A few of us here on ONE’s policy team are in the process of reading ENOUGH, by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman, which was recently featured on the blog. As we read this fascinating account of global hunger, we will be highlighting interesting tidbits. If you’re enticed, pick up a copy yourself. It’s an engaging read.

If you’re a reader of the ONE blog, you already know that agriculture has long been neglected as an investment priority in the developing world, and that the percentage of official development assistance (ODA) designated for agriculture declined substantially between the 1980s and today. Using fascinating anecdotes, ENOUGH begins by outlining a brief history of the Green Revolution that swept across Central America and South and East Asia in the 1970s —with insight into the dynamic and determined personality of the Revolution’s humble leader, the Nobel Peace Prize-laureate Norman Borlaug—and expounds on some of the reasons for agriculture’s neglect, particularly in Africa.

By the time the Green Revolution reached Africa, there was no momentum left—political or financial— to continue the revolution across the continent. In part, the world had been lulled into thinking that challenges of hunger and food insecurity had been sufficiently addressed. In addition, there was growing belief that African governments had become involved with too many aspects of their economies that were better left to the private sector, and multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF required developing countries to shrink the size of the governments in return for development assistance. African agricultural development suffered as a result—whilst the U.S. and Europe gave subsidies to their farmers, African governments were told to keep markets free of such government support. Borlaug, with the help of a Japanese entrepreneur, did take a stab at bringing the Green Revolution to communities across Africa in the mid-to-late 1980s, and while the communities in which he worked initially saw surpluses, without any support from the government or the international community, the private sector was not developed enough to provide inputs or credit for farmers to continue using Bourlaug’s techniques. Moreover, countries were encouraged to invest in industry rather than agriculture, despite the clear evidence—both from the rebuilding of Europe post-WWII, and the Green Revolution—that investing in smallholder agriculture can make a country both more food secure, and more economically robust. By then, however, the Green Revolution was “out of fashion” and international political will to achieve food security had waned. Farmers—particularly those in Africa—were left behind.

The authors dub the cycles of attention and inattention a topic gets on the world scene the ‘Ebb and Flow’. The parallels today from decades ago are clear: then, political will, innovation, and the determination of hodge-podge mix of people all concerned about images of food insecurity in places like Ethiopia and Mexico pushed the issue of hunger to the forefront of the global agenda. In the last year, the impact of the global food crisis, and the financial crisis, has helped raise the tide for agricultural development and food security once again.

World leaders, like those meeting this week at the G8 Summit in Italy, are again making promises to the world’s poor and hungry: we will help ensure that your fields are nurtured, that your goods can get to market, that your universities can develop new technologies. The task of achieving increased agricultural productivity and food security, however, will not be completed tomorrow. We must be committed for the long haul. Let’s hope that this time around, the attention span of our global consciousness is long enough to make irreversible improvements in agricultural development and food security throughout Africa.

-Beth Adler