Peter McPherson
President
NASULGC, A Public University Association
Hearing: Food Security in Africa
July 18, 2007
10:30 AM
House Committee on Foreign Affairs
Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health
Introduction:
Mr. Chairman, and distinguished Members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to speak to you about “Food Security in Africa: the Impact of Agricultural Development.”
Africa has been a challenge for the development community. As Administrator of USAID in the 1980s, I was engaged in these issues and as President of Michigan State University, an institution with a rich history of development work in Africa, I continued my interest and concern about African development. In that position I actively engaged a wide array of stakeholders to form The Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa. The Partnership was formed in 2000 to formulate a vision, strategy, and action plan to significantly increase public and private investment in African economic development and to increase the effectiveness of U.S. assistance to strengthen African agricultural and rural development. Now as president of NASULGC, an association of the largest US public universities with a long and distinguished history of development work in Africa, I am deeply engaged in discussions concerning the role of higher education in development in Africa with growing concern about the declining roles of agriculture and higher education in the U.S. government development portfolio.
Mr. Chairman I want to thank you personally for your support on a number of issues regarding food aid, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, and trade. Both the House and the Senate have provided strong report language in the State, Foreign Relations and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill that stresses the importance of agriculture in the development process. This year’s World Development Report focuses on agriculture’s critical role in development, particularly in Africa. My testimony today emphasizes these points and argues that to develop agriculture we must produce new knowledge, science and technology and to create and sustain that production we need to assist Africa in building human and institutional capacity that are fundamental to any advances in production, marketing and trade.
Key Points of the
testimony:
- Agriculture is a critical component of the lives and the economies of Africa. It is imperative that the development community appreciate its role. While funding has diminished over the last 15-20 years, there are some signs of renewed interest.
- Agricultural development is fundamental to any broad-based economic development on the continent and agriculture has been shown to produce more equitable growth in personal income than other forms of development. Generating and extending research, knowledge and technology, building African human capacity to conduct research and supporting the capacity of institutions to produce creative and productive people is essential to the process.
- U.S. universities have a long history of development successes and have played a major role in developing such human and institutional capacity and generating new technologies, both home and abroad. While higher education provides the greatest opportunity for economic growth, the USG development funding has not focused on strengthening higher education in Africa.
- Faced with the retirement and loss of a generation of African scientists (many trained at U.S. universities), we ask for support to devote resources to partner with African institutions to build their capacity and assist them to train the next generation of Africa scientists and scholars. For the past 30 years these resources were provided through a vibrant Title XII (Famine Prevention And Freedom From Hunger Improvement Act of 2000), the CRSP programs and CGIAR; all of which have been or are slated for major funding cuts.
Support for Higher
Education in Development in Africa
We have become increasingly concerned that the role of higher education is not fully appreciated in the present development environment. The recent 2005 USAID Education Strategy: Improving Lives through Learning places strong emphasis on basic education but scantly mentions or recognizes the higher education’s role in international development. As an association representing the major public universities that have a long and deep commitment to the development of less-developed countries, we are troubled that the present level of emphasis on higher education will not support nor sustain the new mission statement of USAID: “helping to build and sustain democratic well governed states that will respond to the needs of their people and conduct themselves responsibly in the international system.”
Much greater support for basic education exists in Congress and the development community than for higher education. Based on very limited work in the late 1970s, basic education was found to have a higher rate of return than higher education. Donors focused on those studies to promote basic education. No doubt basic education is critical for development but, as opposed to competing with higher education, the development portfolio should be a balanced continuum of opportunity that allows the best and brightest to succeed. In an information world with a global economy, higher education is critical to developing businesses, negotiating treaties and contracts, and creating the stability that is necessary for comprehensive national development. The university community needs to participate in a coordinated effort to make this point with Congress, USAID and the MCC.
Unfortunately donor support for higher education degree training has waned dramatically over the last decade. USAID’s efforts in this regard have diminished substantially. The Agency has gone from training more than 15,000 students who earned higher education degrees in the early 1990s to less than 1,000 today. Many African countries struggle to maintain even low enrollment levels, and the academic research output in the region is among the world’s lowest.
We strongly support basic education as fundamental to development and the rates of return of those investments are solid. Still most people understand that a country cannot build a competitive economy in the 21st century on 8th grade or high school education alone. “Higher education produces the entrepreneurs, the creative thinkers, the business leaders that generate economic growth and turn poor countries into prosperous ones. Tertiary education exercises a direct influence on national productivity which largely determines living standards and a country’s ability to compete in the globalization process.”[1]
In summary, Africa faces a multitude of challenges that will affect how successful development efforts will be. Clearly, agriculture is key to making that development successful. Successful agricultural development is most directly achieved through investment in human and institutional capacity that will generate the knowledge, technologies and leaders to eradicate famine and food shortages, and build economies that support stable and democratic societies in Africa. NASULGC and the Partnership stand ready to assist you in this critical process.
