by Fred Pearce
But we can’t just leave the peasants to get on with it. An important reason why smallholder farming has stagnated, in many parts of Africa in particular, is because even the most basic state help has been stripped away. The collapse of support for peasant farmers in Africa has been a continent-wide tragedy and a global disgrace, because it has often been carried out in the name of free markets, and demanded by structural adjustment programs.
For decades, African governments have turned their backs on the countryside, putting their money into airlines, industrial enterprises, and urban infrastructure, and starving smallholders of seeds, fertilizer, and rural roads. The state marketing agencies that once underpinned local economies by buying crops at stable prices have been abolished. Extension services that once spread best practice have shriveled. Research budgets have been slashed. Even the roads in many rural areas are more potholes than tarmac.
In 2003, African leaders pledged to raise the proportion of their budgets allocated to agriculture from an average of 3.5 percent to 10 percent. With agriculture responsible for typically two-thirds of their GDP, that still seems a small figure. But only seven nations, representing just 15 percent of the continent’s 1 billion people, have yet achieved it. Government spending still averages less than $20 per year per rural inhabitant. Compare that to the huge subsidies, handouts, and tax waivers—not to mention free land—now being offered to foreign investors. Donors too have taken their eyes off this ball. Agricultural aid was halved between the mid-1980s and the millennium, bottoming out at 3.4 percent of total aid. It has only recently begun to recover.
More spending will only make sense if it is spent wisely, of course. But the good news is that there are innumerable examples of what can be done. The recent poster child has been Malawi. Since 2005, the small southern African country has radically raised corn yields by distributing coupons that farmers can exchange for cheap fertilizer and corn seed. More than 1.5 million Malawi farmers benefit. The subsidy costs more than 6 percent of Malawi’s GDP, and absorbs 60 percent of the budget of the Ministry of Agriculture. But since the program began, Malawi has gone from being a food importer to a food exporter. Economic growth is up and there are more jobs.
The system isn’t perfect. Some parts of Malawi still lack food at certain times of the year; three-quarters of the vouchers end up in the hands of men, even though most of the farm work is done by women; and environmental critics say a concentration on corn fed by chemical fertilizer will degrade the country’s soils in the long run. But other countries, such as Zambia, are copying this model. Development expert Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University claims Malawi’s success could be replicated across the whole of Africa for $10 billion a year.
Much else can be done besides raining fertilizer across the continent. I have seen numerous and diverse success stories on my travels. I visited a research station on the mosquito-ridden shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya where they have developed a simple system for banishing the stem borer, a common and destructive pest in cornfields, without expensive chemicals. Tens of thousands of corn farmers in East Africa now cultivate a common weed known as napier grass on their field edges. The grass attracts the stem borer and leaves the field free of the pest. They call it the push-pull system. Farmers have discovered they can also harvest the napier grass to feed their dairy cattle.
In Mali, on the edge of the Sahara desert, I saw farmers stabilizing their soils and increasing crop yields by planting trees. This was a reversal of the advice from foreign agronomists who told them trees reduce yields and should be removed. The new practice had spread from neighboring Niger, where Chris Reij, a Dutch geographer who first spotted the trend, reckons 200 million trees have been planted in a largely unremarked “re-greening” of the Sahel region.
More surprising still, because it slays some environmental myths as well as undermining prejudice against peasant farmers, is the story of the Akamba people in Machakos, Kenya. Half a century ago, colonial administrators wrote off the “overpopulated” and deforested district as destined for desertification, and the Akamba for destitution. But since then, Akamba farmers have increased output fivefold, while reducing soil erosion, increasing tree cover—and tripling their population. Desertification has been put into reverse. Malthus has been stood on his head. And all without outside assistance. Their trick has been to manage their land better, by terracing hillsides, capturing rainwater, and planting trees. And they have been finding new markets for high-value produce. The Akamba still work small family plots, but they are selling vegetables and milk to Nairobi, mangoes and oranges to the Middle East, avocados to France, and green beans to British supermarkets. Researchers call this the “Machakos miracle.”
