The Seed Compact

The problem

The most successful foreign-aid programme in history cost almost nothing and asked for no repayment. In the 1940s the Rockefeller Foundation sent a plant breeder named Norman Borlaug to Mexico; the wheat he bred there, and the rice bred at an institute in the Philippines that the Ford and Rockefeller foundations founded in 1960 with American money, roughly doubled the cereal yields of Asia within two decades and are credited with preventing famines that would have killed hundreds of millions. The varieties were given to any country that wanted them, free, without patent. The institutes grew into a network, CGIAR, that today employs about 9,000 people in 89 countries on a research budget of just over $900 million a year, which is roughly the cost of one American hospital.

The network has never finished the job in Africa. The Green Revolution's varieties were bred for irrigated Asian plains and fitted Africa's rain-fed, diverse and often degraded soils badly; the seed systems, extension services and roads that carried the new wheat to Punjab did not exist in the Sahel. Africa's average maize yield is about 2 tonnes a hectare, against about 10 in the United States and 5 in Asia. The gap is the largest unrealised agricultural gain on earth, and the continent's population will roughly double by 2050. In 2024 the network's funding was cut by 13 percent, and in 2025 by a further 20 percent, as its largest donor dismantled the agency that paid.

The economics of agricultural research are among the best documented in development: reviews of hundreds of studies find returns of 20 to 60 percent a year on public breeding programmes, sustained for decades, because a better seed costs nothing more to plant than a worse one and the gain repeats every season. The world underinvests because the gain is captured by farmers and eaters rather than by whoever paid, which is the definition of a public good, and the reason the founding institutes were public. № 053 argued for paying for results where the finish line is verifiable. A bushel of maize on a farm in Malawi is a verifiable finish line.

The proposal

The Seed Compact: an American endowment of $5 billion for African crop research, paying out under the rule of № 067 to the CGIAR centres on the continent and to African national breeding programmes, plus $300 million a year in direct funding for a decade. Every variety bred under the Compact is released into the public domain. Breeders are paid a results bonus per verified tonne of yield gained on farmers' fields. The Tongue Commons of № 115 carries the extension advice; the Forecast Gift of № 114 carries the planting calendar.

How it would work

1. The endowment. $5 billion, once, invested under the Index Rule of № 065 and paying out 3 percent, about $150 million a year, in perpetuity, to the African centres of the network and to the national programmes of Compact members. An endowment cannot be cut 20 percent in a budget year, which is the reason it is an endowment.

1. The decade's direct funding. $300 million a year for ten years, on top, to rebuild what the 2024 and 2025 cuts removed and to fund the breeding pipelines for the crops that matter most on the continent: maize, cassava, sorghum, millet, cowpea, banana, and the vegetables and legumes that feed households rather than markets.

1. The public domain. Every variety, every trait and every dataset produced under the Compact is released without patent or licence, as Borlaug's wheat was, so that any seed company, cooperative or government may multiply and sell it. The Compact does not object to private seed companies; it insists that the public's seed be public.

1. Paid per tonne. Breeders and the programmes that release their varieties receive a results bonus per verified tonne of additional yield on farmers' fields, measured by the surveillance the Compact funds, on the model of № 113. A variety that yields in the trial plot and fails on the farm earns the ordinary funding and no bonus. The bonus rewards the variety that reaches the field, which is the one that matters.

1. The extension. A seed is useless without the advice on how to grow it, and the advice must be in the farmer's language. The Tongue Commons delivers it by phone in the languages of № 115; the Forecast Gift of № 114 delivers the rains forecast that decides the planting date. The Builder Corps of № 110 places agronomists in the national programmes, each training two.

1. The soil. Africa's yield gap is as much soil as seed: depleted, acid and eroded in much of the continent. The Compact funds the soil science alongside the breeding, and the Topsoil Ledger of № 149 applies its measure to the continent as well as to Iowa.

The numbers

The cost. $5 billion once, and $3 billion over ten years: about $450 million a year in the first decade, $150 million a year thereafter. The network's current African spending is a few hundred million; the Compact roughly doubles it and makes half of it permanent.

The gap. Maize at 2 tonnes a hectare against 5 in Asia. Closing half the gap on Africa's roughly 40 million hectares of maize alone is about 60 million additional tonnes a year, worth on the order of $15 billion a year at farm prices, and the calories of a hundred million people.

The return. At the documented returns of 20 to 60 percent a year on public breeding, the Compact's spending repays itself within a few years and continues repaying for decades. It is the best investment in this block, and the cheapest.

The precedent. The founding of the rice institute cost the Ford and Rockefeller foundations a few million dollars. The rice it bred is credited with saving more lives than any other single intervention of the twentieth century.

The honest objections

"Yields are not Africa's constraint; roads, markets and prices are." Largely true, and the reason the Compact sits inside a block that builds the roads (№ 006), the power (№ 111) and the market access (№ 117). A better seed on a farm with no road to market gains the household that eats it, which is not nothing; the same seed with a road gains the region. The Compact does not claim to be the whole answer. It claims to be the cheapest part.

"Public-domain seed hands Africa's genetics to multinational companies." The public domain lets anyone use the seed, including multinationals and including the cooperative in Kisumu; what it forbids is anyone owning it. The alternative, in which the varieties are patented by whoever funds the breeding, is the arrangement that has kept improved seed expensive and scarce across the continent. Borlaug's model was open, and it worked.

"Genetically modified crops will be pushed on countries that have banned them." The Compact breeds by whatever method the host country permits, which for most of the continent is conventional breeding with modern tools, and it releases what it breeds in the public domain, where each government decides what its farmers may plant. The Compact takes no position on the modification debate and funds no lobbying on it.

"The Gates Foundation already funds this." It funds part of it, generously, and its funding is a private decision that can change. The Compact's endowment is public, permanent and larger, and it exists because the network's public funding was cut by a third in two years while the private funding held.

"Paying breeders per tonne will produce varieties that yield and nothing else: no taste, no nutrition, no resilience." It could, which is why the bonus is a supplement to the ordinary funding rather than a replacement, and why the verification measures yield on farmers' fields over seasons, where a variety that fails in a dry year fails the measure. The trait the bonus rewards is the one that survives the farm.

Sources

• CGIAR, Windows 1 & 2 Budget for 2025 and financing plans, on the 2024 and 2025 reductions; CGIAR Research Portfolio 2025–2030
• Alston, Marra, Pardey and Wyatt, Research Returns Redux: A Meta-Analysis of the Returns to Agricultural R&D (2000), and subsequent reviews of returns to public agricultural research
• Food and Agriculture Organization, FAOSTAT, cereal yields by region
• Evenson and Gollin, "Assessing the Impact of the Green Revolution, 1960 to 2000," Science (2003)
• International Rice Research Institute, history and founding; Leon Hesser, The Man Who Fed the World (2006), on Borlaug
• Proposals № 006 (The Marshall Compact); № 053 (The Prize Fund); № 063 (The Famine Guarantee); № 065 (The Index Rule); № 067 (The Spending Rule); № 110 (The Builder Corps); № 113 (The Malaria Contract); № 114 (The Forecast Gift); № 115 (The Tongue Commons); № 149 (The Topsoil Ledger, forthcoming)