Which farming model should Africa adopt?

by Chido Makunike

The Food and Agriculture Organization’s Director General, Jacques Diouf, recently (December 2007) issued a statement clarifying the organization’s position on the role of organic agriculture in feeding the world.

“FAO has no reason to believe that organic agriculture can substitute for conventional farming systems in ensuring the world’s food security. We should use organic agriculture and promote it,” Dr. Diouf said. “It produces wholesome food and represents a growing source of income. But you cannot feed six billion people today and nine billion in 2050 without judicious use of chemical fertilizers.”

The clarification was because of what the FAO believed to be misrepresentations of its position after a conference at its Rome headquarters in May 2007 to identify organic agriculture's potential and limitations. A FAO press release during the conference mentioned a presentation by an FAO expert, stating, “The paper quotes recent models which indicate that organic agriculture could produce enough food on a global per capita basis for the current world population.”

Many organizations took this line as a positive answer by the FAO to the often debated question, “Can organic agriculture feed the world?” This interpretation of the FAO’s stance was regarded as a major victory in the effort to influence opinion in the debate over the relative suitability of organic versus conventional agriculture for the world.

Diouf’s statement distances the FAO from any suggestion that it believes organic agriculture to be “the” answer to world food security. It says the conference paper in question was not an FAO document, implying that it was wrong to have interpreted the argument as the official FAO position, as many did.

“The key elements in feeding the world now and in the future will be increased public and private investments, the right policies and technologies, knowledge and capacity building, grounded in sound ecosystem management. There is no one solution to the problem of feeding the world’s hungry and poor,” Diouf concluded.

The “clarification” will be heatedly debated and will not settle the sometimes bitter war between supporters of organic agriculture and sceptics. There will be questions about whether the FAO’s December stance represents a pulling back from the position some thought it had adopted in May, and if so, why. All kinds of dark conspiracy theories will be propounded.

The whole discussion about the role of organic agriculture in ensuring global food security has particular relevance for Africa, the sole continent where per capita food production has been declining. The need to reverse this trend is urgent and the constraints are complex and more daunting than elsewhere. This has put Africa right at the epicentre of the ecological/organic farming versus green revolution/biotechnology-based farming debate.

On the surface, the FAO has adopted a middle of the road position that should not be particularly controversial. But this is no longer a battle simply between two broad paradigms about how best to feed the world. It has gone beyond that to encompass the defence of wide-ranging other belief systems and vested interests on both sides.

The opposing sides are currently engaged in a high stakes game to present their position as “the” solution for Africa’s food insecurity problems. They each have impressive experts, studies, projects and statistics absolutely “proving” why their paradigm is the “only” one that can get Africa out of its food predicament.

No one farming model can serve the continent’s diverse agricultural landscape, no matter how environmentally friendly or potentially productive it may be. It will take a range of interventions to address Africa’s many contributors to low productivity. The range will vary depending on location, climate, soil type, economics, water and infrastructure availability and so on. This will involve sometimes uncomfortable compromises between the imperatives of good yields, long-term sustainability, environmental concerns and the like. It will not be possible to completely eliminate undesirables or to accommodate all desirables at the same time. Short term emergency solutions may be quite different from those adopted over the long term.

Africa is poorly served by reducing the discussion to essentially one between ecological/organic farming and green revolution/biotechnology based farming. Both have their role to play, and each has its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Unfortunately, as with so much else that has been sold to Africa, each is presented as having to be accepted as an immutable “package deal.” Life is not that neatly and simply compartmentalised.

Appreciating the considerable benefits of organic agriculture should not mean being blind to the difficulties of applying it in certain situations. For instance, it is ideally suited to small holdings, producing dramatic and long-lasting results. But beyond a certain farm size, it can become impractical, especially without mechanization. Relief from the drudgery of farming may feature in a choice of farming methodology as much as whether that choice is the most environment- friendly or “sustainable.”

Similarly, many aspects of successful conventional farming that are taken for granted elsewhere, such as widespread availability of fertilizer at prices most farmers can afford, perhaps subsidised, are simply not available to most African farmers. As long as that remains the case, they should be capacitated with how they can still be more effective farmers without them, such as with organic methods.

We all face similar choices and compromises daily. For example, whether to use the speed and convenience of a personal car, or the more “sustainable” but slower, less convenient option of public transport. We do not always make the sustainable/environmentally friendly choice, but somehow romantically expect it to be easier in the tough job of farming! Conversely, where the personal car may be the more “productive” choice because of its speed, convenience and flexibility, the cost of spare parts or fuel compared to one’s finances may not make that “high productivity” choice possible.

These decisions are not as simple as “right” or “wrong.” The exact make-up of the range of methodologies chosen by a farmer (or country) could change from season to season, or as one or more of the factors leading up to the decision become less or more available. The final decisions made are always a compromise between minimising overall negatives and maximising overall benefits.

These many inter-connecting variables do not make it desirable or beneficial for Africa to agree to be boxed into the fundamentalism of wholly swallowing any one agricultural paradigm. Africa should carefully consider all the competing ideas on what works best agriculturally in a given situation and why. But it must retain for itself the right to pick its own mix of what is on offer, without being strait-jacketed into any one of the ideologies that often come attached to various external assistance offers or flavours of advice.

A key missing ingredient in bringing this about is for the parameters of the agricultural debate to be set by Africans. Africans have often been bit players in their own agricultural drama, merely playing according to scripts carefully managed by others on both sides of the debate. We should refuse to be presumed to be empty vessels into which others can pour pre-packaged ideas based mainly on their realities and ideological vantage points, and make agricultural choices based on our own realities and interests.

African Agriculture