Seed Tribe

Earlier this week, I attended a workshop to discuss the future financing of Africa's seed industry, convened by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa and held at one of Nairobi's swankiest hotels, Tribe, located next to the Village Market in Gigiri. While Tribe is an extremely stylish venue, no question, it fails the gestalt test in that its constituent parts make up much more than its whole. Everything is beautiful - yet together it somehow lacks a coherent theme. The venue aside, the workshop itself was outstanding.

Some six years ago, nobody was interested in investing in Africa's seed sector, so the presence of at least six representatives from actual or potential investors was very encouraging. Increasing populations, increasing food prices and long term investment in the breeding of crop varieties specifically suited to a range of different topographies have created an environment which may break the low input/low output cycle in African agriculture.

But attractive industry fundamentals don't automatically result in attractive investment opportunities. Managing a seed business is difficult and fraught with risk. It involves the maintenance of "breeder seed" - the parental material from which hybrid seed is itself produced. It involves uninsurable agricultural risks (drought, disease, pests, etc), regardless of whether it is produced by outgrowers or on owned farm land. Especially for hybrid seed, maintaining appropriate isolation during crop flowering to avoid genetic contamination is a challenge. Once the seed crop is harvested, it needs to be transported for sorting, drying, processing and storage, with attendant logistics and processing risks. Because agriculture is seasonal, all this has to be done some 5-8 months before the seeds are actually sold to farmers, which in turn leads to a cash flow challenge during the holding period. And then, seed companies face the universal business challenge of managing their large number of small agro-dealer debtors.......


Growth, too, brings its own business challenges. An owner-manager can generally manage a small business without too much managerial support, but as his/her business grows, s/he must invest in recruiting new managers, the development of business administration systems, internal controls and the delegation of authority.

Given all these risks, it often amazes me that there are people out there who want to take up this challenge and deliver improved seed to Africa's farmers. But there are, and they are a remarkable group of astonishingly determined and unsung heroes. During the conference, Aline O'Connor Funk, consultant to AGRA and a former seed business owner-manager in the United States, shared with us the tag-line of the American Seed Association. "First, the seed". It would take a brave person to disagree.

My memory of 9/11

It's hard to believe that it's the tenth anniversary of the assault on New York and the World Trade Centre. People of my parents' generation used to say that they could always remember what they were doing on the day of JFK's assassination in 1963. I suspect 9/11 will have the same impact for my generation.

I was at home in Harare, at number 25 Brentford Road, close to Ballantyne Park. In August 2001, after a particularly gruelling travel schedule, shuttling between the UK, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya and Zimbabwe, I came down with a very painful and debilitating attack of shingles. Because I was struggling to recover, the CDC medical adviser, the redoubtable Dr Paul Clarke, advised me to have specialist medical review in the UK.

As chance would have it, my UK flight was scheduled for about 9 pm on the evening of 9/11, when the news broke at about 4 pm Southern African time. I was busy packing my bags for the flight. The BBC website bore the extraordinary and unthinkable breaking news that first one and then a second aircraft had crashed into the World Trade Centre. I remember switching on the TV and seeing the first footage before setting off for Harare's airport in a taxi.

The mood on arrival at the airport and in the BA departure lounge was sombre. Together with the other passengers, I watched events unfolding on CNN and Sky TV. A lot of alcohol was being consumed in silence. Later, as we boarded the BA flight to London (one of the last flights before many airlines grounded their planes), I found myself sitting next to an Algerian-born female journalist. We chatted for a while, anxiously, both slightly drunk, before lapsing into silence as the cabin lights were dimmed and the plane thundered down the runway. Oddly - perhaps because of the alcohol or because of my illness - I had the best night's sleep on a plane that I have ever had.

Real Impact

Back in the innocent days, "malnutrition" was used as another word for famine. I still remember the shock of Michael Buerk's reports from Ethiopia in 1984, when pictures of malnourished children horrified the British public and inspired Bob Geldof's extraordinary Live Aid campaign. Today, famine has returned to East Africa, threatening the survival of up to one million Somalis (maybe more) and, indirectly, the stability of the region as a whole.

Since then, the aid industry has become, for want of a better word, professionalised. There are hundreds of new organsations working alongside the UN, the International Red Cross, Oxfam, Save The Children, Care et al, all of whom have communications and PR departments vying with each other for press coverage and donor recognition for their work. Yet, despite the proliferation and professionalisation, thr four horsemen of the apocalypse still have their powers undimmed, and the survival of millions is at severe risk. To be fair, Somalia presents a unique set of challenges to the distributors of emergency food supplies. The state of anarchy that has prevailed since the late 1980s and a complete lack of basic physical and social infrastructure creates an extremely dangerous vacuum for the aid agencies to operate in.

But malnutrition is not just about the quantity of food available, but also its nutritional content. The FAO estimates that up to 80% of malnoursihed children live in countries with food surpluses. Countless people across East Africa (and elsewhere, of course) suffer from an impoverished diet, excessive in carbohydrates and frequently lacking in essential vitamins and minerals. The poor quality of diet manifests itself in numerous chronic health conditions, in particular in the high and increasing rates of diabetes in the region.