We need to reengage the power of our U.S. land-Grant institutions to assist Africa to build its higher education and research institutions and train another generation of scientists and academic to lead a green revolution for Africa. We ask the subcommittee to reconsider revitalizing Title XII, creating new linkage programs that build African human and institutional capacity and to recognize and advocate for the role of higher education as a vital component of development strategy for Africa.
African agriculture
and it challenges.
Livelihoods in Sub-Saharan
Africa (SSA) are heavily linked to agriculture and agrarian livelihoods. Approximately 45.2 percent of the region’s
population is located in areas of low density, with 70 to 80 percent of the
total labor force employed in the agricultural sector. Agriculture in SSA contributes about 35 percent
of the total GDP of southern Africa, and approximately 30 percent of the
region’s foreign exchange earnings.[2] The heavy reliance on
agriculture for livelihoods underscores the necessity for gains in agricultural
improvements in production and efficiency.
The state of agriculture in SSA is severely affected by climatic,
agro-ecological, natural resource, input, and labor constraints. While inadequate rainfall and poor quality
soils are the primary production constraints, high rates of evapotranspiration,
high transport costs, lack of access to fertilizers, and access to technology
further reduce yield potential. While
food production has increased in SSA, it has done so mainly by bringing
marginal lands into cultivation. However
there are notable successes such as Mali, Ghana and Mozambique where improved
policies, new varieties and technologies have improved lives and economies
significantly.
In addition, “most
Africans live in the subhumid or arid tropics, with few rivers to provide
irrigation and a lack of the large alluvial plains typical of much of South and
East Asia that permit cheap irrigation. As a result, Africa has the lowest
share of irrigated cropland of any major region of the developing world.”[3] Thus, despite
the appearance of abundant land, many parts of SSA are fast approaching the
limits to sustainable agricultural production from existing resources. In addition, as natural resources on arable
land are gradually depleted, population growth is gradually increasing, causing
per capita food production to decline in almost all of the countries in
southern Africa.[4]
Due to limits on agricultural
productivity and the relative geographic isolation of the large percentage of
the SSA population, food insecurity is especially prevalent. “Sub-Saharan
Africa accounts for 13 percent of the population and 25 percent of the
undernourished people in the developing world. It is the developing region with
the highest proportion—one-third—of people suffering from chronic hunger.”[5] In order to address chronic hunger, improve
food security, and enhance rural livelihoods, investments in agricultural
development are essential.
Why is agriculture an
important focus for economic development and human welfare in Africa?
The classical and widely held model of development projects that agricultural production increases reduce the cost of food. Since food is a major component of the cost of living for the poor and agricultural is a substantial part of most rural Africans’ lives, this increase in efficiency has a broad impact. It reduces poverty for the majority, frees up capital to be spent in other sectors of the economy, and because greater efficiencies reduce labor demands in agriculture, it provides labor for growth in non-agricultural sectors.
In a broad review of African development, a recent International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) study[6] shows that agriculture is truly an important engine of growth for Africa. While its role may vary among countries depending on a diversity of conditions, agriculture is an especially strong force in poverty reduction, because it affects the rural poor who are a large component of the poor of Africa. The study concludes “most African countries cannot significantly reduce poverty, increase per capita incomes, and transform into modern economies without focusing on agricultural development.” This conclusion is similar to that of another study[7] of a broad range of developing countries that found that increasing agricultural productivity is the most efficient way to reduce poverty and inequality.
Yet another study[8] of 62 developing countries demonstrates the power of agricultural development to increase national economic growth. The study shows that changes in agricultural productivity explained 54 percent of the growth in GDP per worker and that this increased efficiency, released labor from agriculture to other sectors that accounted for another 29 percent of the GDP growth. The remaining 17 percent of GDP growth is from non-agricultural increases.
Agriculture does not just grow economies it measurably improves human lives. A secure and diverse food supply increases child survival, improves cognitive and physical development of children and increases immune system function, including resistance to HIV/AIDS (a secure food supply also has an impact on the trajectory of this and other diseases). This linkage is aptly noted in the House report language as, “Food and nutrition are important components of a comprehensive approach to HIV/AIDS.” The institutional barriers created within funding agencies that prevent critical linkages among agriculture, food and human health and development often frustrate us.
