Gates-Funded 'Green Revolution' in Africa Has Failed, Critics Say (chronline.com) 132
Climate change confronted African farmers with back-to-back seasons of drought. The director of agricultural development at the Gates Foundation says that's one reason they've fallen short of their goals of helping the continent achieve a "green revolution".
But while the foundation contributed much of $1 billion spent to date on the effort, "Money doesn't necessarily produce results," notes the Seattle Times: As an annual African farming summit takes place this week in Rwanda, activists, farmers and faith leaders from Seattle to Nairobi are calling on the Gates Foundation and other funders to stop supporting an effort they say has failed to deliver on promises to radically reduce hunger and increase farmer productivity and income. Worse, critics say the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, founded in 2006 with money from the Gates and Rockefeller foundations, has promoted an industrial model of agriculture that poisons soils with chemicals and encourages farmers to go into debt by buying expensive seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. As a result of that debt, some farmers have had to sell their land or household goods like stoves and TVs, said Celestine Otieno and Anne Maina, both active with organizations in Kenya advocating for ecologically friendly practices. "I think it's the second phase of colonization," Otieno said.
A donor-funded evaluation last December offered gentler criticism, concluding the alliance had achieved mixed success over the past five years, with increased corn yields in half the countries it examined. Most notably, though, it found "AGRA did not meet its headline goal of increased incomes and food security." Peter Little, director of the global development program at Emory University, puts it another way: "I don't think it's come close to what it promised to do...."
[C]ritics claim the real drivers are multinational corporations selling fertilizers, pesticides and seeds that farmers have to buy every year. AGRA's grants go to dealers of seeds and various agricultural products, as well as African governments, research institutions, farmers' groups and other organizations deemed capable of implementing a "transformative agenda." The solution to Africa's hunger problem, some say, is redirecting money to millions of small-scale farmers on the continent and using methods that are both effective and ecologically friendly, like fertilizing with manure.
But while the foundation contributed much of $1 billion spent to date on the effort, "Money doesn't necessarily produce results," notes the Seattle Times: As an annual African farming summit takes place this week in Rwanda, activists, farmers and faith leaders from Seattle to Nairobi are calling on the Gates Foundation and other funders to stop supporting an effort they say has failed to deliver on promises to radically reduce hunger and increase farmer productivity and income. Worse, critics say the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, founded in 2006 with money from the Gates and Rockefeller foundations, has promoted an industrial model of agriculture that poisons soils with chemicals and encourages farmers to go into debt by buying expensive seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. As a result of that debt, some farmers have had to sell their land or household goods like stoves and TVs, said Celestine Otieno and Anne Maina, both active with organizations in Kenya advocating for ecologically friendly practices. "I think it's the second phase of colonization," Otieno said.
A donor-funded evaluation last December offered gentler criticism, concluding the alliance had achieved mixed success over the past five years, with increased corn yields in half the countries it examined. Most notably, though, it found "AGRA did not meet its headline goal of increased incomes and food security." Peter Little, director of the global development program at Emory University, puts it another way: "I don't think it's come close to what it promised to do...."
[C]ritics claim the real drivers are multinational corporations selling fertilizers, pesticides and seeds that farmers have to buy every year. AGRA's grants go to dealers of seeds and various agricultural products, as well as African governments, research institutions, farmers' groups and other organizations deemed capable of implementing a "transformative agenda." The solution to Africa's hunger problem, some say, is redirecting money to millions of small-scale farmers on the continent and using methods that are both effective and ecologically friendly, like fertilizing with manure.
The only thing green about Gates are his banknotes (Score:3, Insightful)
Africa would be a lot greener if Gates would have thrown backnotes out of his private jet window.
Gates charity projects are just a smoke screen for BigAgra and their genetically modified seeds business model.
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Wasn't Gates getting richer every year since he announced that he's going to give 90% of his money to philanthropic causes via Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation?
Some incredible philanthropy, when you earn more from it than you give out. Sounds a bit too good to be true. Sounds a lot like high end tax evasion.
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When you have that much money, there are not enough decent companies to put it all into that are 'helpful' and novel.
You find that it becomes difficult to not just give it to large companies that are established and can actually come up with decent plans who might actually be able to execute.
