–2012 rice harvest fell by half (Gueye 2011).
The economic risks of foreign-controlled inputs
The Gates-Rockefeller Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa does not acknowledge that a ‘green revolution’ with high priced hybrid seeds, oil-based chemical fertilisers and pesticides places heavy economic risks on peasant farmers. But these risks are many and severe. Among them:
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The risk that the prices of seeds, fertilisers, and pesticides produced by multinational corporations will increase steadily over time, while the prices of the crops farmers sell will move in an unpredictable seesaw. The patenting of seeds by powerful multinational corporations means that their prices almost always trend upward, whereas the prices of crops themselves can vary enormously depending on factors that range from weather to financial speculation in global food markets. In the past few years, global price volatility has become such an important risk factor in food markets that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation dedicated the 2011 World Hunger Report to the topic (Food and Agriculture Organisation 2011). In this globally determined price context, African peasants are highly vulnerable to losses that can dramatically reduce or even wipe out their incomes.
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The risk that African governments will not be able to sustain an efficient and equitable system of subsidies needed to make high-cost food production systems viable for peasant family farmers. In Senegal, the fertiliser subsidy alone accounts for 35% of the agriculture ministry's budget; total agricultural subsidies account for 70% (Ndaw 2012). Of course, government input subsidies to farmers also allow multinational seed and fertiliser producers to keep their prices high.
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The risk that North American and European trade partners will continue to subsidise their farmers, threatening African peasants with the loss of their local markets (EuropAfrica 2006). This threat affects both male farmers, who control grain production, and women farmers, who grow vegetables on their own account. In 2003, women onion farmers in the Senegal River Valley told me that they knew exactly when imports of cheap onions from Holland hit the national market because local onion prices immediately dropped.
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The risk that if African farmers are pressured to adopt hybrid or genetically modified seeds on a wide scale, traditional seed stocks will decline or disappear, reducing the genetic diversity African farmers currently use to cope with climate change, and drastically increasing their dependence on foreign-controlled seeds.
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The risk that AGRA or one of its multinational partners will patent seeds developed by African scientists or will limit Africans whose PhDs are supported by grants from the Gates Foundation to working primarily with seeds already patented. As far as I know, AGRA has thus far kept the terms of its grants and contracts with African institutions and individual scientists secret – a practice that I have been told AGRA's partner, Monsanto, requires of the PhD candidates it supports.
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The risk that the AGRA model of modernisation based on foreign-produced and foreign-priced inputs will cause the economic collapse of Africa's small family farms. When caught in the squeeze periodically generated by seesawing world food prices and steadily increasing input costs, African farmers often have to default on input credit. If high cost inputs are not economically viable for peasant farmers, they may eventually be forced into bankruptcy and have to give up their land.
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The spectre that family farmers will be put under pressure to seek titles for their land in order to use it as loan collateral, raising the risk of widespread peasant dispossession. Once farmers mortgage their land, the risks of bad weather, loss of harvests to bird or locust attacks, family illness, or even negative price changes on international markets can force them to default. If significant numbers of farmers default, whole communities can lose their land and the emergency help that village life tends to provide.
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The risk that land privatisation will lead to massive dispossession of women farmers. Raj Shah, the USAID director, asserted in an interview on PBS on 18 May 2012 that African women farmers need a title to land so that they can get a loan. Nothing could be more risky for women. Almost all must work on family fields controlled by their husbands before tending their own crops. Furthermore, women must devote much of their harvest to feeding their children. All this, as women farmers have told me directly over many years, makes credit ‘too risky’. In Africa, the gender and land issue is far more complex than the head of USAID implies. With privatisation, it is likely to be mainly men who get titles to land (Faye 2008). If a male family head then mortgages household land and defaults on the loan, the land that women and younger men farm can be lost. Furthermore, research in the Sahel has found that some household heads invoke patriarchal privilege to sell their land without even consulting the rest of the family (Hilhorst, Nelen and Traoré 2011).
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The risk that women farmers will lose income if their community's common land is being privatised. When communities cede common lands – wetlands, forests, pastures – to outside investors (as in the MCA-Sénégal case discussed below), critical parts of women's own-account farming and food processing, like shea butter production in West Africa, are often lost (Oakland Institute 2011). When common lands are privatised, pastoralist women often lose access to their cattle, the source of their small, but critical, earnings from milk and milk products.