The importance of food can not be underestimated. In a recent study[9] in Kenya, children who received 2 oz of meat on school days (2/3 of the calendar days) preformed 20 percent higher on intelligence scores and achieved an increase of a grade–and-a-half higher in school. Think of the implications of that impact on creative capacity to compete in a knowledge based world when integrated to the national level; then think of the costs on chronic malnutrition to a national economy not only in lost potential but health care costs, lost productivity and wasted lives.
What makes agricultural productivity increase and how does it affect
food security?
Perhaps the most important revolution of the 20th century was a peaceful and a green one at that. Dr. Norman Borlaug used advanced breeding techniques to redesign the wheat plant and make it considerably more productive, more adaptive to wide range of environments and more disease resistance (funded by USAID, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations). Dr. Borlaug received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his work. Part of Borlaug’s genius was his complete dedication to build human capacity in science that both advanced his vision more rapidly and left a sustainable research capacity for developing countries. It is when research, human and institutional capacity are wed that science can generate solutions to human problems and it is when those elements are present in developing countries that we see major advances like those that Borlaug generated. Due to Borlaug, the post war famines of the Asia were extinguished in the early 1970s. For this effort Borlaug received the Noble Peace Prize in 1970.
Food security is achieved by addressing a wide range of constraints. Some of these constraints are more obvious than others and more amenable to our development approaches. While connection to markets, trade policy and other components of what is termed an “enabling environment” are important elements to national development they will depend on two factors. First and foremost, they depend on well-trained, visionary indigenous people to design, implement and support them. In short, highly educated human capital is essential.
Second, we need to increase agricultural productivity. Most of the recent gains in agricultural production in Africa have resulted from expanding the area of land cultivated and not increasing the production per unit of land area. The implications are not just a decline in per acre production efficiency but a use of more marginal land with ever increasing negative impacts on the natural resource base. Increases in efficiency per acre are the result of improved technologies and access to inputs. The sustainable way to increase efficiencies is to create Africa capacity to generate new technologies; that is build the human capacity and build the institutions that generate that capacity—the universities and the agricultural research institutes. We need to make such investments. Evidence from rural Uganda indicates that public investments in agricultural R&D had the highest impact on poverty reduction of development investments throughout the 1990s.[10] In addition to financial resources, agricultural innovation requires human capital and, therefore, sustaining and improving upon advances in agricultural R&D requires concurrent investments in general education.[11]
How does research
and higher education contribute?
If increases in agricultural productivity are essential to broad-based economic growth and those are largely dependent on the generation of new technologies, then what supports this development? We would argue that all of the following are critical: increased human creativity; capable institutions that generate new knowledge and technologies and transfer the information to the farmers and produce the human capacity; and valuable linkages to partner institutions to help facilitate that development.
1. Higher education builds human capital at a level that is necessary to compete in a global economy. Global economic engagement requires sophisticated business knowledge, the ability to meet international standards of quality, negotiate appropriate agreements, craft complex financial mechanisms, understand and interpret the rules of engagement and to be both entrepreneurial and competent. Increased human capacity to conduct these endeavors will facilitate greater participation in global markets for the poor countries of the world. These are the job creators for all the basic education graduates being produced with the laudable emphasis on basic education.
2. Just as human capital is necessary to conduct business,
it is critical to build and maintain the
institutions that generate new knowledge and technology, establish and
maintain standards, create laws, and conduct business in ways that resemble
U.S. and international norms.
Well-trained people create and sustain functional institutions that
promote good economies and support good governance. Of USAID’s 40-year
investment in higher education degree training an outside review concluded: “Change at the institutional level of this magnitude is
unusual in human resources and training programs and testifies to the
extraordinary impact the ATLAS/AFGRAD programs had in Africa.”[12]
3. Higher Education and research institutes generate knowledge that has economic impact, particularly in agriculture. In a study[13] of more than 1,800 rates of return to research in agriculture the median of the rate of return estimates was 48 percent per year for research, 62.9 percent for extension studies, 37 percent for studies that combined research and extension jointly, and 44.3 percent for all studies combined; a profitable investment by any standards but particularly so for a developing country.
4. In a USAID commissioned evaluation of more than 3,000 African higher education trainees educated in U.S. universities, supported by USAID, the evaluators found that the training had a marked effect on the impact of individuals, in building stronger institutions, and had a lasting impact on economic development and social contributions.[14] The experience of training in the United States had numerous benefits beyond the technical skills acquired. A number of positive aspects of efficiency and views of democracy were associated with links to an American education.