Investing in tens of thousands of 'small guys' is fraught with the larger folks gobbling them up. Bankers will go after that money. Large companies will buy up the ideas.
You also run into the problem that while lots o
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It's a nice hypothesis, but like most nice hypotheses it doesn't survive encounter with reality. Bill Gates was the opposite of damned. He got significantly richer.
Re:The only thing green about Gates are his bankno (Score:5, Informative)
Obviously Gate's fortune is going to continue growing all on its own due to investments. He doesn't keep his or the foundation's money in a box under his mattress! Or even in a bank account. It's held in various funds and investments that ensure the the money continues to grow and is not lost to inflation (unlike our bank accounts). It's not like he's making money off the foundation itself though. This is basic money management and retirement planning stuff here. If you can save up enough money it can start working for you instead of you working for the money.
By the way none of this contradicts his goal to get rid of 90% of his money over time.
Yes Gates pays a lower tax rate on his wealth's earnings than you likely do because the income that comes from his wealth is from investments, not from an income from salary. Nothing new here. Many proposals have been made to change the way investment incomes are taxed over the years. So far the rich haven't come to an agreement as to how this should be done.
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Re:The only thing green about Gates are his bankno (Score:4, Informative)
If a foundation makes money, it isn't your own income and has to be used by the foundation. Ie, he can't by himself a new car with that $11B, because it's not his money. Yes, it does avoid taxes by putting your money in a foundation, but you don't earn money this way, you lose the money the same as if you make your normal charitable contribution.
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The desperate lying by bootlickers has begun. Facts such as that his Foundation was critical to several organisations doing charity work before moving to for profit modus operandi (one example given below) will be ignored. And another brainlet below will try the other angle by claiming that philanthropy is obviously investing for personal profit.
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And now, we have brainlets pretending that philanthropy is actually investing for profit.
Re: The only thing green about Gates are his bankn (Score:2)
Quiet you! Others will get tipped off to the scam that is foundations with sky high overhead and money laundering book deals
Manure spreads parasites (Score:2)
Re:Manure spreads parasites (Score:4, Insightful)
Fertilizing with shit is not necessarily a good idea either.
It is, but it's not as simple as just "dump raw shit on the field".
Re:Manure spreads parasites (Score:5, Informative)
The simple fact is that yields per hectare today from this hated evil "poisonous" "industrial agricutlure" are VASTLY higher than they were when people were "fertilizing with shit". Africa's yields per hectare are vastly lower than the standards of the "industrialized" world. Getting that number up to western standards IS a good goal. Starvation is a horrible thing.
Industrial ag works superbly in developed countries in terms of massive yields while providing incomes to farmers that are up to developed-world standards. While meanwhile most African farmers do backbreaking labour and live in abject poverty. The question is what bottlenecks stand in the way of helping farmers who want a better life through western methods. Obviously, if one wants to do traditional low-yield manual farming, that's certainly their choice. But for most people, poverty sucks, and they want to live like western farmers do.
When synthetic nitrate fertilizers were first produced, farmers were really skeptical of spending all that money to dump some chemical on their fields, unsure what benefits they'd see if any. What did the salesmen do? A common trick was to find a high point in the surrounding countryside and spread the nitrate fertilizer in the shape of a giant N. So everyone could see how the plants there grew thick, lush, deep green and productive compared to the "natural" landscape around them. Nature just doesn't produce that on its own.
The simple fact is, harvest takes nutrients out of the soil, both cations and anions. If you want exceptional, western-standard yields, you need to be adding said nutrients back at those rates. And traditional methods just don't cut it for that. Even early "modern" yields don't hold a candle to more modern ones. For example, in the mid 20th century, the saying for corn in the US was "knee high by the fourth of July". Today corn that's only knee-high by early July would be seen as a castrophic low-yield year.
Our understanding of soil and plant needs has evolved extensively over the years. First, plant needs were "water and sun". But then to explain why plants grew well in some areas but not others, it was theorized that they needed water, sun, and soil organic matter, and a huge amount of emphasis was put on adding manure and rotting matter. But then experiments demonstrated that you could sometimes grow plants well in nearly organic-depleted soil, and it went back to "water and sun". Then they started discovering what minerals had to be in place, and it was "water, minerals, and sun". Then "water, minerals, air and sun", and it was assumed that plants sequestered their own nitrogen. Then the need for external nitrogen was discovered. Since it was now seen that plants didn't need organics, they were largely neglected, with farming focusing just on NPK etc.
