By Bob Parker

My first trip to Africa was in January 2010, when a delegation from the American Peanut Council traveled to Senegal and Mali. The purpose of the trip for me, then a vice president with Golden Peanut, was to explore Africa as a potential market for U.S. peanuts.

Consumption in the U.S. was high but leveling off, while countries like Senegal and Mali had a growing population of children who could benefit from more peanuts in their diet. It seemed like farmers in the United States could provide those nuts, create a new market and benefit financially.

During subsequent trips to Africa, particularly this past year when I retired as president and CEO of the National Peanut Board and had the flexibility to return, I’ve come to see that growing continent as more than a potential market. 

Visiting farmers’ fields and research plots supported by the USAID-funded Peanut Innovation Lab showed me how U.S. and African scientists are working together to improve peanut production. The Peanut Innovation Lab has been headquartered at the University of Georgia for decades, but their work to create new varieties, find the best production practices, improve peanut quality and promote peanut nutrition benefits farmers everywhere.

I’ve seen how important it is for the U.S. to invest in agricultural research and programs to help farmers overseas become more self-reliant. 

U.S. influence and trade

The U.S. is losing influence in Africa, even as China gains influence through its Belt and Road Initiative, a 10-year-old program to build infrastructure around the globe. That investment is turning China into Africa’s biggest single trading partner. The number of Africans with a positive impression of the U.S. fell below the number with a positive impression of China for the first time last year. 

Building agricultural research and extension capacity in Africa translates into influence in ways that selling, or even giving away, our farmer stock cannot. 

Countries are more stable when the people can meet their basic needs for food, and as economies grow, the U.S. will benefit from new trading partners.

Not harmed

I’ve explored peanut fields in six African countries, led on tours by agricultural experts in those countries. 

The scale of farms in Africa is different than the scale we see in the U.S. While a U.S. grower might be disappointed with a 2-ton-per-acre crop, farmers in much of Africa will produce the equivalent of 500 pounds per acre. There are lots of reasons for that yield gap, and those challenges won’t all be solved quickly. 

Bob Parker and Mark Manary, center, the pediatrician who invented peanut-based Ready-To-Use Therapeutic Food, talk to a vendor selling peanut products in Ghana, where peanut is an important part of the diet. (Photo by Peanut Innovation Lab)

First, farming in the developing world is done mostly on small tracts with little or no mechanization. Without equipment, inputs and irrigation, farmers rely on human labor and rain. African farms may be several generations away from yields that would allow them to become self-sufficient producers of food for their countries. 

At the same time, population growth in Africa means that farmers there need to feed more people at home and are unlikely to compete in the export markets that the U.S. wants. 

Benefit from agricultural research

I first saw Groundnut Rosette Disease in northern Ghana. Seeing this devastating disease made me think of a disease we see commonly in the U.S., the tomato-spotted wilt virus, but on steroids. Across a wide field, individual plants showed severe stunting, clear signs of the disease. Pulling them up, I could see that they produced absolutely nothing to harvest. 

Caused by a virus complex spread by aphids, Groundnut Rosette attacks in an erratic pattern across the field and there’s no chemical treatment to prevent or stop it.

By breeding varieties with genetic resistance to the disease, African scientists are giving farmers there a way to respond to the disease and providing U.S. farmers with a head-start if the disease does arrive on our shores. 

Honestly, we have plenty of reasons to believe that the disease might appear in U.S. fields one day. We have the same aphids here and one of the plants that harbors the virus in peanuts’ off-season – sickle pod, a common weed in the Southeast. 

When tomato spotted wilt virus spread across the Southeast in the early 1980s, all our varieties were susceptible, and the disease accounted for tens of millions of dollars in losses. How different would those years have been if we had had resistant varieties available to fight the TSWV?

If diseases like Groundnut Rosette Disease make it to the U.S., we will have genetically resistant lines ready to fight back. 

Thinking back to that first visit to Africa nearly 15 years ago, I hadn’t yet seen how the continent is important to U.S. growers. The booming population still creates a trading opportunity for U.S. growers. 

Building relationships with peanut producers and processors in other countries normalizes our standards for them and makes them more practical trading partners in the future. When a country chooses a European standard for aflatoxin limits – 4 ppb, as opposed to the U.S. standard of 15 ppb – that country becomes an unlikely trading partner for us.  

It’s simply important that we continue to invest in research and programs that make farms and farmers around the world more resilient. The U.S. will spend $35 million over 10 years to make peanut production a more stable business around the world.

It’s in our best interest.

Parker is the retired president and CEO of the National Peanut Board.