Investing in higher education in
developing countries is a critical component to long-term economic growth and
stability, and crucial to agricultural development and poverty reduction. Investments in tertiary education promote
“technological catch-up,” allowing countries to gain ground on more
technologically advanced societies and maximize economic output. To illustrate the economic growth potential
of tertiary education on GDP, a one-year increase in tertiary education stock
would raise steady-state levels of African GDP per capita by 12.2 percent due
to factor inputs, potentially boosting incomes by 3 percent after five years, a
significant feat considering the trend towards decreasing incomes in some
African countries.[15]
In developed countries this
effect has been well measured. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, high school graduates earn an average of $1.2 million,
associate's degree holders earn about $1.6 million, and bachelor's degree
holders earn about $2.1 million, over an adults working life.[16] In the United States,
average rates of return on investment for post-secondary education increased
from 5.6 percent in 1979 to 9.1 percent in 2004, consistent with average international
rates of return across nine countries estimated at 9 percent.[17] The increases in rates of
return likely reflect the increasing importance of education in a
technology-knowledge based global economy.
Perhaps the greatest contribution
of higher education, however, is manifested in the indirect benefits to
society. Based on a Carnegie Institute
report,[18] post-secondary education
influences individual behavior, encouraging more open-minded, cultured,
rational, and consistent individuals with less authoritarian tendencies. In addition, university enrollment has
demonstrated a tendency to decrease prejudice, improve knowledge of global
affairs, and improve social status. These
benefits are in turn passed along to succeeding generations. Leadership training
provides countries with talented individuals able to establish policy
environments favorable to growth and sustainability. The promotion of education
and literacy also encourages a social environment with an increased capacity
for tolerance and understanding, and diminished tendencies towards prejudice
and misconception, constructing a well-informed society with the ability to
think critically and objectively, establishing the foundation for democracy: a
critical component of developing a more secure and stable world.
What have U.S. Land-Grant Institutions done for development
in the past?
The USAID dual
training/capacity-building model was initiated in the early fifties and
provided global leadership until the 1980s.[19]
Four early capacity-building experiences chronicle the success of this
model:
·
Philippines:
Cornell University (with U.S. funding) helped elevate the college of
agriculture at Los Banos in the Philippines to form the University of the
Philippines Los Banos (UPLB) (Turk 1974).
Today, UPLB is an important regional graduate training center in
agriculture for many students from Asia.
·
India: USAID assisted India
in developing a new university model called the State Agricultural University
Model (Read 1974; Lele & Goldsmith 1989).
Currently, 31 State Agricultural Universities serve India. India’s National Agricultural Research System
has approximately 25,000 agricultural scientists in government and
universities, representing 8,000 person-years of scientific talent.
·
Ethiopia:
From 1952 to 1968, Oklahoma State University, with USAID funding,
assisted in building a productive College of Agriculture. Later, the College was upgraded to become
Alemaya University of Agriculture.
Today, Alemaya University is a household name in Ethiopia. The USAID mission in Addis Ababa recently
awarded a $10 million contract to Virginia Tech, Cornell University, Virginia
State and ACDI-VOCA (an NGO) to strengthen research and extension in the Amhara
administrative region.
·
Brazil: In 1963, the
government made a political decision to build a human capital base for a modern
agriculture. With USAID financing, four
American land-grant universities spent a decade assisting four Brazilian
universities in strengthening B.Sc.-level training in Brazil, followed by
another four years of support for postgraduate education (Sanders, et al
1989). In 1972, the government
established EMBRAPA (Brazilian National Agricultural Research Corporation) to
coordinate its national research program.
EMBRAPA launched a massive human capital program and spent 20 percent of
its total budget from 1974 to 1982 on training programs in Brazil and
abroad. In fact, in the late 1970s and
1980s, EMBRAPA had an average of more than 300 researchers enrolled each year
in postgraduate training programs.
Today, one-third of EMBRAPA scientists have a Ph.D. degree, half have an
M.Sc. degree, and the balance has a B.Sc. (Beinetma, et al, 1998).
This major effort
has been the basis for substantial improvements in developing countries
capacities and their development.
Without these individuals and their institutions, development certainly
would be impaired.
U.S. support for African agricultural
development lags overall.
The
trends in agricultural funding at USAID have not been encouraging. The long-term trends show agriculture not
keeping pace with other funding objectives and certainly not consistent with
the problems of African food production. When African countries are allowed to
design their portfolios with the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) they
choose agriculture. But that funding is
not enough to tackle the problem nor is much designated for human or
institutional capacity building nor research. In USAID research and higher
education will be increasingly marginalized with the new organizational
structure that proposes to reduce the Development Assistance Account moving
funds to the Economic Support Funds. As you know, the DA account funds much of
the central bureaus’ activity that supports most of our few remaining
university projects under Title XII (Famine
Prevention And Freedom From Hunger Improvement Act of 2000). These research and human capacity building
programs (such as the Collaborative Research Support Programs, the CRSPs) are
slated for 30 percent cuts next year.
