At universities across the African continent, young scholars often start off on the academic career path as tutorial assistants with bachelor’s degrees, and can wait years before the opportunity of further training comes along. This reality presents a frustrating dilemma, both for aspiring young academics who want to build careers, and for universities that desperately need them to advance and help build capacity further, yet have few resources to invest in their training.

While providing doctoral training in particular drives up an institution’s running costs substantially, the reality is that those few universities that do have the strength to increase the post-graduate (and particularly doctoral) training they offer must now do so, in order to meet the pressing demands of higher education expansion—and fast.

In recognition of this dilemma, the MacArthur Foundation supported young lecturers from Bayero University, in Kano, Nigeria, in obtaining their PhDs abroad, in order to help develop a critical mass of academics with the global connections and expertise necessary for building a culture of advanced training and research at the university, from the ground up.

Half a dozen of these young lecturers—all of them male—gather around the lunch table at Bayero, in order to share the experiences of their first few years in academia. All are eager to discuss and debate what their newly earned credentials will mean, both for their own careers and for the university, located in the arid far northern reaches of Nigeria. They are also daunted by the challenges they will face here, as they balance heavy teaching loads up against their ambitions to continue publishing and networking internationally, building on the connections they made while abroad. Without the program, “None of us would have had the opportunity to go and travel and study in those world class universities,” says Bashir Tyjjani, who recently completed his PhD in finance at the University of Dundee in Scotland. “We are now importing the culture of research back home, which will improve the quality of our jobs and our university.”

This aspect of a university’s “research culture” left a deep impression on Tyjjani and several of his colleagues, who relished being able to attend international conferences and contribute to journal publications. When Tyjjani returned to Bayero, for example, he took over as the head of the department, and decided to introduce a thesis monitoring committee, because he saw how it had worked as a mechanism for smoothing communications and heading off problems for graduate students working on their theses at Dundee. In addition, he says that he is now working to set up an exchange program and collaboration agreement between the accounting and finance departments at Bayero and Dundee.

In the past, few of the young lecturers sent abroad for training by the university returned, says Muhammad Bello, a professor of mathematics who previously oversaw all MacArthur-funded programs. The lure of higher pay, better resources, and greater opportunities was simply too strong. Before leaving on their MacArthur fellowships, the lecturers all signed pledges that they would return to Bayero after completing their PhDs. “We feel that it’s morally binding on us,” says one of them. “If we stay there, the whole aim of the program is being defeated.”

Few of the returnees around the table today, however, would deny that they were sometimes tempted to stay. Studying liquid crystals as an industrial chemist at Putra University in Malaysia, Abdulsalam Salisu travelled to South Korea, where he rubbed shoulders with the world’s leading experts. One of his Nigerian counterparts was able to register two patents—one in the United States and one in Australia—in the time it took to complete his PhD there. By contrast, young academics here and elsewhere around the continent are often so bogged down by heavy teaching loads, poor access to materials, and unavailable supervisors (to say nothing of arcane national patenting procedures and regulations), that it takes them as many as nine years to merely finish.

“All of us have attended international conferences, and we presented papers with leading scholars in our various fields. Since we are back to Nigeria, we are going to implement some of the skills we have learned. Now all of us can go present papers in international conferences,” says Haruna Musa, who did his PhD in polymer chemistry at the University of Bristol.

Now back in the land of power failures and slow internet connections, however, the lecturers express fears that they will not be able to maintain the levels of productivity and connectedness that they have come to value so much. For all the recent gains that universities have achieved in improving internet speeds and reducing costs, connectivity still lags far behind much of the rest of the world. “We used to be on the Internet for more than 10 hours, in our own rooms,” says Idris. “Here, you have to go to an Internet cafe, and it takes ages before you can open a page. I’ve been back here one and a half years, and I’ve had such a heavy teaching load that I’ve done no research work.”