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The risk that the output of medium-sized commercial farms (15–50 hectares) will not have a positive impact on rural food security. Commercial farmers may take villagers' land without adding anything to the national food supply. A study of national agricultural investors in Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger found that domestic investors have not had either better yields or much larger harvests than peasant farmers (Hilhorst, Nelen and Traoré 2011). Furthermore, in Senegal successful commercial farmers usually export most of the food they produce.
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The risk that land privatisation will lead the way to more land grabs by agribusiness or other investors who cannot provide enough jobs to absorb the dispossessed population. This risk of massive unemployment caused by land grabs is extremely high in Africa where the urban formal sector is not producing jobs, and an already overcrowded informal sector cannot be counted on to assure the survival of rural families forced to leave their villages (Li 2011). The implications of this scenario for the intensification of hunger in the majority of African countries where well over half the national labour force makes a living in agriculture are chilling.
The AGRA-MCC alliance: paving the way for peasant-pastoralist dispossession?
The US Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) offers selected countries huge grants (often more than US$500 million dollars) for projects that have been negotiated with the government. The focus of MCC projects in West Africa has been on building agricultural infrastructure (irrigation schemes and roads) and on land privatisation. The MCC typically begins by seeking government permission to set up special zones where MCC is granted the right to develop a privatised land holding system (Grain 2010). It then invests in irrigation or other land improvements that allow it to reconfigure the land into standardised plots, the smaller of which are given or sold to the customary landholders of the area. Plots of 30–50 hectares are also reserved for national investors, such as government elites and wealthy businessmen, while much larger areas are reserved for foreign agribusiness. I want to look at two cases: Mali and Senegal, both of which are at early stages, but which clearly reveal the problems of the MCC approach to land ‘securitisation’ which is, in these cases, privatisation.
Mali: taking pastoralist land for irrigated rice cultivation
The land the Malian government allocated to the MCC is located in an as yet un-irrigated area near the massive Markala dam on the Niger River. The dam, built in the 1980s, expanded the irrigation potential in the area to 700,000 hectares, but since foreign lenders stopped providing funds in the late 1980s, the government has only been able to construct 90,000 hectares of irrigated plots for local farmers (Oakland Institute 2011). Unsurprisingly, there is a huge land grab going on.
MCA-Mali4 has been allocated 22,000 hectares of land currently used by Fulani pastoralists who move their herds seasonally between their villages in the Niger River Valley and upland pastures. The irrigation project will divide the entire area into irrigated plots, eliminating the possibility of keeping large herds in this area during the crucial dry season. The deal MCA-Mali is proposing to the pastoralists is to allocate five hectare plots to each household. The catch is that the household will have to take a 20-year mortgage to purchase three of the five hectares. The two hectare plots ‘given’ to local households will be used as loan collateral for the purchase of the other three (Grain 2010). The pastoralists are expected to pay US$5775 to US$7700 per hectare (Oakland Institute 2011, p. 21). To put this breathtaking price in perspective, one must realise that farm workers' wages in this area can be as low as US$1.00 to US$1.50 per day (Oakland Institute 2011, p. 31). The pastoralists will also be required to buy packets of seeds and other inputs provided by AGRA in order to cultivate the land (Grain 2010).
Accepting this ‘deal’ requires that the local pastoralists give up their traditional livelihoods and become high-tech farmers using expensive inputs while facing volatile or government-controlled output prices – the scenario that has wreaked such havoc among the rice farmers of the Senegal River Valley. It seems very clear to me that the risks discussed above as well as the extraordinary price of the irrigated plots the pastoralists are expected to purchase, make this deal totally untenable.5 Indeed, Mamadou Goïta, a prominent leader of the West African Peasants' Federation, predicts that 90% of the Malian pastoralists who take loans to buy their plots will lose them (Diouf 2010). When they are gone, there will be more land available for the MCC-Mali's second phase which consists of selling irrigated plots of 10 to 30 hectares to Malian commercial farmers and far larger irrigated areas to foreign investors.
MCA-Sénégal's bargain in Senegal: give up land to get irrigation
In September 2009, the MCC signed an agreement with the Senegalese government that provided a US$500 million grant to construct 35,000 hectares of irrigation infrastructure and to rehabilitate 80 miles of the only national highway in the Senegal River Valley. The agreement also gave the MCA-Sénégal permission to develop a land security project, whose objective is to ‘formalize the occupation of irrigated parcels in conformity with modern law’ (MCA-Sénégal n.d.). The MCC's rationale for its land reform is that ‘raising the value of land through irrigation raises the specter of conflicts between the local population and outside investors’ (ibid.).
