TESTING GROUND : California Researchers Join the Effort to Stop Another African Famine

To the north there lies a desert as harsh as any moonscape. Beyond the ragged mountains, the inferno turns to dust. The western coast feigns temperance, but its image is deceiving, for seasons there are normally marked by fire and flood.

The irony of this bleak portrait is that it describes both Southern California and the African Sahel, a vast crescent of arid poverty extending south from the Sahara Desert.

There are plenty of parallels linking America’s richest agricultural state to the world’s most benighted quadrant. The fertility of the Gambia River delta equals the fertility of the irrigated farmlands around Sacramento. Summer heat in the Imperial Valley matches that of the Nubian desert in northern Sudan. The same pattern of salinity that limits horticulture in the western San Joaquin Valley also stunts crops planted on Senegal’s plateaus.

In California, agronomists largely have overcome the state’s climate and topography through research conducted in laboratories and at experimental farms. African leaders hope the technology developed here will slow their Malthusian spiral before the clash of uncontrolled population growth and diminishing resources ends in disaster.

For the 26 African nations that are chronically food-deficient, the greening of California has special significance. “Heroic challenges successfully met seem to rejuvenate you Americans,” says Siteke Mwale, special assistant to Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda. “If your scientific methods of agriculture could be applied with African patience, our lack of productivity might eventually be resolved.”

The apocalyptic drought that has killed 3 million Africans, turned 10 million others into refugees and placed another 13 million at risk has emblazoned as never before the ugly face of famine on America’s conscience. But long before the rain stopped falling three years ago, California academics were trying to ensure the production of essential foodstuffs.

For African farmers the immediate priority is survival, and to that end Anthony Hall, a 45-year-old plant physiologist at UC Riverside, has invested nine years researching the cowpea. A legume, the cowpea is rich in protein and well adapted to arid soils, a quality appreciated in northern Senegal, where annual rainfall has dropped from 16 to 8 inches.

Supported by a grant of $600,000 from the U.S. Agency for International Development, Hall is breeding cowpeas for greater heat tolerance and growth potential. It’s an arduous task that keeps him shuttling between Africa’s bush, the Imperial Valley and experimental nurseries at the Riverside campus in search of plants with heightened resistance to drought.

“UC research is designed for application on California farms, but in the Sahel people are starving,” says Hall. “If a new cowpea germplasm developed here can reduce Senegal’s dependence on international relief, I think both sides will benefit.”

The breadth of the cooperative effort is typified by the work of William Sims, a vegetable specialist at the University of California at Davis, who has introduced genetically improved tomatoes to 27 developing countries. In Egypt, where he’s a paid consultant to the Ministry of Agriculture, farmers quadrupled the size of their harvests by switching to a high-yield varietal developed at Davis.

The tomato may be merely a garnish to some, but to Sims it’s the panacea for much of what ails Black Africa. “The tomato contains more Vitamin C than an orange,” he says, beaming. “Africa’s problem is a lack of technical advice. Ethiopians still plant a tomato that’s 40 years old.”

Unfortunately, increased production does not always result in higher levels of nutrition. Tropical countries lose a quarter of their grain harvests to rats, insects and spoilage from faulty storage. The average is even higher in the Sahel, where roads and refrigeration seldom extend beyond the cities.

“Most of the world’s good land already is under cultivation,” says Joseph Eckert, a UC plant pathologist who in 1964 developed an inexpensive fungicide that prevents mold from appearing on citrus after the fruit is brought home from the store. Today, his advice is sought by Egypt, Thailand and numerous West African countries, which collectively lose 26% of their oranges to post-harvest disease. “It’s more cost-effective to prevent mold and fungi than to clear and plant marginal jungle land,” Eckert says,contemplating the still life composed by a mound of decaying fruit.

Animal disease rivals the drought as a destroyer of protein in Africa. The perspective of doctors involved with the largest veterinary research program in the world--an undertaking at the UC School of Veterinary Medicine in Davis with a $16-million budget--is that the best way to keep food fresh is to keep it alive. But maintaining healthy livestock is no easy task in Africa, since a lack of vaccines and other treatments allows a host of parasites to thrive.

Some African savannas capable of supporting 200 million cattle are nearly devoid of animal life; they are plagued by East Coast Fever, blue tongue and a deadly form of sleeping sickness spread by the tsetse fly. An infinite variety of parasites preys on lesser mammals, and most lodge inside humans once the food chain is contaminated.