In the modern era, we've come to understand that while soil carbon isn't a required component per se, its water retention, cation exchange capacity, and nurturing of the rhizosphere are very important, and so much more is done - in "industrial agriculture" - to preserve it than was done decades earlier. The same applies to pesticides, herbicides, etc - IPM has become much more popular, to help preserve predator populations and rhizosphere health. Indeed, in greenhouse ag, pesticide use is now a minority, predators are the main means of pest control (doesn't work well outdoors, though... predators tend to just bugger off). And fertilizer application is more controlled than it used to be, not simply due to waterway concerns, but outright because you don't want to be wasting money on fertilizer that's just going to run off.
Yes, modern "industrial" yields are "unnatural" by historic standards. But that's ALWAYS been the goal. We've been manipulating nature since day 1 to get better yields. Go look at what wild tomatoes or wild bananas look like some time. Humans selective bred the heck out of them over thousands of years. And the very nature of learning to farm was learning to suppress what nature wants to do and impose your own order, in a manner that gives a maximal return. And the more return we get per hectare, the less wilderness we have to occupy to feed the world. This is a *good thing*.
Re: Manure spreads parasites (Score:2)
But industrial ag requires tremendous amounts of petroleum derived chemicals in order to work, plus the infrastructure to distribute them. Ammonia fertilizer is made from natural gas. Glyphosate anyone?
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Oddly enough it's been standard practice since the dawn of human history. And it works well without spreading disease. Manure is composted to be of the most value. Composted animal manure, for example, is very clean and smells quite nice actually. Even weed seeds become nonviable during the composting process. Seems to foster good soil bacterial and fungal life.
In some form or another, all societies everywhere are going to have to recycle 100% of the nutrients in the waste stream. Right now we clean ou
Re:The only thing green about Gates are his bankno (Score:4, Insightful)
Africa would be a lot greener if Gates would have thrown backnotes out of his private jet window.
Gates charity projects are just a smoke screen for BigAgra and their genetically modified seeds business model.
No, Africa remains poor because people like you convinced them that they should reject genetically engineered food. Now they are starving again because they haven't used low-water rice or vitamin A precursor enhancement.
Re: The only thing green about Gates are his bankn (Score:2)
The pilgrims learned the hard way that there is more variation to soil in the USA vs Europe. How is the local county extension going to help farmers in Africa with a different environment? Do you think consultants from the midwestern US or Canada know more about farming in Africa than African farmers? How colonialist!
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Unless you discover corruption and bullet proof GMO's nothing will change. Until the wars in Africa stops poverty will not dissapear.
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No, Africa remains poor because people like you convinced them that they should reject genetically engineered food.
It is not the genetic engineering that is the real problem here. The real problem is the Intellectual Property laws and business practices that are practiced under those laws via genetically engineered food.
By planting genetically modified seed, they are giving up their freedom and independence. Seems rational to resist that.
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No, Africa remains poor because people like you convinced them that they should reject genetically engineered food.
It is not the genetic engineering that is the real problem here. The real problem is the Intellectual Property laws and business practices that are practiced under those laws via genetically engineered food.
This is a legal problem in the US and EU that has nothing to do with the technology itself. The GMO being deployed in Africa, such as golden rice, is open source.
Re: The only thing green about Gates are his bankn (Score:2)
So youre saying Gates is a much richer mother Theresa?
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Fossil fertiliser is the solution, not a problem (Score:2, Insightful)
African farmers not buying fertilisers because of lack of foresight is a far right meme. Please stop making it a reality.
If you don't subsistence farm and thus don't recycle all the humanure and waste from slaughter/food back into the soil, you need fossil fertiliser to make up the difference.
The regenerative bullshitters don't help, pretending their bullshit can work in Africa. Of course without telling them they need an industrial fossil fertilised corn farm for supplemental chicken feed down the road. Co
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So both the local farmers and the donor-funded evaluation are far right memes according to you.
Do you know what the difference between religion and science is? Former starts with an outcome, and adjusts inputs to arrive to it. Latter starts with inputs and adjust the outcome in accordance.