There are two general solutions to poor nutrition: one, do nothing about the diet itself, but fortify its constituents with synthetically-produced vitamins and minerals. I call this the sticking-plaster approach, doing nothing about the fundamental cause of the problem, nor addressing some of the long term adverse health consequences of poor diet. However, it seems to be the preferred solution by health ministries in the region - in Kenya, for example, it is becoming common for maize flour and even sugar manufacturers to add Vitamin A and other nutritional supplements to their products. This is a good thing, in that it does at least ensure that children (in particular) have sufficient nutrition to grow properly, but it needs to be balanced with a second solution, which addresses the root cause of the problem and provide people with the education, knowledge and practical guidance to improve their diets. To be more specific, with regard to Vitamin A deficiency, the Kenyan consumer can purchase vitamin A-fortified bags of sugar, but s/he should also eat more pumpkins and carrots.

About five years ago, l made an investment, through African Agricultural Capital, in an early stage integrated pest management (IPM) business operating in Thika, central Kenya, called Real IPM. The business began by supplying phytoseiulus persimilis (a mite which preys on rose growers' most damaging pest, the red spider mite) to the Kenyan floricultural industry, thereby enabling rose growers to use fewer synthetic pesticides with both cost and environmental benefits. Since then, Real IPM has grown into a successful biopesticides and IPM business, developing its product range, its customer base and its geographical scope.

Not content with its success alone, its founders, Louise Labuschagne and Henry Wainwright, have established a not-for-profit organisation called Real Impact (http://www.realimpact.or.ke/) which is pioneering the improvement of nutrition in and around the Thika area of central Kenya, working with a range of organisations (schools, hospitals, community organisations, etc) to establish "nutrition gardens" - essentially equipping these organisations with the skills and know-how to improve the diets of their beneficiaries through the cultivation of kitchen gardens with a range of vegetables, legumes and staples designed to improve the nutritional profile of a Kenyan institutional diet.

Nutrition gardens may not be a solution for Somalia, but they do offer a much more sustainable solution to malnutrition than the sticking-plaster of food additives. Knowing the tenacity and determination that has propelled the growth of Real IPM, I am sure that Real Impact will live up to its name, and, in time, transform dietary behaviour in its chosen region and beyond.

Goat racing

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending Kampala's leading social event of the year, the Royal Ascot Goat Races at the Speke Resort in Munyonyo, as a member of a syndicate with a goat in each race. In keeping with tradition, goats are named by their owners, their names being derived from (fictitious) sires and dams. One of our goats was the superbly named Hugh Grant - by California Freeway out of Devine - but alas, he failed to rise to the occasion.

The racing itself is entirely incidental to the day out. Goats aren't like greyhounds - they don't run for fun - and they are of course too small to have jockeys to urge them along. So the racecourse consists of a grassy oval, fenced inside and out, and the goats are pushed around the course by a kind of manual snowplough. Every now and again, one breaks into a trot, and, as they approach the finishing line, that is what decides the winner. Our syndicate managed one winner and one third place, which was almost enough to cover the costs of purchasing the animals. The real benefit of ownership, though, is that it confers VIP status on syndicate members, with entry to the owners' marquee with unlimited food and beer and wine on tap.

This is a Kampala society day out, to come, to see and to be seen, to drink copiously, to admire the ladies dressed up to the nines, and to forget..... And, brash though it is, it does raise a great deal of money for local charities, and in that regard at least, it probably delivers more social value than its infinitely more famous eponymous parent in the third week of June in England.

No Exit

Kampala Amateur Dramatics Society's next production will be the great French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis Clos, usually translated in English to No Exit. It will be staged on the first two weekends in November as a dinner theatre production, and offers Kampala audiences something very different to KADS's usual fare.

The plot is simple: three condemned souls are incarcerated in a room in which the essentials of any sort of civilised life are absent - no bathroom, no privacy, no books, no mirrors. Their punishment is to torture each other by picking over each other's lives in an eternal present from which there is no escape. The play's most famous quote is "L'enfer, c'est les autres" (Hell is other people) but my own favourite is Garcin's observation that [the three lost souls] "are chasing after each other, round and round, in a vicious circle, like horses on a merry-go-round."

A friend observed yesterday that Sartre's hell is very close to his own idea of hell: a place in which God/Jesus is absent. It's hard to disagree: there is no God and no love in the room - and the natural world is completely closed off - but it also makes me think of the hell of the Big Brother house, where repulsive contestants voluntarily subject themselves to a complete lack of privacy in exchange for the possibility of winning a large cash prize, and, ghouls that we are, we revel in their torments for the vicarious pleasure of not being there with them.

No Exit certainly promises to provide some food for thought (please excuse the pun) for its dining audience in November. It will make challenging and thought-provoking theatre, itself all too absent in KADS' normal round of frothy comedies, feelgood musicals and traditional pantomime.