I also visited the dusty desert margins of northern Nigeria, around the ancient caravan city of Kano. The area is as densely populated as Belgium. Rainfall is declining. An incompetent government cannot keep chemical fertilizers in the stores. Only the richest farmers can afford high-yielding grain varieties or irrigation. The poor make do by cultivating almost every scrap of the sandy soil that they can find. Surely, you would say, those fields should be turning to desert? Yet, the roadsides between the closely spaced villages are busy with fruit and vegetable stalls, and behind them the fields grow black-eyed peas in rotation with grains.
I met Ado, who tended a 5-acre plot on the outskirts of Badume village, 30 miles northwest of Kano. He took me behind the high mud walls of his small compound to an inner sanctum where a dozen sheep were munching away on waste straw he had cut from his fields. The sheep deposited manure that Ado scooped up to return to the fields as fertilizer. This simple nutrient recycling had tripled his pea harvest. And since the pea plants were legumes, they were adding more nitrogen to the soil and improving his sorghum and millet crops, too. The extra crops were transforming Ado’s life. “Now I can send my three children to school,” he said. “The boys will become farmers, but I want my daughter to become a doctor.”
His neighbor, Galadima, was doing the same thing. “Crops grow much better with manure,” he told me. “I don’t use chemical fertilizer at all now.” His two wives and eighteen children came running out of the house and lined up for a family photo. “We can double yields here easily and improve the environment at the same time,” said agricultural scientist B. B. Singh, who had advised the farmers as head of the Kano office of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture. “And this is nothing unusual. We can do it all over Africa.” So simple, but so effective.
In many places, new communications technology is helping smallholders. Mobile phones have revolutionized the ability of small farmers to access markets and check prices. In outgrower schemes for fresh vegetables—such as the Homegrown operation I watched in Machakos, which airfreights produce to Britain—farmers take orders by phone for the day’s delivery while working in their fields.
Africans can learn from each other, but also from elsewhere. Well-organized milk markets are still rare in Africa, but Indian milk production has gone from seventy-eighth in the world to number one, almost entirely through the work of farmer-owned cooperative dairies. The knowledge that a truck will be collecting milk from the local village every morning has done wonders for the productivity of even the smallest Indian farmers. I met Jitbhai Chowdhury, who cultivates 5 acres of irrigated alfalfa in Kushkal village in northern Gujarat. He feeds the alfalfa to half a dozen cattle. Every morning, he milks the cows and carries two churns containing 7 gallons of milk to a village collecting point. From there, a tanker takes it to the modern Amul dairy in Anand, Gujarat, which supplies dairy products across India. Co-ops currently collect from 10 million Indian farmers in more than eighty thousand villages.
Urban markets are creating new opportunities for rural smallholders. Nairobi’s consumers have been an important part of the Machakos miracle. In Ethiopia, the bulk of the milk and honey sold in the capital, Addis Ababa, comes not from large commercial enterprises but from in
formal markets supplying the output of smallholders. But city dwellers also grow their own food—on a huge scale.
As much as a tenth of the world’s food is grown within cities. Most of it comes from small farmers—micro-farmers, even—cultivating roadside plots and wastelands, rooftops and military bases, garbage dumps and parks, gardens and greenhouses, railway yards and university campuses, and scraps of land beneath bridges or beside canals. Urban farms are a major source of leafy vegetables. In Haiti, people grow vegetables in old truck tires and even kettles. And they even supply meat. In Lima, Peru, they raise guinea pigs in squatter settlements. In Nairobi, chickens fatten in coops bolted to apartment walls. Sheep graze on the roadsides of the Armenian capital Yerevan.
Urban agriculture is usually high-efficiency agriculture. According to the late Jac Smit, president of the Urban Agriculture Network of the UN Development Programme, city-grown vegetables typically use only a fifth as much irrigation water, and a sixth as much land, as mechanized rural cultivation. Hundreds of millions of urban dwellers get some of their food and part of their income from urban agriculture. They include professionals as well as the landless, and at least as many women as men. In a world where more and more of us live in cities, more and more of our food will come from cities, too. And when supermarket shelves empty or income falters, in times of drought or conflict, cities will feed themselves.