Re: Fossil fertiliser is the solution, not a probl (Score:1)
Just the ones who do it out of lack of foresight and planning.
The ones who preach Savory's bullshit are just dangerous idiots and the Africans eager to follow the advice naive. Zero fossil fertiliser regenerative farming is a bullshit western meme spread by idiots from all political directions.
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I want to down-mod you, right or wrong, just because of the way you talk.
But, I won't.
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20-30 years ago, Zimbabwe grew enough grain to pretty much supply all of southern Africa.
It's not impossible. It's just very hard in the current climate (both political and atmospheric).
Re:Fossil fertiliser is the solution, not a proble (Score:5, Interesting)
After the British left, the Zimbabweans voluntarily dismantled their industrial-farming complex so they could return the land to individual families and resume traditional farming. They cannibalized their mechanized farm equipment for parts and scrap, and returned to the old ways.
I really don't know how to feel about this. One one hand, screw colonialism. The Zimbabweans get to determine their own destiny. On the other hand, dumping western farming methods resulted in famine that caused millions of people to starve to death. Maybe not the best choice for that particular civilization. But dammit they get to make the choice themselves.
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Yeah. That's why I said a large part of it is political, unfortunately.
And I know exactly what you mean by feeling that duality.
Re: Fossil fertiliser is the solution, not a probl (Score:2)
The downside of giving up colonialism is that you have to leave others to their own devices. Prime directive!
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The main reason this once prosperous nation dismantled their farming infrastructure is because they were ruled by a corrupt moronic dictator who wanted to hand the farms over to his cronies, in the name of Equity of course. Only problem is, they had no idea what the fuck they were doing and couldn't actually farm.
Re: Fossil fertiliser is the solution, not a probl (Score:2)
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Your conflating lack of education with lack of intelligence.
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You're... Look at me talking about edumacation.
Re:Fossil fertiliser is the solution, not a proble (Score:5, Informative)
African farmers not buying fertilisers because of lack of foresight is a far right meme. Please stop making it a reality.
this was tried 20 years ago: the results were absolutely disastrous. some Westerners interfered and provided fertiliser, machines, and western genetic-base Maize.
year 1: great crops.
year 2: great crops throughout the area which meant that native maize was not grown and discarded.
year 3: drought. the Western-based maize crops failed. absolutely nobody got *any* food.
the problem it turned out was that the genetically-diverse maize, which didn't grow very well *in general* contained genetic resistance to drought, genetic resistance to local pests, genetic resistance to local flooding, the genetic-based ability to grow without needing fertiliser even in poor soil, and so on.
thus whilst they got shit yields compared to Western farming practices *at least they got something every year*
it was i think about a decade before the country recovered due to every single damn farmer in the country having thrown away the *local* maize "because financial pressure".
that the Gates Foundation does not know their history and the damage caused by interference of this type, does not surprise me in the least. i'm glad they're not getting anywhere because they shouldn't fucking well be intefering in the local affairs of another country, forgetting the millenia of genetic diversity that gives that country food in the first place.
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i'm glad they're not getting anywhere because they shouldn't fucking well be intefering in the local affairs of another country
They aren't interfering with anything. They are providing materials. It's 100% up to the locals to take them or not. But let's go back to your example.
A large problem in Africa is the needs of the population outweigh the yields produced by their farmers. If they stick to what they are doing that is very much wilful starvation. You cherry pick one example which showed great yields, and then complained about an external catastrophe.
Do you stab yourself every day just to avoid someone else *maybe* stabbing you
Re: Fossil fertiliser is the solution, not a probl (Score:2)
Its almost like scientists dont really understand the complex dynamic systems that make up the earth and therefore shouldnt play games with them until they do. Imagine that!
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Global starvation, under the guise of humanitarian aid, is the goal of the Gates Foundation. Bill is a eugenicist, as he's said before. He believes global human population needs to go down substantially.
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Here's the problem (Score:1, Funny)
He wants to make them grow their food in peach tree dishes.
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peach tree dishes.
Those were invented when a peach fell from a tree on Dr. Julius Petri's head.
The program would have worked (Score:4, Funny)
It could work, if they stick to the original plan of turning Africa into a gigantic golf course, with lions and tigers and schwag oh my!