UC veterinarians recently completed a program in which goats resistant to local disease were crossbred in Kenya with larger European breeds. “In some cases, the result may have been only two or three extra cups of milk a day, but in northern Kenya, every bit of nourishment helps,” says David Robinson, a professor of animal science at UC Davis.

California’s love affair with technology is reflected in the amounts it budgets for food-related research and development. This year, the University of California’s division of Agriculture and Natural Resources will spend more than $97 million in support of its 2,500 scientists and their 1,400 research projects. Cooperative Extension programs amounting to an additional $28 million will explain new techniques and fund more field experiments.

This commitment to science, and the ability to pay for its implementation, provides the foundation for a massive agro-industrial complex that not only produces basic agricultural commodities worth $13.6 billion each year but also promotes high-tech experimentation on the intricate DNA chromosomes essential to life.

In many respects, the technology most appropriate to Africa’s parched Sahel is that of harnessing the power of the sun. Solar energy is the only asset some Sahelian nations possess in abundance. Bankrupt nations subsisting on foreign aid can scarcely afford the petroleum to run the pumps, generators and greenhouses necessary for modern, irrigated farming. Many economists believe that the development of solar energy is essential if the continent’s subsistence farmers and poor nomads are ever to prosper.

So far, cost is limiting solar energy’s potential. The eight panels necessary to power a pump cost about $5,000, or about $7 per watt. In the San Fernando Valley, Arco Solar Inc. has 100 scientists trying to bring down the cost of photovoltaics, the process by which sunlight is turned into electricity. They’ve developed a new method, using a silicon film instead of silicon wafers, that could eventually cut the cost of solar energy in half and make it competitive with diesel energy. Arco physicist Don Morel predicts that by the end of this century, solar energy--the most expensive and complex of the various alternative sources--will be the cheapest and most practical for resource-poor sub-Saharan nations.

Arco already has more than 1,500 solar panels in place throughout Africa. Arco panels power more than 100 water pumps in Somalia. In the Botswana village of Otse, solar power supplies 2,500 gallons of water daily for human use and for irrigation. In addition to water, solar energy makes possible refrigeration, light and telecommunications.

“Unfortunately, the people who would benefit most from this technology are the ones who can least afford it, but that is changing fast,” Morel says. “Logic favors an advanced technology that has no moving parts, never needs maintenance and requires no petroleum.”

During Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr.’s Administration, the problems of surviving on a “small planet” received greater priority. Academics reconciled to an era of limits worked to develop technologies appropriate for an increasingly interdependent world. With the election of Gov. George Deukmejian, emphasis shifted back to projects that directly benefit California’s farmers, animal breeders and industries such as seed companies that sell tons of germ plasm overseas.

The relationship between government policy, scientific research and international development was underscored during the recent debate over tax reform. Scientists experimenting with wind and solar energy suddenly encountered a shortage of investors when the Treasury Department proposed a sharp reduction in special tax credits for alternate energy research. In some laboratories the new investment climate reinforced the belief that scientific research cannot be guided by altruism alone.

“Eventually, the Third World’s problems will lead to increased hunger and revolution, but the Third World can’t afford the technology that could solve those problems,” says Martin Learn, director of the Alternate Energy Institute in La Jolla. “The need is there, but a company can’t exist by giving its product away.” Nevertheless, other venture capitalists remain enthusiastic about overseas development--even in the Third World--despite the slim chances for immediate profit.

One of the more quixotic ventures involves spirulina, an edible species of blue-green algae, harvested daily from 10 large ponds gouged from the desert east of the Salton Sea. Spirulina yields more protein per acre than any other food crop, and that fact alone has convinced the Proteus Corp. of Marin County and its Japanese partner that they may have the solution to Africa’s famine in their grasp. A team of aquatic biologists from UC Santa Barbara--with financing from the partner (a chemical firm) and encouragement from French scientists who are testing the algae-based ecosystem in India, Togo and Senegal--are now working with two Japanese advisers to dredge 60 tons of spirulina from the Imperial County ponds each year. Biologist Bruce Carlson, assistant farm manager, predicts that once the present production costs of $9 a pound are lowered, no Sahelian peasant ever need starve again.