Cassava Disease

About this time last year, the Economist featured an article about the spread of new varieties of stem rust, a fungal disease which can cause significant crop losses in wheat. The variety of stem rust causing most anxiety among agricultural scientists is rather unimaginatively called UG99, having been first observed by Ugandan researcher William Wagoire in 1999.

Stem rust (pictured) is not a new disease: the late great Norman Borlaug's work initially focused on breeding stem rust-resistant wheat varieties, when he made the serendipitous discovery of the gene Sr31 that not only increased tolerance to stem rust, but also substantially increased yields (and was one of the most important contributors to the Green Revolution in the 1960s).

It's not clear yet how widespread Ug99 will become, or how it can be controlled, and so it presents a considerable threat to the world's most important food crop (alongside rice).

Given the importance of agriculture, it used to surprise me how seldom news stories like this appear. On reflection, though, perhaps it isn't really so surprising. I recently read, for the first time, Amartya Sen's long essay Poverty and Famine, in which the renowned economist argued that famine was caused not by the non-availability of food, but rather by inefficient food distribution mechanisms and a lack of money. Experience bears this out - when was the last time anyone heard of a serious food shortage in a wealthy country with decent roads and other infrastructure? As a result of this - and the separation of modern urban life from the soil - the overwhelming majority have no experience or understanding of agriculture. A constant food supply is taken for granted, so why on earth would agriculture be in any way newsworthy?

This week, however, I was surprised to hear a similar story on BBC World Sevice on another critical staple crop, cassava. As many as a billion people depend on cassava's starchy roots as a staple food, and yet it is hardly known outside the tropics (except in the long-deceased tapioca pudding of my youth). It is particularly important in West Africa, and also in parts of East & Central Africa.

Cassava is an excellent food security crop, as it can survive in drought conditions. In areas of Uganda, it is treated as a "food bank" - when supplies of fresh matooke bananas or other staples run low, cassava roots provide a reserve source of carbohydrates. In other parts of the world, cassava is also used for industrial starch production, for animal feeds and, more recently, as a feeder crop for ethanol production.

TheBBC report highlighted a report just published by the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture. The report warns of the dangers presented by cassava's four most damaging pests and diseases: cassava mosaic disease (pictured), green mite, brown streak disease and whitefly. The report urges the establishment of early warning systems for disease outbreaks, so that they can be contained quickly and effectively before spreading to other regions. Cassava, like bananas and potatoes, is propagated using plant cuttings rather than conventional seed. This means that infected plants can move rapidly from region to region, increasing the risk of disease transmission.

It's not the exciting political news that keeps us glued to CNN and Al-Jazeera newsfeeds. But, for the billions that make up the so-called bottom of the pyramid, it's a lot more important.

Malawi shandy

A Malawi shandy is simple and delicious: a mixture of soda water, lemonade, ginger beer and angostura bitters, served with plenty of ice cubes in the largest available glass to hand. Nothing better on a hot Southern African day (except possibly a cold beer). Sadly, I missed out on a Malawi shandy during my most recent visit, but apart from that, my visit to the "warm heart of Africa" did not disappoint.

It was good to see considerable progress at both of our Malawi investee seed companies, Seed Tech and Funwe Farm. Production volumes on the increase and belief in and commitment to the future. As with all East & Southern African countries, agriculture is the modus vivendi for the majority. The Malawi government introduced a highly successful Agricutural Inputs Susbidy Programme about four years ago: a well-managed subsidy scheme that has led to considerable growth in the distribution of quality certified seeds and fertiliser throughout the country, created an opportunity for seed companies to develop and, if reports are accurate, led to an increase in farm yields of between 50% and 100%.

And yet the future of this successful programme may be in jeopardy, because Malawi is running out of money. An undignified spat with the British government earlier this year led to the mutual expulsion of high commissioners, followed by a suspension by the British of budgetary support to the Malawi government, in turn followed by the reduction and suspension of other bilateral aid programmes to the country. Malawi is heavily dependent on aid inflows, among other things because of its considerable trade imbalance, and the suspension of aid has resulted in a shortage of foreign exchange - most clearly visible in queues at petrol stations and the informal rationing of fuel. Under these circumstances, will Malawi be able to cntinue to afford its agricultural subsidy programme? Let's hope so: it would be a tragedy if the gains in productivity over the past five years were lost in a political squabble.

As a fringe benefit, my visit to Malawi also enabled me to spend three nights at the Norman Carr Cottage in Monkey Bay. The London Review of Breakfasts blog post on the Norman Carr Cottage in 2006, together with its two comments, speak volumes for this most idyllic lodging, which serves to demonstrate that hotel facilities are unimportant in comparison to hospitality, location and simple good food. My advice is simple: go there if you possibly can, relax in a hammock under the giant sycamore fig tree beside the lake, order a Malawi shandy, and thank God you are alive.