INTERNATIONAL When local farmers know best M A S E R U ,    L E S O T H O
Search archive	THE second stage of the green revolution is running into resistance from farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. The first stage, promoting high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice, left Africa’s poorer farmers untouched. The launching of the “Sasakawa 2000” initiative (named after a Japanese magnate) in the mid-1980s seemed to offer smaller farmers hope with its hybrid grains, cheap fertiliser and pesticides. But a group of scientists and farmers from a dozen African countries, who met in Lesotho earlier this year, suggested that the hope was false. They listened to tales of the setbacks to the Sasakawa programme in Ghana. For a few years, Ghana’s maize yields did indeed increase with imported hybrids, but they required more and more fertiliser. When farming subsidies were cut, under IMF-inspired economic reform, Ghana’s small farmers faced a triple problem. They could not afford the soaring costs of chemicals; the land had become saline (they came to call fertiliser “the devil’s salt”); and they had larg ely abandoned their own seeds. Until recently, Ethiopia had been careful to preserve and develop its genetic heritage of plants. A Russian botanist who rode through the country on muleback in 1928 identified Ethiopia as the ancestral home of a dozen food crops, including sorghum. Gene- bank scientists in Addis Ababa acted swiftly during the 1980s famine to collect and save the seeds that peasant farmers, over many years, had adapted to tolerate local conditions of drought and disease. A network was established of nearly 30,000 farmers w ho were conserving their seeds. To no avail. The “seeds of survival” programme had Canadian support and Ethiopia’s government did not care for it, seeing it as a threat to its own authority—and to the aid that came through the Sasakawa project. Last year, it took ove r the programme, retired its scientists and sent the Canadians packing. Some other African governments are less suspicious. Mali and Senegal have welcomed “seeds for survival”. The 14 countries of the Southern Africa Development Community have begun collecting indigenous plants in their “genetic resource centre s”. But none of these countries is as rich or diverse in indigenous plants as Ethiopia—and the network there took 20 years to build.