The other major agricultural research program, the Consultative Group on
International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), has lost ground as well. From a
high of $46 million in 1986 funding has declined to$25 million in 2006. Long-term degree training, once the pride of
USAID’s development portfolio has declined by 95 percent. At one point in the
1960s U.S. land-Grant institutions had more than 70 partnership programs with
developing country institutions of higher education.
The distinct role of
agriculture in the development of Africa is both recognized and heavily
supported by African institutions and political leadership. In July 2003, following the endorsement of
the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme developed by the
New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), African heads of state
pledged to allocate 10 percent of national budgetary resources to the
Programme’s implementation based on conclusions that “agriculture led
development is fundamental to cutting hunger, reducing poverty … agriculture
must be the engine for overall economic growth in Africa.”[20] Indeed, the role of agriculture in
development programs is regaining popularity, as evidenced by the inclusion of
agricultural development initiatives in the Millennium Development Goals,
poverty reduction strategy papers, and its emphasis in the Rome Declaration on
World Food Security.[21]
However, despite the
apparent resurrection of agriculture as a catalyst for overall economic growth
and poverty reduction, recent trends in bilateral aid contradict policy gains
and concessions aimed at agricultural investment and development. According to an extensive analysis by Taylor
and Howard[22] overall U.S. support for agricultural
development in Africa has not increased significantly since 2000, despite
efforts by USAID to focus more available development resources on
agriculture-related projects. While
USAID support for agriculture-related programming actually increased by 9
percent (adjusted for inflation), the increase was offset by absolute declines
in funding through other channels.
Indeed, even within the USAID Bureau of Africa channel, the largest
channel for agricultural development assistance in the Agency, “the amount of funds available for that
purpose [agricultural development] grew by only 7% from FY2000 to FY2004, from
$284 million to $304 million, which means a 3% decrease in real terms after
adjusting for inflation.” Increases in
another source of USAID funding for agricultural development within the
Initiative to End Hunger in Africa (IEHA), came from the reallocation of funds
from within the Africa DA account, rather than from any real increase.
Taylor and Howard
further characterize the discrepancy between USAID objectives and aid:
Most of USAID’s
gains occurred in one year (from FY2002 to FY2003), and there was an absolute
decline in estimated funding for African agriculture by USAID and the U.S.
government as a whole in 2004. A central constraint for USAID is that although
it has placed agriculture at the center of its economic development strategy
for Africa, the level of appropriated money available to support such
development declined in real terms between 2000 and 2004 (Taylor and Howard,
2005).
Peter
McPherson
President, NASULGC, A
Public University Association
Peter McPherson is president of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC). This is an association of public research universities, land-grant institutions, and many state public university systems. Its 215 members enroll more than 3.6 million students, award approximately a half-million degrees annually, and have an estimated 20 million alumni.
McPherson is Chair of the Board of Directors of Dow Jones and Company. He is the founding Co-chair of the Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa; Chair of the Board of IFDC, an international center dealing with soil fertility and agricultural development; and Chair of the Board of Harvest Plus, an organization working on breeding crops for better nutrition. He recently completed the chairmanship of a commission created by Congress to consider ways to greatly increase the number of students who study abroad.
Prior to joining NASULGC, McPherson was president of Michigan State University for over 11 years, from 1993-2004. From April to October 2003, he took leave from that position and served as the Director of Economic Policy for the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq, working with the currency, the Central Bank, the Ministry of Finance and the banks of the country.
Before Michigan State, McPherson held senior executive positions with Bank of America from 1989 to 1993. From 1987 to 1989, he served as Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, focusing on trade, tax, and international issues and was one of the principal U.S. negotiators for the Canadian Free Trade Agreement. He was Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) from 1981 to 1987 and in that role was responsible for the U. S. effort for famine relief in Africa in 1984-85. During that time he was also the Chairman of the Board of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. From 1977 through 1980, he was a partner and head of the Washington office of Ohio law firm, Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease. Prior to that, he was a Special Assistant to President Gerald Ford in the White House.
McPherson has been honored with the U. S. Presidential Certificate of Outstanding Achievement, the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Leadership Award, the Department of Treasury’s Alexander Hamilton Award, the UNICEF Award for “outstanding contribution to child survival” and the 1983 Humanitarian of the Year award from the American Lebanese League and the Jewish National Fund Tree of Life Award in 1998. He received a B.A. from Michigan State University, an M.B.A. from Western Michigan University and a J.D. from American University.