Subsistence farming can't exist in the21st century (Score:2)
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Yeah I'm a bit skeptical about the whole criticism based on these statements about "chemicals", fertilizers and "industrial farming". This is trademark organic/"natural" BS complaints.
There might be legitimate criticism of the program, I don't know and don't care enough to spend time researching it. But if they want to feed the whole country with 1% of the population in agriculture, that's the way to do it. Otherwise everyone can fuck around in their back yard of course.
Re: Subsistence farming can't exist in the21st cen (Score:2)
Ukraine farms certain things at scale because it has access to cheap natural gas and fertilizer plus the climate to support grain production. Without cheap fossil fuels you dont get agriculture at scale. Sorry but thats the way it is.
Newsflash! Quarterly-results driven 3rd world ... (Score:4, Insightful)
... programms are counterproductive to sustainable increase of wealth and prosperity in the 3rd world.
Golly Jeepers Gee Wizz, who would've thunk? ...
So they're saying the same that research and cold hard data has concluded decades ago: Shipping combines to rural Africa and installing complex wells and watering systems makes no sense what so ever if there isn't the infrastructure in place to support them and/or they make no effing sense in a savana that only has 3 weeks worth of temperate climate rainfall per year.
But it does make sense for 1st world corporations selling combines and watering systems. So there you go.
Misses 80% of the story (Score:5, Informative)
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> African farmland is marginal and requires a lot of fertilizer in order to be productive.
Usually there are certain crops that do well in any kind of land (assuming water). The trick is to create a bigger market for such products, as it may take a while for people to develop a taste for new kinds of foods. We gotta break the food monoculture.
Debt (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a key problem is that Western-style agriculture requires significant capital investment. We still have this popular image of the salt of the earth yeoman farmer, but the reality is that modern farming is a large-scale industrial process. You might as well ask a poor subsistence farmer to just build his own factory as immediately start farming like a Western farmer.
Re: Debt (Score:2)
All non subsistence agriculture works in huge nutrient loops which are hard to close. Fossil fertiliser (whether modern or peat or bat guano) is the most convenient way to fix it on the medium term. The alternative is closing the loop, which without a sewage system means the old Chinese way. Collecting human waste from houses.
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Whether you use fossil fertilizer or the "old Chinese way", you still have the fundamental problem of scale and finance.
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There is no alternative, replacing the nutrients used by crops is not western style agriculture it's the only agriculture which can work longer than a couple decades.
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There is no alternative
This is excessive hyperbole. There are many alternatives for replacing those nutrients, it's just that none of them produce the kind of yields that you get with artificial fertilizers.
For the record, Europeans also used human waste for fertilizer. That's not unique to China.
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So what are the alternative sources for phosphorus and potassium other than fossil fertilizer or nation scale collection (and fermentation) of humanure?
On a long enough timescale erosion and animal migration bring some in, but that can't sustain meaningful agriculture ... eventually soil depletion is guaranteed without a more plentiful source.
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Another method involves fish farming, and using the nutrient-laden water from the fish ponds to irrigate your fields.
I'm not an agro scientist, I don't know all of the methods by which this can be done, but whenever anyone says, "I can only imagine one solution, and therefore that's the on
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I did say phosphorus and potassium for a reason, they don't come from the sky and are macro nutrients (the micros have lots of cheap sources). Fish, much like cows, don't have fusion reactors either ... that's the problem with Savory's bullshit.
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I did say phosphorus and potassium for a reason
Yeah... I still don't know what that reason is. Are you trying to suggest that human manure is different from cow manure in some remarkable way? Do humans have fusion reactors?
I'd ask who Savory is, but that just seems like a weird non-sequitur. I probably don't care.
Re: Debt (Score:2)
Yes, humanure from long living humans is inherently different from manure from animals met for meat. Nearly all the phosphorus and potassium in humanure they took from the soil in food is in their manure, for meat animals a lot more of it is locked up in the meat, which thus ends up in the humanure again.
Humans are the link which opens the nutrient cycle.
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I suspect that the same is true for potassium, though I can't say that with certainty. Regardless, the point was that, "I only know one way to do som
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Neither cows nor humans contain nuclear fusion reactors, we don't produce phosphorus and potassium. We consume, contain and pass it.
