Accra, Ghana — It is no coincidence that a neighbor of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa here is Embrapa, the Brazilian agricultural research corporation. For Embrapa was one of the main players engineering the green revolution in Brazil.
Embrapa was created in 1973 with a four-headed mission: guarantee food supply to Brazil’s teeming cities, where most of the country’s poor people live; help develop the rural areas; preserve Brazil’s natural resources; and produce a sufficient surplus of food for export. Its signature achievement so far has been developing the technology to bring vast stretches of savanna land, known as the Cerrado, into production; converting it from bush wasteland to fertile fields. Agricultural researchers adapted sets of plants and animals to thrive in tropical conditions. It also introduced farming practices, management and mechanization to the region. The Cerrado, benefiting above all from innovative soil research, is now a verdant blanket of crops.
Since then, Brazil has become a major force on world agricultural markets, particularly in soybeans, and it has made advances in corralling domestic hunger. Brazil’s grain and cereal production has increased four-fold. The principal scientists and administrators in developing the Cerrado won the 2006 World Food Prize. Norman Borlaug, the father of the original Green Revolution and founder of the prize, hailed the work of Embrapa as “one of the great achievements of agricultural science in the 20th century, which has transformed a wasteland into one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world.”
Can Brazil do the same for Africa in the 21st century?
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