Of course, urban agriculture will only ever be a small part of the story. But, especially in Africa, it shows the dynamism and innovation of which small farmers are capable, given the right circumstances and a ready market for their produce. Whatever Collier may believe, they are often the true innovators. “There is much that is working well in Africa, working much better than many appreciate,” says Jules Pretty of the University of Essex, one of Beddington’s team of experts. Smallholder farming is the solution rather than the problem, he says, a success story waiting to happen. Small farms have great potential to increase their output—but also to raise the incomes and improve the livelihoods and skills of their operators.
Few small farmers in Africa can abandon subsistence food production. Nor should they. But successful cash crops turn African smallholder farming from, at best, an “old man’s business,” into something young adults seek out, even when they have the chance to go and work in factories or offices. Perhaps that is the biggest challenge of all. If the young don’t want to till the soil then, as Ben White of Erasmus University, Rotterdam, as staunch a supporter of smallholders as you will find, admits: “We will have no argument against the corporations growing the world’s food, because there will be nobody else to do it.”
Notes on Sources
The following is a far-from-complete listing of sources used in preparing this book. Many of the news items I used were first accessed from the website http://farmlandgrab.org, which is maintained by GRAIN, an NGO. Among the academic sources are papers presented at the International Conference on Global Land Grabbing held in Brighton, England, in April 2011, available at http://www.future-agricultures.org. Below I refer to this event as “the Brighton conference.”
Mostly I have cited material available online. I am happy to provide further references where required. Contact me at [email protected].
Introduction
Siggs’s quotes are from his presentation “Can Africa Be the World’s Bread Basket?” at the Agriculture Investment Summit Europe in London, in June 2011: http://www.feronia.com/. Davies was speaking at the Brighton conference.
Chapter 1: Gambella, Ethiopia
I visited Gambella in February 2011. I thank Omot Agwa Okway and others for their hospitality. I consulted media and other reports on the Anuak community online at http://www.anyuakmedia.com. The villagization plan appears in “Villagization Program Action Plan (2003),” http://www.anuakjustice.org/. Shiferaw is quoted in “Ministry Says Ongoing Resettlement in Gambella State Key to Improving Livelihoods,” http://www.anyuakmedia.com/ (2010).
For Karuturi, see “Karuturi Global Eyes East African Markets,” http://www.bloomberg.com/ (2010) and “Karuturi and the Conquest of the African Mind Space,” http://www.financialexpress.com (2011). For Saudi Star, see Davison’s “Saudi Billionaire’s Company Will Invest $2.5 Billion in Ethiopia Rice Farm,” http://search1.bloomberg.com (2011) and “Silence over Ethiopian Land Grab Broken,” http://farmlandgrab.org. Contract terms appear in “Major Loopholes in Land Lease Contracts Raise Many Questions,” http://www.anyuakmedia.com/, and in “Land Rent Contractual Agreements,” http://www.solidaritymovement.org/.
For the government response, see “Land Deals in Ethiopia Bring Food Self-Sufficiency and Prosperity,” http://www.guardian.co.uk (2011) and “Come and Farm Our Virgin Lands, Ethiopia Tells India,” http://www.thehindu.com (2011). But also read “Targeting the Anuak,” http://www.hrw.org (2005); UNICEF’s “Livelihoods & Vulnerabilities Study: Gambella Region of Ethiopia,” http://www.genocidewatch.org (2006); and “Gambella Journal: A River Washes Away Ethiopia’s Tensions for a Moment,” http://www.nytimes.com (2004). Resource politics is discussed by Dereje Feyissa in “Decentralisation as Ethnic Closure, with Special Reference to a Declining Negotiated Access to Natural Resources in Western Ethiopia,” Africa Development 31, no. 2, pp. 243–60, http://www.codesria.org/ (2006), and in his book Playing Different Games (Berghahn Books, 2011). On wildlife, see my “Agribusiness Boom Threatens Key African Wildlife Migration,” http://e360.yale.edu (2011). I quote from Cherie Enawgaw’s “Recent Survey Results and Status of Potential Wildlife Sites in Gambella National Park,” Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority, http://www.ewca.gov.et/ (December 2010).
Chapter 2: Chicago, U.S.A.
I visited the Chicago Board of Trade in the summer of 2010. Kaufman’s 2010 piece in Harper’s is at http://frederickkaufman.typepad.com. For the 2008 global food crisis, see the Guardian’s coverage at http://www.guardian.co.uk/. (Also “Food Price Rises Threaten Global Security—UN,” “Food Prices Could Swing Future UK Elections,” and “Poor Go Hungry While Rich Fill Their Tanks”—all at http://www.guardian.co.uk.)
Sheeran is quoted in “Food Crisis Sparking Conflict” (2008), http://www.opendemocracy.net. Masters’s senate testimony appears at http://hsgac.senate.gov/. American economists’ warnings appear in “Economists Support Regulation of Commodities Futures Markets in the Reconciliation of the Financial Reform Bill,” http://ourfinancialsecurity.org (2010). Schutter’s briefing, “Food Commodities Speculation and Food Price Crises” is at http://www.srfood.org/. The World Development Movement criticizes speculation in “The Great Hunger Lottery,” at www.wdm.org.uk (2010).
Goldman Sachs is quoted at http://www.thomhartmann.com; Soros in “We Are in the Midst of the Worst Financial Crisis in 30 Years,” http://www.stern.de (2008); and Ghosh in “A Global Food Bubble?” at http://www.pacificfreepress.com/. Munden and Fischler were speaking at meetings I attended in 2011. The 2011 UNCTAD report is “Price Formation in Financialized Commodity Markets” at http://www.unctad.org. Mid-2011 prices are from “High Food Prices Are Here to Stay—And Here’s Why” in http://www.guardian.co.uk.
Chapter 3: Saudi Arabia
I visited Saudi Arabia for the Saudi Water and Power Forum in 2009. Al Safi farm is discussed in “Creature Comforts Help Dairy Cows Thrive in the Desert,” www.worldvet.org (2003). McGuckian is profiled in “Dairy Tycoon Brings Music to Our Ears,” http://business.timesonline.co.uk (2005). For water issues, see “Camels Don’t Fly, Deserts Don’t Bloom,” School of Oriental and African Studies, www.soas.ac.uk/ (2004), and my book When the Rivers Run Dry (Beacon Press, 2006).
Saudi land grabs are discussed in “Kingdom Plans Agriculture Investment in 27 Countries,” http://arabnews.com (2011); “Transnational Land Deals in Mindanao,” presented at the Brighton conference; “Indonesia Sees Rice Crop Up, Seeks Gulf Farm Investment” at http://farmlandgrab.org/13670; “Saudi-Based Partners Launch Africa Rice Farming Plan,” http://af.reuters.com (2010
); and “Saudi Investors Poised to Take Control of Rice Production in Senegal and Mali?” http://www.grain.org (2010). Rajhi’s story is detailed in the Economist, beginning with “Green Grow the Deserts O” (April 6, 1985) and continuing through “Saudi Farms Turn Soil for Seeds of Change” (2009) and “New Saudi Company Leases Asia Land for Rice” (2010), both at http://www.ft.com.
For Gulf agriculture strategy see “Bridging the Food Gap” by NCB Capital, http://farmlandgrab.org (2010), and “$53b FoodB,” http://www.zawya.com (2011). UAE Pakistani purchases are detailed in “Foreign Land Deals and Human Rights,” http://www.chrgj.org. King Abdullah gets his medal at http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/45133/icode.
For Qatar’s London holdings, see “Qataris Enjoy Rich Pickings in London Property,” http://www.guardian.co.uk (2011). Other deals are described in “Qatar in Talks to Buy Argentina, Ukraine Farmland” and “Hassad to Buy Sugar Project in Brazil” at http://af.reuters.com (both 2010). The Sarawak deal is covered in “Tanjung Manis Eyes Investments Worth RM650 Million from Mideast,” http://www.bernama.com (2011). For Qatar’s Australian ambitions see “Nation Feeds Gulf’s Appetite for Ownership,” http://www.smh.com.au (2011), and “Qatar Plans 70 Percent Food Self-Sufficiency by 2023,” http://farmlandgrab.org/post/view/19016 (2011).
Woertz’s “Potential for GCC Agro-Investments in Africa and Central Asia” is at http://www.grc.ae (2008). I discussed Agrisol’s plans with a PR man from Burson-Marsteller. Read also “Iowan Rastetter Leads Tanzanian Ag Project,” http://farmland grab.org/post/view/18802 (2011), and Understanding Land Investment Deals in Africa at http://media.oaklandinstitute.org (2011).