In the case of cow manure it gets returned at the source. Turning poor soils to pasture and grazing cows on it adds no phosphorus and potassium, but it does lock up some of it in their body. Through beef, that gets passed through us, that's what opens the nutrient cycle. All agriculture does that, animal agriculture is not special in that regard.
But that's the point, animal agr
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The funny thing is, this was supposed to be a conversation about alternatives to fertilizers based on fossil fuels, and neither phosphorous nor potassium come from fossil fuels. You only get nitrogen that way. Now modern 'potash' is
Green Revolution? (Score:1)
You know ol' Norman Borlaug recanted prior to his death, right?
He figured it out. Why can't you?
Before climate change when it didn't have droughts (Score:1)
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Give it time...
Sri Lanka Decided to Not Use Chemical Fertilizers (Score:5, Insightful)
Just look at Sri Lanka to see what the elimination of chemical based fertilizers do to agricultural production. Manure may be better than what the farmers were using before the initiative, but won't be a viable long term solution for massively increased production.
Unfortunately, it really is because of the large corporations developing fertilizers, GM seeds and pesticides plus the aggregation of small farms into large industrial like farms that has increased the yield of crops in the US significantly. Eventually Africa will need to follow this model to maximize food production.
However, it was probably not a good idea to immediately jump from subsistence level farming techniques to a full use of fertilizer, pesticide and engineered seeds type farming since the local economies would be completely upended.
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Manure may be better than what the farmers were using before the initiative, but won't be a viable long term solution for massively increased production.
Compost is the only viable long term solution. You can't build soil with synthetic fertilizer. The only thing that does that is addition of organic matter. If your soil has been depleted and turned into dirt, farming with synthetics is just hydroponics in a dirt medium.
What needs to happen is that feces needs to be composted instead of discarded or flushed into waterways, and returned to the fields where food crops are grown. It takes less than a year to compost "humanure". Anything else depletes the soil.
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Yeah, the nutrient cycle becomes problematic once you grow much past subsistence levels. Especially if you don't have reclamation infrastructure, but even a one-size-fits-all sewage system is problematic as there's a LOT of pharmaceuticals and other waste chemicals in the waste that are not easily removed, and not necessarily a good idea to saturate our crops in. Heck, between birth control and plastics we've got a global estrogen immersion crisis already, even without intentionally concentrating it back
Re:Sri Lanka Decided to Not Use Chemical Fertilize (Score:5, Informative)
Ugh. Please look at it CORRECTLY, which you do in your LAST sentence but absolutely DO NOT in your first. (Key word "immediately".)
Sri Lanka's plan was to gradually eliminate chemical based fertilizers over many years, in a slow transition to organic. Then the moron crook President decided he could save a bunch of money if they just did it all at once -- and banned synthetic fertilizer almost immediately.
It was as big a catastrophe as predicted and the crook had to flee the country. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/15/23218969/sri-lanka-organic-fertilizer-pesticide-agriculture-farming [vox.com]
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Just look at Sri Lanka to see what the elimination of chemical based fertilizers do to agricultural production. Manure may be better than what the farmers were using before the initiative, but won't be a viable long term solution for massively increased production.
Unfortunately, it really is because of the large corporations developing fertilizers, GM seeds and pesticides plus the aggregation of small farms into large industrial like farms that has increased the yield of crops in the US significantly. Eventually Africa will need to follow this model to maximize food production.
However, it was probably not a good idea to immediately jump from subsistence level farming techniques to a full use of fertilizer, pesticide and engineered seeds type farming since the local economies would be completely upended.
The problem with manure as fertilizer [vic.gov.au] is disease [umn.edu]. If industrialized countries are still having trouble with it I'd be nervous about adding even more to the disease burden in Africa.
Re: Sri Lanka Decided to Not Use Chemical Fertiliz (Score:2)
Manure? We are getting rid of the animals that produce manure cause cattle farts cause climate change. No manure for you! We are also getting rid of the fossil fuels because climate change! No ammonia fertilizer for you! Wait how will we provide a sustainable plant based diet at scale without manure or fossil fuel based ag chemicals? Think about it ;)
Placebo (Score:2)
LOL!
On the average, a placebo will work better half the time.
This statement supports the premise "the program doen't work".
Placebos? (Score:2)
"On the average, a placebo will work better half the time."
