Ugandan Seed Crisis: The failure of charity and bureaucracy

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With every last bit of fertile land spoken for, Uganda's only path out of mass hunger is intensification—getting more food out of the same amount of ground. Back in the 1960s and '70s, high-yield varieties of wheat and rice revolutionized agriculture in Asia and Latin America, freeing up to a billion people from chronic hunger. But the Green Revolution skipped Africa. I had come to Uganda to try to figure out why.

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Between 2003 and 2008, a $1.9 million project by the Danish International Development Agency fully equipped this lab and trained staff to work here. But blackouts are frequent in Uganda. When the power comes back it often returns with a surge, and the Danes apparently forgot to put surge protectors in the budget. As a result, Danish taxpayers have paid top dollar for a collection of finely engineered paperweights.

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Uganda's better seed companies are mired in a cat-and-mouse game with the fakers. About 10 years ago they began branding the bags that hold their seed to differentiate themselves, but then traders started buying up the empty bags and selling them to scammers to refill with commodity grain passed off as seed. The companies tried dyeing their seed in bright colors to make them visibly different from bulk grain, but the scammers quickly figured out how to dye the fakes too.

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Such experiences explain why Masawi doesn't bother buying seed. Instead, she does what 95 percent of Ugandan farmers do: She saves part of her harvest each season to plant the following season. She might trade a bit of it informally with her neighbors, but in general what she plants hasn't travelled more than a couple of kilometers. This is the way the vast majority of East Africans source their seed, and it is a major reason they're often hungry but seldom starve.

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Lant Pritchett, a professor of international development at Harvard, calls this "isomorphic mimicry," a phrase he borrowed from evolutionary biology. Think of the nonvenomous scarlet kingsnake, which has evolved to look uncannily like the highly venomous eastern coral snake. It borrows the deterrent effect of appearing venomous, he notes, without going to all the trouble to evolve venom. And it works: Animals won't risk attacking an eastern coral snake, so they leave the scarlet king alone. There can be a clear evolutionary payoff to appearing to be something you're not.

Pritchett posits that the governmental institutions in many developing countries do something similar: They evolve to mimic the trappings of a properly functioning bureaucracy, without investing scarce resources in the bothersome task of actually doing their jobs. To get resources out of international donors, such institutions have many incentives to look like agents of development but very few incentives to act like them.

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