“As we’ve started to publish our papers online, we are already known. Recently I reviewed a paper for the Royal Society. I’m sure they know I am here in Africa. But the problem now is that maybe you disappear,” says Salisu.

If properly supported, these new academics, with their valuable skills and new international connections, firmly believe that they can inject valuable new lifeblood into the university, and can help turn an obscure university in the northern extreme of Nigeria into a place where ideas from around the world are exchanged, adapted and re-shaped to suit a local context. Such is the promise of advanced degree training abroad. Says Tyjjani: “The future depends largely on how prepared we are to contribute… We’ve seen a lot in developed countries, and if we [can] implement some of the things we saw, there’s every possibility that our universities will also become centres of excellence.”

The event, curated by New York-based blogger and entrepreneur Emeka Okafor, and convened by a group of bloggers, stemmed from their realization that Africa — a continent which according to stereotypes produces little — in fact holds a great wealth of backyard tinkerers and inventors, Okafor says. This creative class works largely unsupported and in obscurity, offering a sort of unacknowledged wellspring of productive creativity that could be harnessed to generate wealth and development on the continent. What they lack is the necessary access to markets, networks and resources to scale up their products and make themselves known.

The Maker Faire is an attempt to bring these isolated problem-solvers together to build platforms for their ideas to spread. “It is essentially an effort to validate these brilliant individuals,” Okafor told me. “Hopefully over a period of time we’re building an auto-catalytic, self-sustaining community that builds on its own strengths and its own resources. We hope that a lot of what happens will be emergent and self-directed, as opposed to us laying down what the rules should be.”

Under the white tents erected in a courtyard at the university, Makers traveling from as far as South Africa and Wales display their inventions and share their hopes of making it big. Norbert Okec, a retired chemist from Uganda, displays a solar-powered traffic light that he assembled from LED’s and scrap materials. “The idea behind this was to keep it as simple as possible. It’s an open-source project, and so it is easy to imitate, and improve,” he says. The project developed as a response to Kampala’s pervasive gridlock — an increasingly common problem that in many African cities is exacerbated by a lack of working traffic lights.

In other corners, young designers share a mobile phone game they created in the aftermath of Kenya’s post-election violence, called GetH20, in hopes of spreading messages to other youth about the necessities of cooperating and conserving scarce resources. Students from the University of Nairobi’s Fab Lab give cool and colorful demonstrations of their computer-controlled tools, which cut out patterns on demand, according to a designer’s specs. Students from MIT showcase the internet mesh network they are setting up around Nairobi. Another young woman from a local architectural firm shares her story of helping to create a communal stove in the slum of Kibera, which burns the garbage that chokes the city’s rivers.

Across this space, the village meets the blogosphere. Challenge turns to opportunity. Water and electricity scarcity. Potholed roads and poor communication networks — These are the sorts of problems that spur ingenuity and inspire solutions.

Michael Oware Onyango and Absalom Odera, business partners from the village of Dunga in Kisimu, created a hardy bicycle, the Masiro 2010, designed for farmers and other village sellers who transport their heavy loads on forbidding rural roads. The sturdy frame made from welded pipes supports loads of up to 250 kilos, and boasts shock absorbers and an emergency brake, as well as a pedal-powered phone charger — which is a boon for rural entrepreneurs in areas that lack electricity.

Other ideas are too diverse and too interesting to do justice to here. For nearly everyone, though, lack of capital remains the biggest obstacle to overcoming isolation and scaling up. One inventor displays his cardboard prototype of a grain drying room, which uses moisture sensors to automatically close an open rooftop in the event of rain, in order to avoid the spoilage which drastically reduces Africa’s crop yields. He dips the end of the wire he has rigged into water, causing the roof to slide shut. “I would like to make this from real materials and not a cardboard box,” he says. “But I make use of what I have.”