Spirulina’s detractors are less sanguine. They dismiss it as nothing more than unappetizing pond scum that will go down in history as the nutritional equivalent of Esperanto.

Impediments to agricultural cooperation occur both here and abroad. Bureaucratic delays, guerrilla wars and hepatitis routinely thwart projects deemed foolproof in California. In the southern Sudan, where Calvin Schwabe, a professor of epidemiology in the School of Veterinary Medicine at UC Davis, has been trying to encourage cooperation between the departments of animal medicine and public health, a “cold chain” composed of portable refrigerators was set up to keep perishable medicines fresh. “But that meant that we needed four-wheel-drive vehicles to deliver the kerosene to power the deep freezers,” he said. “On occasion the system collapses for want of a 25-cent wick that can’t be delivered because the fleet of Land Rovers lacks spare parts.”

Equally frustrating for African technocrats are the vagaries of California’s rigidly structured academic community. Will a university concentrate its resources on molecular genetics or work to eliminate the parasitic tse-tse fly? The decision is as unpredictable as Africa’s electricity.

“The reward system for professors at the University of California doesn’t encourage prolonged research overseas,” says Parker Pratt, chairman of the soil and environmental science department at UC Riverside. “An unconventional activity that doesn’t lead to publication can leave you dead in the system and can mean that you’ll never make tenure.”

Pratt’s “rule of academic survival” is widely, if less candidly, seconded by his peers. “Foreign projects that demonstrate principle instead of developing science may be very helpful, but there’s no special category for ‘good works’ at the University of California,” says John S. Letey, a UC Riverside soil physicist.

More important for scientists responsible for California’s agricultural transformation is the question of whether sophisticated technology, and the ethics by which it is controlled, can be transferred successfully to a continent incapable of feeding itself.

“Given the problems like the Kesterson Reservoir, which was inadvertently poisoned by selenium in waste irrigation water, I’m not sure that Africa needs the technology we have to offer,” says Stephen Commins, coordinator of the Development Institute at UCLA’s African Studies Center. “Africa’s energies might be better directed toward a rediscovery of the mixed agriculture that existed prior to colonialism.”

Many Africans express similar sentiments. At a famine-relief conference last summer at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Oumarou Youssoufou, the Organization of African Unity’s ambassador to the United Nations, “Mau-Mau’d” representatives of 124 charitable relief organizations, accusing them of cultural imperialism and concluding with the suggestion that they simply send money.

“Our basic problem is that there are too many experts on African affairs,” he stated. “You are like doctors who open up a patient without even consulting him.”

Having just collected $120 million to aid starving Africans, the audience might have responded that their efforts were precisely what a good doctor would have ordered. Instead, they reaffirmed the legacy of radical chic by rising in unison to applaud the verbal flaying.

Muffled cries of ingratitude finally surfaced the next day, but the belated response partially underscored the fact that Africa’s post-colonial development is rife with misguided altruism. In the Gambian village of Georgetown, irrigation for the surrounding fields is powered by eight different pumps, each from a different country, and all testifying to the failed ambitions of foreigners unwilling to adapt to local conditions.

One European scheme developed for Swaziland assumed that the livelihood of tribal nomads would improve if the quality of their cattle could be upgraded. Teams of epidemiologists laden with vaccines and hormones were dispatched, and each returned with bullish predictions of anticipated revenues when the cows went to market.

Alas, the project failed. The villagers refused to sell the new cattle, which they soon grew to hate because of the animals’ appetites. The scientists had overlooked the fact that the nomads deemed money worthless since theirs was not a cash economy.

Californians such as Michael Watts, a Berkeley geographer who began visiting central Gambia in 1978, are trying to prevent similar failures. Watts has helped develop a $2-billion irrigation scheme that would prevent salt intrusion in the Gambia River delta, provide irrigation for 150,000 acres and thus make unnecessary the annual importation of 250,000 tons of rice. On paper, the project makes sense, but Watts believes more studies are needed.

“Most of tropical Africa suffers from a liver disease caused by a freshwater snail,” he says. “To eliminate salt from the delta would make it more productive but increase the risk of disease. As a geographer, I try to bridge a series of technical concerns to ensure that what works in California will be practical for Gambia.”

The realization that human concerns are as important as technological innovation is a notion that has been slow to develop. But its acceptance is vital to the cooperative effort essential to the development of a self-sufficient, modern Africa.