­Overcoming the “Hurricane of Hunger” in the Most Affordable and Efficient Way

Antonio Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, has described the rapidly worsening famine around the developing world as a “hurricane of hunger.” Some experts say that as many as 100 million Africans are in danger of dying, and the increasing disaster has no end in sight. If even just 60 million of these people were to die, this tragedy would stand as the worst famine in human history.

To cure a disease, one must first diagnose it accurately, but more than 30 years after the droughts began worsening, we have failed to do so. Before 2010, famines in Africa rarely affected more than 10 million people. By 2017, when the United Nations declared a famine in Africa and Yemen, 20 million people were in serious need of food aid, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

By 2020, that number had risen to 40 million in Africa alone. In 2023, it rose to over 60 million people. However, this monstrous number of people was almost totally fed by the World Food Program, so few people elsewhere realized what was happening. Obviously, the “hurricane of hunger” has not been caused by the war in Ukraine or the sanctions put in place to try to end that war.

While food aid can prevent people from dying in the short term, it is not a solution to the problem. Rather, it is only a short-term, rather expensive band-aid that masks the problem so that far too few people around the world realize the extent of the disaster facing us. By allowing the wound to fester, it has allowed it to spread and endanger the lives of tens of millions of additional people.

The fact that this “hurricane of hunger” has been growing worse and worse for over two decades is consistent with what most people believe is causing the crippling droughts across the developing world: climate change. But we have convincing evidence that climate change is only about 20% of the problem. First, rainfall across Africa has not decreased anywhere by more than about 5 to 10%. Such a small decrease could not be causing the devastating droughts that are now occurring every second or third year across most of sub-Saharan Africa.

Almost any farmer in drought-prone Africa will confirm the problem. If you ask them (as I have done with hundreds of them), how deep the soil is wet after a 3- to 4-hour tropical downpour, they will tell you it only gets moist down to about 15 cm, at most. The soil any deeper than that remains absolutely dry.

Equally convincing is the experience of literally millions of farmers from Brazil, Paraguay, Central America, and Africa. A small group of development personnel have been working since the mid-1970s with a group of plants called green manure/cover crops (gm/ccs). These plants, including mostly leguminous trees, bushes, crawling plants and creepers, can fertilize the soil and overcome droughts. Today, just in Africa alone, there are now thousands of farmers in each of six African nations—Mali, Cameroon, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar—who have been using gm/ccs for at least six years. Most of these farmers’ maize yields in years of good rainfall have increased from less than 1 ton to 3 tons/ha/year. Even more important, their yields in droughty years have increased from almost nothing to about 2.5 tons/ha! That is, the droughts now reduce farmers’ much-improved harvests by less than 20%. Lack of rainfall is obviously not the major cause of the “droughts.”

So what is? For over 2,000 years, African farmers kept their soils fertile by forest fallowing (also called “slash-and-burn” or “shifting” agriculture). This system kept the soil fertile for millennia without synthetic fertilizers, even as people consumed significant amounts of nutrients from the soil every 20 to 25 years. Forests have also kept the weeds under control, kept the soil moist, largely controlled insects and plant diseases (without pesticides), sustained trillions of microorganisms/ha that helped feed plants, produced tremendous amounts of biomass, and sequestered many tons/ha/year of carbon in the soil, for literally millions of years. And they required absolutely no human labor.

 So what is the problem now? Because of human population growth, the amount of land available for Africa’s rural households had, by the 1980s, decreased to less than 1.5 ha/family. With so little land, farmers could not grow forests on their land for 15 or 20 years at a time and still have enough land left to produce the basic grains their families needed. Farmers began reducing their fallowing time from 20 to 10 years, to 8 years, to 4 years, and eventually, nothing. Forest fallowing is now on its deathbed across sub-Saharan Africa. As a result, soil organic matter has dropped from 4% before the 1980s to well below 1% today. According to scientific experiments in Malawi, this has caused the rainwater infiltration rate to drop from 60% to 10% or 20%. Without enough organic matter, clay soil becomes almost rock-hard. (In sandy soil, water runs through quickly to well beneath the root zone.) Thus, even without climate change, the amount of water held in farmers’ soils is now just 1/3 to 1/6 of what it was 30 years ago. Whereas climate change has reduced rainfall by at most 10%, soil degradation has reduced the amount of water actually infiltrating the soil by 66 to 83%! That is, the loss of the soil’s organic matter is far and away the greatest cause of these crippling “droughts.”

So what can we do about this? First, the fact that soil degradation, rather than climate change, is the primary cause of increasing hunger means farmers no longer have to be helpless victims. They can solve the problem themselves if they're taught a few new, virtually free farming practices. Secondly, it means that we don’t need to just stick a finger in the dike; we can build a brand-new dike. But how?

Green manure/cover crops (GM/CCs), including many farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR) systems, have proven they can solve all these problems. They make the soil soft and porous and able to absorb and hold plenty of rainwater. They provide shade and a mulch cover that keeps moisture in longer. They keep the soil fertile (by fixing nitrogen and recycling nutrients efficiently), they make plowing and soil preparation totally unnecessary, they control weeds, they reduce the incidence of pests and plant diseases, they sequester tons of carbon/ha in the soil every year, they dramatically increase crop productivity, and they can do all this for centuries, with absolutely no need for synthetic fertilizer. At the same time, they can dramatically reduce both farmers’ cash and labor costs.

Does all this sound virtually impossible? Frankly, yes. But these are precisely the same advantages that we listed above in the case of natural forests. For these reasons, the most important motto of gm/ccs is to “imitate the forest,” which is a very simple process.

So what kind of plants can do all these miracles? Well over one hundred species of gm/ccs are in use today across the world. But two GM/CC systems are the most popular across Africa and are well-suited to at least 75% of drought-prone, lowland sub-Saharan Africa. One uses jack beans, gliricidia trees (also called “mother of cacao”), and lablab beans, intercropped in people’s maize fields. A second one involves jack beans, gliricidia trees, pigeon peas, peanuts, and cowpeas, intercropped in maize, sorghum, millet, or cassava fields. In each case, these gm/ccs provide a tremendous amount of high-protein food, in addition to the sustainably tripled basic grain yields. For instance, the first of these systems will provide edible gliricidia flowers, plus the edible leaves, pods, green peas, and dry beans of the lablab bean, a native African plant whose beans contain about 50% more protein than do our Western beans. The tender lablab leaves alone, which dry easily and store for 12 months, can provide large amounts of vitamins and minerals, along with more than 12% protein. They thereby constitute a virtually free and plentiful source of vitamins, minerals and proteins that are available year-round—a veritable nutritionist’s dream come true.

Will farmers accept gm/ccs?

Well, today, over 15 million smallholder farmers around the world have been using them successfully for anywhere from 6 to over 500 years, and another 10 million farmers use FMNR. And where these practices have been introduced correctly, and smallholder farmers have seen the results, they are understandably clamoring to adopt them like no other technology I have worked with over the last half-century.

We now know how to end the hurricane of hunger in Africa, surprisingly cheaply, within one generation. Furthermore, interest in GM/CCS among development organizations has increased significantly over the last year. All that remains is the financial support we need to train these organizations, along with tens of millions of farmers.