On a continent where perhaps 10% of the population has Internet access, I find fascinating this attempt to bring people together and let their interactions shape new directions and processes, in the same organic, unplanned vein as so many Internet communities have coalesced, with unforeseen and unforeseeable results.  “I would call it massively parallel cross-pollination,” says Okafor. “It’s inter-disciplinary, it’s un-siloed, but it’s actually quite nourishing. That’s my succinct description of what I think is going on.”

Other Makers echo similar sentiments in plainer language. Onyango and Odera, the bicycle-makers, have come away with new contacts and ideas for innovations to add to their bikes. The challenges of overcoming isolation, attracting finance and reaching markets are not going away any time soon. But hopefully as venues such as this one emerge and build momentum, so will new pathways to creative fulfillment and prosperity.

Okec, the Ugandan traffic light inventor, is optimistic: “I’ve got cards from venture capitalists, from engineers. I didn’t expect this,” he says. “I really want the Maker Faire to come to Kampala.”

In the evening, Laxman drove us into the village, where girls obliged to do housework and look after the livestock during the day attend night school.

Talk about dedication to learning.

Twenty-seven girls between the ages of six and fourteen sat cross-legged upon mats in the dust underneath a tarpaulin in the dim light of a solar-powered lantern, passing around slates and chalk to begin the evening’s lesson. The girl facing the camera in this photo was fascinated, and couldn’t stop turning around to gawk at us.

Most of the girls, Laxman explained, are from low-caste families who were further impoverished when they sold their farm land in this village in order to make way for a new highway. The families know how to farm, he said, but not how to save or invest their money.

Although primary education is free, he said, their families see more value in utilizing their daughters’ labor than in educating them — though boys are often sent to school.

Learning at the night school is based on daily life — basic literacy, numeracy and knowledge of agriculture, health and water. None of these girls will likely ever get more than a fifth-grade education, Laxman said.

But that is enough, at least, to equip them for a life of conducting basic business and looking after their families. Apparently when a woman has five years of education or more, her children are healthier.

It was only here in this place that the true horror of the caste system struck me. I hadn’t really thought much about it before.

Over three thousand years, such venerables as the Buddha and Gandhi — and no doubt countless others in between them – tried and failed to do away with it.

Now the inequities persist still, especially in rural life, Laxman said — although now the distinction between castes is more a factor of economics than of religious power structures. (For a fantastic and wildly illuminating take on caste, pick up The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.)

Until more value is placed on education, it’s hard to see that changing.

In India recently, I visited a visionary – indeed revolutionary — institution called the Barefoot College, which embraces a very refreshing development ethos. Shunning the paternalistic, hand-out mentality so typical amongst organizations that work with the rural poor, this place seeks instead to empower rural people to uplift themselves by acquiring the technical skills to serve their own development needs.

Set in a small village called Tilonia, in the parched semi-desert of Rajasthan, one of India’s poorest states, the college is a place of informal, unstructured learning, where village women in colorful saris with toddlers in tow sit concentrating on configuring solar-powered electrity circuit boards and soldering radio parts.

It may call itself a college, but this is no ordinary place of learning.

I wanted to go there because I’d heard that the reach of their work extends not only to the parched, isolated villages of India, Bhutan, Pakistan and Afghanistan — but also to communities in some 21 different African countries.

I was escorted around the college by Laxman Singh, who has worked at the college for the past 20 years and is himself of low-caste origin. He explained the college’s focus on empowering women by offering them exposure to technologies that aid development and raise living standards in ways that also protect the fragile environments where so many live.

The college itself is a showcase for some of these innovations: solar panels are ubiquitous, as well as parabolic mirror-reflector cookers. Various tanks and channels around the grounds, and conduits on the buildings, form an elaborate system of rainwater collection and storage — inspired by traditional practices.

The women who learn such techniques here, Mr. Singh said, will bring their education and skills back home to their villages and put them to work for the betterment of the community. “Women can change everything,” he says.

That is the idea behind the Barefoot Solar Engineers initiative: women selected by their communities travel to the college in order to learn how to solar-electrify their villages. They spend six months at the college learning the intricacies of configuring circuit boards and hooking up solar panels, before they return home equipped with enough materials and spare parts to be in business for the next 5 to 10 years.

Solar engineers in training

Households pay fees equivalent to what they’d otherwise have to spend on kerosene and candles — thus ensuring sustainability of the program and a livelihood for the barefoot engineer.

Helen Nchenge, 43, from Cameroon was one of 21 women from seven different African countries studying at the college when I visited.

She said that the access to solar lanterns would help children in her village do their school work at night without having to use smelly, dangerous and costly kerosene.

“This is going to change peoples’ lives, because the village has been living in darkness,” she said.

How disappointing to learn at this critical moment — when, as I see it, humanity essentially needs to make that leap of faith and accept that climate change is for real, before the window of opportunity to do something about it slams shut – that our venerable and Nobel-lauded climate scientists are prone to hubris and shoddy fact-checking, as if nothing more was at stake than the politics of some podunk biology department. 

While I was blissfully unaware of this latest climate debacle unfolding on Twitter and in the reader forums of the New Scientist, however, I felt a creeping sense of alarm as I climbed higher towards Machupuchre, the distinctively shaped peak at the center of the Anapurna mountain range, and listened to my guide Dambar Thapa speak about the gradual receding of the glaciers that he’s noticed over the years. 

Gazing across a forested valley at the spectacular snow-clad mountains, I was feeling that odd sensation of guilty pleasure that I feel so often when it gets incongruously warm and pleasant in winter. Call it global warming neurosis: a moment of happiness tarnished somewhat by the knowledge that the delicious warmth might well be a portent of suffering and doom. The sun was out, and I had stripped down to my t-shirt. It was probably 20 degrees ( about 70 Farenheit). 

People in the Himalayas speak about global warming not as some distant threat, but as something that’s here and tangible. When my husband and I were planning our trek in Kathmandu, for example, I questioned the tour operator because I had read something about the possibility of avalanches on the route in winter. 

Here today, gone... when?

He laughed. 

“With global warming, you don’t have to worry about avalanches anymore,” he said. “It hasn’t even snowed up there this year.” 

As we ascended, Dambar stopped to point out a dirty heap of snow at the base of a dry river. “Every year I come here and it’s a bit less,” he said. 

Now, I am well aware that making a solid case for the evidence of climate change requires much more than anecdotes about standing around in shirtsleeves in the Himalayas in January, eyeing diminishing glaciers.  

In a way, that is the crux of the problem. Even though there’s such a wealth of anecdotal evidence to go around — out-of-whack floods and droughts in Africa, warming in the Arctic, etc — so few of us actually understand the complex dynamics of climate, that it’s easy to leap to conclusions. For would-be denialists, it’s equally easy to be swayed by ideological and economic arguments, as well as half-baked science — especially when acknowledging climate change as a reality means spending lots of money and making painful lifestyle adjustments. 

Now, unfortunately, the peccadillos of a bunch of scientists have given foot-draggers an excuse to continue dragging their feet. The scandals may have undermined our trust in the integrity of scientists, but they have not changed the fact that the glaciers are actually melting — even if not quite at the breakneck speed first put forward by the IPCC. 

The story of our planet has been one continuous drama of ice ages and mass extinctions. The extent to which the cause of current climatic gyrations is natural or man-made — or both — will always be contentious; though pretty much everyone except the quacks will tell you that human activity plays a major role. The bottom line is, we need to find ways of adapting to the new realities hurtling towards us. 

Glaciers are the Earth’s early warning system, writes John Gartner on the Chasing Glaciers website. “We study how glaciers melt because better understanding of their intricate water storage system provides a window into how our climate is changing,” he writes. “The current rapid (geologically speaking) reduction in global glacier mass provides clues to the likelihood that significant and possibly catastrophic environmental changes lay ahead.” 

Which poses a very real problem for people in countries like Nepal, where the glaciers are just about the only means of storing water to irrigate crops and generate electricity. All told, more than a billion people around the world rely on the water stored in glaciers. From Central Asia to Europe and the Andes, the prospect of melting glaciers gives a horrifyingly clear shape to the threat of climate change. 

The disappearance of glaciers also threatens the viability of hydropower not only in this corner of Nepal but in regions across the globe, Reuters reports. 

Artificial glaciers are one potential solution being tested in Ladhak, in northern India near Tibet, reports SciDev.net. But of course collecting water in dams poses its own ecological problems. 

Our future depends on both finding alternative ways of storing water and acting to slow down the rate at which the glaciers are melting. Why risk the tragedy of losing these exquisite and mysterious formations, that hold the key to so much of life? 

This remote rooftop of the world holds a key to our survival

Harnessing the power of water

Just got back from a spectacular 11 day trek in the Anapurna region of Nepal, to learn of the horror that has gripped Haiti. It’s getting increasingly difficult to cut yourself off from the outside world these days. You pretty much have to go somewhere as remote as the Himalayas.

Even where I was, in the region of the Anapurna Base Camp, globalization is steadily encroaching. For those of us whose lives are ever-complicated by the world’s interconnectedness, a brief escape from the constant flood of news and information is bliss.

But in places where information and resources are so hard to access (everything from a bottle of coke to basic construction materials is carried up the mountain on somebody’s back), one really sees the benefit of spreading good ideas. I’m thinking especially of the access to hydro and solar power which has become widespread in the Anapurna region over the past few years.

Nepal is rich in water resources, and a number of families and trekkers’ tea houses have constructed their own tiny hydro power plants along the banks of the plentiful streams in the area. These are simple sheds fed with stream water which enters in a tube, spins a turbine to generate the power and then is channeled back in the river.

A typical hydropower shed

These are low impact, de-centralized sources of clean energy. Each plant generates something between one and four kilowatts, which means that while cities like Kathmandu cope with six hours of load-shedding a day, these places have a small but steady stream of constant power.

Having access to reliable sources of lighting and heat brings other benefits, too. Now, there’s that much less kerosene to be lugged up steep trails — which is a fire hazard to boot. Plus residents no longer have to gather firewood, depleting the forests. Pretty cool.

photo by Kitty Lindow

It’s the end of my third day in Kathmandu. Since I’ve been so Africa-oriented for the past few years, it’s hard not to see a lot of parallels between here and various places in Africa, despite the obvious differences. The first day here was a mad rush to take in a few of the tourist sites before the start of a 3-day general strike, or bandh, decreed by the Maoists, which was supposed to grind all transportation and business activity to a halt.

(Basically, as I understand it, the Maoists waged a 10-year insurgency here, before signing a peace deal a few years ago that has brought them into the government. But they accuse the government of bad faith dealings and have been boycotting since May, while calling more and more of these bandhs to drive home their displeasure. Those in the know say that what they really want is revolution.)

So during that first day a lot of time was spent sitting in gridlock inhaling eye-watering pollution (face masks are very common here) while ‘rushing’ to amazing Buddhist and Hindu holy sites, and a beautiful old city replete with the most intricate eighteenth-century wood-carved buildings and temples. Religion seems so integrated into daily life — everywhere on the streets you see little shrines with statues adorned with bright chains of marigolds and butter lamps, and smeared with brightly colored wax drippings. People pause ever so briefly on their way past to spin a prayer wheel or yank the cord of a clanging bell. I found it particularly fascinating and moving to watch the elderly Tibetan refugees circling the huge Buddhist shrine of Bodnath. I’m so struck by the beauty and the squalor here.

To my mind, the traffic and resultant pollution is but one sign of overpopulation in the Kathmandu Valley. The political situation seems to be another– since what else are all the angry unemployed young men supposed to do but get involved in radical politics? (Though I suppose I should admit here that I’m pretty clueless when it comes to Nepalese politics…) But in any case, whether here, in Lagos or even in parts of Johannesburg and Cape Town, it’s difficult not to see how small, fragile and overburdened this planet really is, especially for those who struggle increasingly to secure basic food, water and fuel as forests and farm land gets swallowed up by the rapidly expanding cities. One long-term resident we spoke to at dinner the first night said that from around now until the arrival of the Monsoon in May, the poorest families in the valley will have to get by on about 5 gallons of water a day. Really makes you think twice about flushing the toilet!

I’m keenly aware that as a backdrop to all of this, our fearless (or feckless?) world leaders in Copenhagen have been turning a blind eye to the imperatives for clean development in poor countries like Nepal, and basically selling the developing world up the river. But let me cleave to the matter at hand.

With the city shut down by angry young men waving red hammer and sickle flags, we had a respite from the smog and got to walk everywhere without the nuisance of traffic — apart from the odd police truck, press van or renegade motorcyclist. Many of the small shops on side streets kept their shutters half-open, risking doing business while keeping an eye out, I imagine, for roving Maoists.

Oh, and did I mention the garbage?

At one point, we crossed the Bagmati River, which flows through the town. The trash piles up high on the banks of the river (and, to a lesser extent, throughout the city), while families sift through it, forming massive piles of plastic bottles and other detritus. A recycling of sorts, I guess. Though you often also see and smell the acrid smoke produced by burning plastic.

The pointless conversion of yet more resources into poison, pollution and waste.

photo by Kitty Lindow

A fascinating idea from Wole Soboyejo, a professor of engineering at Princeton who is doing much to boost the quality of science, higher education and entrepreneurship, both in his home country, Nigeria, and beyond. Check out this video footage from Princeton.

As Southern Africa appears fated to be hit particularly hard by climate change, two key questions have emerged:

How does the region adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change, which, even if all greenhouse gas-spewing activity were to cease right now, would still continue to accelerate for years to come, due to the delayed cumulative effect of all our prior emissions?

And, how do developing countries spur their growth using clean technologies?

Oh, and of course a third: who will pay?

Under Kyoto, a market-based solution, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), was conjured up to deal with the latter two issues. Basically, it’s a provision to allow polluters in the industrialized world to earn carbon credits by investing in projects that reduce emissions in developing countries, where such savings are cheaper. By the sounds of it, this third issue of adaptation has been sorely neglected in the policy agenda.

The CDM has also disappointed. Not only is Africa not benefitting from CDM as it should be (just 32 of the 1800 registered CDM projects are in Africa, according to SciDev.net), but of course many of the projects that attract CDM investment are the “low-hanging fruit” — dubious biofuels and forestry projects like this one profiled in Fortune, that run roughshod over the rights of local people.

It’s a real pity that the market has so far failed to deliver much impact — especially when the need and the opportunities are both so great.

Scientists say the impacts on biodiversity and food security in southern Africa are already being felt, for example in the acceleration of extreme weather patterns: long, hot, dry spells that scorch the land, followed by tumultuous storms that cause flooding and dump water with an intensity that destroys rather than nurtures crops.

Earlier this year in Uganda, for instance, I visited a ruined plot of banana trees, owned by a collective of women small-scale farmers, that had been flattened in less than an hour by a freak storm the night before. The women eyed the carnage, and shook their heads in dismay. Freshly decapitated bundles of green unripe bananas lay strewn amongst ribbons of shredded banana leaves, representing the sudden loss of means to pay for school fees and household staples.

Previous banana crops had paid for farming equipment, and a cow to fertilize the soil. But this time the crop into which these women had poured their time, labor and resources would yield nothing – plainly illustrating how the increasing frequency of weather drama due to climate change now threatens to reverse development gains and make those already poor even poorer.

Ahead of Copenhagen, some have been lobbying for a shift in emphasis away from the “technology transfer” approach of the CDM and towards what they call “innovation cooperation” — in the development of new technologies like solar cookstoves and rechargeable batteries that can really make a difference at the level where they’re needed — tackling Africa’s energy poverty without much increasing its carbon footprint.

Writing for SciDev.net, Ambuj Sagar of the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi argues for the establishment of Climate Technology Innovation Centers in locations across the developing world, as part of a new UN Climate Change treaty, which would harness knowledge from industrialized countries, but adapt it in order to suit local needs and spur local economies.

This already seems like a much more sensible approach, especially if some of whatever funds materialize to facilitate this ”innovation cooperation” can trickle down and reach the many isolated African innovators who are working on these challenges already in local, isolated contexts, but lack the wherewithal to scale up the reach of their inventions. What’s more, perhaps the brainpower of these innovators can be harnessed to work on the adaptation as well as the mitigation side of the problem.

Perhaps measures could extend to adaptations such as improving water storage capacity, introducing new drought-tolerant seed varieties, or improving satelite early warning systems – in addition to the sorts of energy technologies that Sagar advocates.

In South Africa, one of the country’s leading food retailers, Woolworths, last week announced that it has been working with its suppliers to develop a new approach to farming that breaks the cycle of dependence on chemicals, improves the soil, protects biodiversity and conserves water. 

The approach, called “Farming for the Future” is not strictly organic; the idea is to minimize rather than eliminate all those chemical nasties that form the backbone of modern agribusiness — for example by aerating and composting the soil instead of applying synthetic fertilizers.

The company says that by the year 2012 about 85 percent of its fruits and veggies will be produced by the new method — while an additional 6 percent will be organic, and the remaining 9 percent will be imported.

While WWF South Africa supports the project, other environmentalists have accused Woolies of merely trying to boost its green image. All style and no substance. No doubt they have a point.

Nevertheless, the announcement feels like a milestone. It signals a serious shift in thinking — on the part of the industrial food producers themselves – about what an appropriate model of food production on a mass scale should look like. That’s important, particularly given the dire threat of diminished food security for Southern Africa due to climate change.

According to Mark Botha of WWF, agriculture is responsible for up to 80% of greenhouse gas emissions and 70% of water usage, while 70-80% of threatened species are imperiled by the expansion of agriculture.

Of course, South Africa is one of the few African countries to practice industrial agriculture on a large scale. So perhaps we have much to learn from those small-scale farmers to the north who farm organically simply because there’s no alternative. (I’ll pick up this theme again in a future post)

To very loosely paraphrase Michael Pollan, author of the Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, here: industrial agriculture basically replaces the complex, natural ecosystems-based approach of organic farming, with a linear, reductionist type of thinking that sees only inputs, outputs and the bottom line – without factoring in the larger costs to the environment and our health. Short-term, short-sighted thinking, in other words.

That approach keeps farmers locked in a vicious cycle, as all those synthetic substances gradually strip away the land’s capacity to maintain itself in a healthy equilibrium. The soil hardens and becomes toxic, inhospitable to all those microbes and little critters who are supposed to keep it rich and aerated. Monoculture-chomping pests proliferate because all their natural predators are gone – poisoned or wiped out by habitat loss — generating the need for yet more poisons to keep them at bay.

The cost of all this folly has yet to be acknowledged by most big food retailers – so Woolies should be commended. Perhaps one of the most encouraging aspects of the new initiative is that it seems to be driven as much by hard-nosed business concerns as by concerns about the environment/green image/ whatever.

According to Woolies executives, the company and its suppliers are seeing this old industrial model become less and less financially viable. Farmers have seen the price of chemical inputs rise by 300%, while they also face shrinking yields due to declining soil health and water scarcity.

In other words, the consequences of industrial farming are proving to be so devastating that even the farmers and retailers who have invested heavily in sustaining this unsustainable model of agriculture are now acknowledging the need to change course.

Surely, that’s a good thing.