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Debate
UNDP: options for global policy-making
Hunger in Africa: neglected farmers
Clashes within civilisations
03/2006 |
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[ Comment ]
Neglecting African farmers
From Niger, to Mozambique, Malawi and Zambia, to Kenya and Somalia – news of food crises in African countries abound. Drought, bad harvests and population pressure are standard explanations. But these factors only aggravate a deeper crisis of African agriculture that has its roots in flawed agricultural policies, both by African governments and donor countries.
[ By Göran Djurfeldt, Hans Holmén and Magnus Jirström ]
Drought strikes again in Africa. The picture of a carcass of a dead cow in northern Kenya circulates in international media and is made to epitomise the agrarian crisis in sub-Saharan Africa. However, we have to look beyond the weather cycles to understand the deeper reasons for the African food crisis.
In our book “African Food Crisis: Lessons from the Asian Green Revolution” we argue that African agriculture suffers a deep economic and political crisis, not one primarily brought about by climate, nor by ecological factors, neither by demographic ones.
In the last one or two generations, huge areas in sub-Saharan Africa have exhausted their potential for extensive agricultural growth. The land frontier is growing progressively tighter, leading to more intensive use of available land. However, African farmers have not had the resources to adjust their modes of cultivation to the new circumstances, with nutrient mining and falling yields as a consequence.
A comparison with Asia makes it evident that farmers have been let down by their own governments, and indirectly by the donors in the OECD countries. The Asian Green Revolution, we argue, was a state-driven project, aiming to avert famine and to decrease the dependence on imports and food aid. Defined as such, the project was a successful one.
Unlike the reforms attempted in the socialist countries and for example in China before 1978, the Green Revolution was also market-mediated. Finally, we find that, contrary to what is claimed by many of its critics, the Green Revolution was small-farmer based. Asian rice farming was and remains smallholder, or family farmer dominated.
On the whole, we search in vain in sub-Saharan Africa for state-driven, market-mediated, small-farmer based agricultural development. If they ever tried, African governments have largely abdicated from attempts to drive agricultural development towards greater self-reliance in basic food production – with Nigeria and partly Ethiopia as interesting contemporary exceptions.
Market reforms were pushed down over the heads of African governments by donors, led by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Reforms failed to create national markets, partly due to flagging investments in infrastructure. Instead we find that markets are largely local and highly volatile and, as a consequence of the risks they face, most farmers remain marginally related to markets, especially those for food staples.
Finally, government policies are often explicitly or implicitly attuned to the estate sector and to export crops, neglecting smallholders and staple food production. Briefly put, these are the basic reasons why African smallholders have grown so vulnerable to climatic fluctuations. Obviously, governments do not control the weather, but decades of neglect of smallholder agriculture is now leading to a bitter harvest of insufficient domestic production, inadequate growth of yields and increasing reliance on import and food aid. In addition, the agrarian crisis adds to the overall crisis in the African economy. Most likely it also adds fuel to the smouldering or already flaming conflicts in the continent.
While it is impossible for Africa to copy the Asian Green Revolution, because agro-ecological conditions are so different, our study shows that at both farm and national levels, the potentials are there to increase self-reliance in food staples. While geo-political conditions rewarded Asian governments for their attempts to increase self-reliance in food staples, African governments today unfortunately find it easier not to try. Importing basic food stuffs from a world market dumped by subsidized goods from the OECD countries is far easier than getting their own farmers to do the job.
Göran Djurfeldt
is a professor at the Department of Sociology
of Lund University.
Goran.Djurfeldt@soc.lu.se
Hans Holmén
is an associate professor at the Department of Geography of Linköping University.
Hanho@tema.liu.se
Magnus Jirström
is a lecturer at the Department of Social
and Economic Geography of Lund University.
Magnus.Jirstrom@msm.lu.se
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