A placebo is carefully chosen to try to have no effect. So while "better half the time" might be pedantically correct, even the outliers are supposed to be as close to non-existent as possible. And a placebo should not lead to failure on it's own - it should be irrelevant, except in so far as the treatment is undelivered.
Near as I can tell from the summary, the program did not achieve its ultimate goal, but had some mixed success. Just not enough.
Null hypothesis [Re:Placebos?] (Score:2)
If a treatment is observed to be better half the time, and worse half the time, this is exactly what is expected from no effect at all.
Saying "but it was better half the time" is entirely consistent with the null hypothesis, "the program doesn't work".
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I reread what I just said. Seems clear to me.
"No effect" some time + occasional success = net positive
Detrimental + positive in roughly equal measure = something like placebo.
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I reread what I just said. Seems clear to me."No effect" some time + occasional success = net positive
But that's not what they said. They called out increased yield in half the countries, but didn't say anything about the other countries.
Yes, if you make up results to fill that they didn't say, you can make this positive. But when you read what they said and don't make assumptions about what they didn't say, what they said does not rule out the null hypothesis.
Detrimental + positive in roughly equal measure = something like placebo.
You don't think that they wouldn't have said "on the average, our program increased yields" if their program had, on the average, increase yield?
Buffet's brother (Score:4, Interesting)
They tried. (Score:3)
When you're trying to actually innovate, some things will work, most will fail. So declare failure, and move on to the next thing. Don't stop trying - that would be foolish. The man has resources usually only available to governments. Let him try stuff.
Shock, horror (Score:2)
So when you just try to pour all the money into an expensive middle-man that you try to set up as a perpetual necessity for everyone to do what they've always done, and then expect poor farmers to just buy into putting all their eggs in that one basket, forever, including selling off all their worldly possessions so that someone, somewhere can make a quick buck off the backhanders and profit margins, things don't work as well as you hope.
Amazing that. Almost like there's a problem there.
That money could tr
Mr. Burns! Li'l Lisa's Patented Animal Slurry. (Score:2)
This is similar to Mr. Burns when he tried to not be evil and ended up MORE evil trying to do good:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
i am very smart (Score:1, Interesting)
Everyonne seems to be overlooking a basic problem. Bill Gates is very smart. Ask anyone. He knew about the possibility of a pandemic before epidemiologist did, at least as far as i can tell from the number of times that TED talk has been referenced.
He is also an expert on agriculture, because he's rich, and therefore very smart.
He is also an expert on Malaria,because he's rich, and therefore very smart.
This is a problem. He has a bunch of money to give and if he gives it and says "you should do it this wa
Best intentions... (Score:1)
...and roads to hell.
So much of the paternalistic attitude from the west has done *exactly* the opposite of what is intended.
Africa has food problems. So we ship food there. But that puts local farmers there out of business, since they can't compete with "free", so now they don't have farms. And next year, they need more food. So we ship food there. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Africa has malaria problems. So we start fighting malaria. But we hate DDT because Rachel Carlson wrote a book. So we use less tha
Re: (Score:2)
I totally agree. It's complicated. Fuck trying.
All about speed (Score:2)
Sow's ear (Score:1)
The problem with African farming is African farmers. Hyper-empaths, also known in recent times as "liberals," labor under the idealistic delusion that everyone is the same, but only differ in the circumstances into which they were born. Sorry, but it just ain't so. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Put another way, you can take the boy out of the hood, but you can't take the hood out of the boy.
And... (Score:1)
Poisoned fruits from Bill Gates? (Score:2)
Not much of a surprise. He pioneered that model with DOS and then Windows. The damage from that "help" is still increasing.
That *IS* the entire point (Score:2)
Worse, critics say the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, founded in 2006 with money from the Gates and Rockefeller foundations, has promoted an industrial model of agriculture that poisons soils with chemicals and encourages farmers to go into debt by buying expensive seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. As a result of that debt, some farmers have had to sell their land or household goods like stoves and TVs
As Pink Floyd would say, "Welcome, to the machine". You have no value to the machine unless you are contributing to it. Modern slavery.
Re: (Score:2)
As slashdotters have mentioned many many times, weather is not climate, and very definitely local weather is not climate.
Deliberate modification of climate would require injection of tens of billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Or removal, depending on which way you want to modify.