In December 2011, MCA-Sénégal hosted a workshop on ‘The securing of land and land grabs: current situation, challenges, and proposals for solutions’ (Agence de Presse Sénégalaise 2011a). During the workshop, people within the MCA zone were invited to express their opinions on land issues. They did. Some suggested that the community-developed plan of land occupation and allocation (POAS), which was completed in 2006, be given legal standing. The POAS process of community-based land-use planning has been very popular in the Senegal River Valley because it builds on traditional patterns of land use and land sharing between farmers and pastoralists that have been successfully used for centuries. Giving these plans legal standing would help to consolidate both farmers and pastoralists' rights over their customarily recognised land areas. The MCA-Sénégal land director's response to the idea of using the already established land use plan as a basis for local land security was vague. According to the press report, rather than addressing the issue directly, he simply said that MCA-Senegal would ‘take account of these opinions during the next five years’ (ibid).
Then just before the conference ended, the director announced that MCA-Sénégal had reached an agreement with several communities in the area of the Senegal River Delta that the MCC is developing. The agreement stipulated that once the community's irrigation infrastructures were completed, ‘60 percent of the land would revert to the community, while 40 percent would be for persons from outside the community’ (Agence de Presse Sénégalaise 2011b). Even though this was something I should have anticipated, I was stunned. The fundamental issue around land use had been decided well before MCA-Sénégal's ‘participatory workshop’ on land grabs. In order to get their degraded or abandoned irrigation schemes rehabilitated, local farmers have had to agree to give up 40% of their customarily owned land to ‘persons from outside the community’, including foreign investors.
The Gates-Rockefeller response to the land issue?
In an unpublished document dated July 2008, the Gates Foundation suggested that the ‘poorest’ farmers will eventually leave agriculture (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 2008). But with the many risks facing all peasant family farmers using high-tech farming methods, I would contend that it is unlikely that only a small number of poor peasants will be pushed off the land. An AGRA-type green revolution will surely lead to the dispossession of substantial numbers of farmers and pastoralists. And when it does, where will AGRA sell its high-tech seeds and input packages? The answer is obvious. With their deep pockets and guaranteed foreign or multinational food corporation markets, the agro-investors who are currently grabbing millions of hectares of African land will be very good customers for the seed packages that AGRA-trained scientists are breeding specifically for African environments.6
What is the US government response to the land issue?
The US government has long promoted ‘reforms’ in African land laws to privatise land. As the cases in Mali and Senegal suggest, when the MCC conditions its expensive infrastructure investments on agreements allowing it to develop a system that permits ‘legal’ land transfers, it is setting up the conditions for land sales by the majority of African peasants who are likely to go bankrupt under high-cost intensive agricultural systems. By setting aside land in its irrigation projects for national investors, MCC is reducing elite-based opposition to large-scale land transfers by making sure that there will be medium-sized parcels of irrigated land reserved for ‘commercial farmers’, i.e. political, military and religious leaders, civil servants, businessmen.
Like the Gates and Rockefeller foundations, the US government surely realises that many, many African peasant farmers cannot survive in the world of globalised high-tech agriculture. Indeed, by setting up systems that force peasant farmers to go into debt in order to farm, the US government is risking the bankruptcy of a large number of peasant farmers and pastoralists. Why do they pursue this course?
The best analysis I have seen thus far is by David Andrews who suggests that one way to understand official US thinking on agricultural modernisation is to consider how heavily influenced US government agricultural agencies are by multinational corporations engaged in seed and input production, food production, food processing and food marketing. At the 2001 World Economic Forum in Davos, for example, the US State Department officially named 17 corporations as its ‘partners in development’, among them Cargill, DuPont, Yara International, Syngenta and Monsanto (Andrews 2011). These, of course, are the very corporations that benefit mightily from AGRA's promotion of their patented seeds, pesticides and herbicides and from MCC projects that open up their access to African land. Their power was recently enhanced when they were officially recognised as the ‘private sector partners’ in the Group of Eight's New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition unveiled on 18 May 2012 by President Obama.
Note on contributor
Jeanne Koopman is an economist specialising in the political economy of African agriculture, and a visiting researcher at Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts. She has lived in Togo, Cameroon, Tanzania, and Senegal and has taught at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, and at the Institut des Sciences de l'Environnement, Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal.