AFRICA should abandon the notion of fighting famine through an agricultural "green revolution" like those that filled bellies in Europe and Asia. What is needed is a series of "rainbow evolutions" that will upgrade the continent's diverse agricultural systems.
So says an international panel of scientists who have devised a major new strategy for improving African agriculture. Their report was launched on 25 June in New York by the UN secretary-general Kofi Annan. "It's not possible to repeat the green revolution in Africa," says Rudy Rabbinge of Wageningen Agricultural University in the Netherlands, co-chair of the panel. The report is published by the InterAcademy Council (IAC), an alliance of 90 scientific academies worldwide.
The green revolutions relied mainly on improvements to yields in rice and wheat, two crops that were already widely grown in the areas that benefited. But in Africa, rice, wheat and maize account for just 20 per ...
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