by Chido Makunike
Largely away from public notice, a battle is raging in Africa over the best ways to raise the continent’s low agricultural productivity, and assure widespread and long term food security.
Despite what is generally agreed to be its great agricultural potential, Africa has for long depended on food imports and particularly during times of natural or man-made crisis, on aid handouts. Joshua Dionne, a Director at the Economic Commission for Africa, said Africa spends $25 billion on food imports and receives food aid of $2 billion annually, with one third of its people suffering chronic hunger.
With these grim statistics, one might think any efforts to boost Africa’s agricultural productivity would be welcomed. Yet that is not the case because of the conflict between the promoters of two fundamentally different approaches to agriculture.
On one side there are those who urge the widespread adoption of “green revolution” methodologies, such as those that accounted for dramatic increases in agricultural productivity in Asia and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s. These involve the use of hybrid commercial seed rather than the farmer-saved seed that is in predominant use in Africa. Green revolution methods also involve heavy use of fertilizers and pest control chemicals. In general, they embrace any technology-based innovation to improve farming yields, including gene modification.
On the other side are those who are bitterly opposed to the whole green technology ethos. They advocate more nature-based approaches to issues of soil fertility and pest management. Promoters of this approach believe that a green revolution approach is not only inappropriate for Africa, but has the potential to do more harm than good. While their areas of disagreement with biotechnology-based farming approaches are broad, they are most vociferous in their opposition to the introduction of genetically modified (GM) seeds to Africa.
The differences between promoters of the two approaches have raged for a long time, and not just in Africa. The debate has gone up in pitch in recent years as the issue of Africa’s agriculture receives more high-profile global attention.
Most farming in Africa is carried out by small holder farmers for their own consumption. The methods used are some variation of traditional farming practiced for generations, with the incorporation of selective modern methods. The traditional practice of shifting cultivation in response to declining soil fertility is no longer practical with much higher populations of people. This has meant soils are worked with no fallow periods to restore them as before, causing rapid and steep declines in fertility.
Fertilizer is an expensive input beyond regular affordability for the vast majority of small scale farmers. The traditional soil supplementation methods of applying animal manure, ash and compost are used inconsistently and unevenly for various reasons. Most farming is rain fed, creating additional problems as seasons seem to become less predictable and incidences of drought increase. Diseases and pests account for significant yield losses.
The efforts to address many of these issues over the years have been overwhelmed by their magnitude, the sheer size of the continent, lack of sufficient sustained funding and political will, political instability and many others. Where strictly farming issues are beginning to be addressed, broader developmental challenges still make African agriculture much less effective at alleviating poverty than it could be. For example, poor and sometimes largely absent supporting road or rail infrastructure can make it difficult for farmers to get their produce to market, hampering their efforts to go beyond subsistence farming. Lack of post-harvest storage or processing facilities have a similar discouraging effect.
The efforts of individual governments to deal with the many related issues leading to low agricultural productivity over the decades have had mixed results. For instance, fertilizer subsidy programmes are expensive and difficult to maintain, and have come and gone in various countries. Factors that are as a result of policy or infrastructural limitations can take a long time to change and for the effects to trickle down to the level of the farmer. There therefore have been gains made in some countries, but they have not been consistent.
The latest high-profile efforts to address the many problems involve new approaches to things that have been tried before, as well as the application of new strategies. Under the auspicies of its New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), the AU held an African Fertilizer Summit in Nigeria in 2006. Its stated aim was to find ways to dramatically increase African farmers’ access to fertilizer. This was the first attempt to address the issue on a continental level. But there has been little news of any follow up to that summit.
Another effort with a heavy emphasis on biotechnology is the recently formed Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). AGRA ambitiously intends to tackle issues of wider hybrid seed distribution, farmer access to fertilizer and other inputs, the training of more African crop scientists and extension workers, and various others. This is also the first effort to deal with so many agriculture-related issues together across Africa.
Both these initiatives, and many scattered smaller ones based on the same general principles, are strongly opposed by a network of African farmer groups, environmental and related NGOs for a variety of reasons. Among them are that fertilizers and other agrochemicals pollute the environment and are too expensive to be used sustainably, and that green revolution thinking makes farmers too dependent on agri-business suppliers of inputs.
They argue that commercial hybrid seeds may produce better yields than farm-saved seeds in certain ideal conditions, but that these ideal conditions are rarely obtained in Africa, leading to yields that are no higher, but doing so more expensively than the farm-saved “open-pollinated” varieties that farmers can pass on from generation to generation. Green revolution critics are also opposed to the vast fields of one-crop “monocultures” of modern commercial agriculture. Their grounds are that this leads to biodiversity loss by the sidelining of traditional seed varieties that may have a lot to offer the farmer and humanity, now and the in future, even if their yield potential is less impressive than hybrid varieties.
This long-running ideological conflict is not going to go away and is likely to become more heated. It is not a zero-sum game in which either side can expect to out-argue the other, although which side gets the upper hand depends a lot on their respective lobbying abilities. I will be tackling various aspects of this agro-ideological conflict from time to time, with a particular emphasis on the implications on African agricultural policy making and development. Next week, I will begin by examining two recent criticisms of AGRA.
