African Farming

2005

By: Ali Ismail

aliismail_uk@yahoo.co.uk


Mobile telephone: 0778-842 5262 (United Kingdom)

An immaculate farmhouse in Stellenbosch, South Africa which manages vineyards



WHY CAN’T AFRICA FEED ITSELF IN THE 21ST CENTURY?


It may be the case that farming methods will have to use economies of scale




When I was at boarding school and university the major talking topic about Africa at the time was the struggle over who was going to rule Rhodesia, as it was then known, now Zimbabwe. In one camp were the liberals who argued that the Europeans had arrived in that region and had taken the best land away from the Blacks unfairly and that the latter should control the country’s driving wheel of state. In the other camp were those who argued that the Blacks had “never had it so good” and should be thankful for their subordinate conditions of life under ‘white’ supervision.

The foundation of the dispute was, as you can guess, the question of whether or not the ‘whites’ were congenitally superior to the Blacks in management skills and, in particular, in the mysteries of agricultural management.

I recall that when studying economic history in my late teens my textbooks taught that it was in Europe, in Britain in particular, that mechanical methods of farming were invented and introduced, enabling more produce to be created from the labour of fewer farm workers thus releasing men and women to work in factories in the earliest phase of the Industrial Revolution.

Now, it is probably true to conclude that in Africa and Asia we, the indigenous people, made no major agricultural innovations at that time and would have carried on farming by ancient tried, tested and proven methods indefinitely if the new ways were not introduced by Westerners who arrived first as traders and then as conquerors.

The Maltese politician and writer Normal Lowell has stated that, in his view, Europeans have a natural genius for food production surpassing the ability of all other races of mankind in this field of endeavour; he proceeds from that premise to the conclusion that Europeans can and should control the other races by threatening to withhold food exports in the event of disputes arising. He is thinking of controlling the Muslim world in particular with this method.

Recently, I heard of an American reference publication: The World Almanac (2004). Previous readers have remarked that when browsing through it, certain statements that purport to give incontrovertible proof that Black Africans are almost completely useless when it comes to agriculture struck them.The World Almanac has a great deal of data relating to various countries. It contains economic and demographic information. They were fascinated by a breakdown of employment in different countries by sectors. It showed the percentage of people involved in agriculture, industry and services.What is interesting is that, in developed countries, apparently, the number ofpeople involved in agriculture is somewhere in the order of 2 percent of thepopulation. Yet, in Black Africa the percentage difference is staggering: it is70 percent to 80 percent in most Black African nations.Now consider this: A country like the USA, where only 2 percent of thepopulation is involved in agriculture is able not only to feed itself, but also has surpluses which it can export. Some of these exports are in fact aid to various regions of the Third World. Yet, in much of Black Africa 70 percent of the population is engaged in subsistence agriculture and they do not have surpluses and in many cases still cannot feed themselves. In fact, Black Africa is a major recipient of North American and West European food aid. According to informed sources, this is not due to Africa's infertility because Africa is unique among the continents in having more land area at the equator or close to the equator than any other. Africa has longer growing seasons, more rain and far more heat than any other continent on the planet. Africa is the perfect Garden of Eden. The soil of most parts of sub-Saharan Africa is extremely rich, in fact more so than any other large region of the world. In fact, 99.9 percent of Africa never ever experiences snow. Yet, countries like Canada and even Russia, with much shorter growing seasons are able to produce food surpluses.I have heard aggressively patriotic Black South African politicians claiming thatBlacks can farm just as well as Whites but their opponents claim that they are talking erroneously. Their traditional and relatively almost primitive Stone Age methods don't even come close to comparing with the methods introduced by ‘white’ people in Southern Africa, they say. Few of them, allegedly, are capable of matching the excellence of ‘white’ farmers who are experienced businessmen with a great deal of technical knowledge about modern farming methods.

President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has always justified his confiscation policy towards the ‘white’ farmers on the ground that originally they never bought the good land they farm – they just took it away from the Blacks. Also, Mr Mugabe says, the Blacks can farm as well as the Europeans. In the event what seems to have happened is that confiscated farmland was parcelled out to veterans of their liberation war and others and they have not been spectacularly successful, in part owing to the sub-economic scale of their holdings.Defenders of ‘white’ African farmers say that this is proof that modern methods of agriculture imported from Europe totally outclass ancient wasteful methods.Others and I have found it interesting to look at these economic statistics that so clearly showed how apparently useless and wasteful Africa really is. It really may be the case that much of the population is engaged in work which brings scanty results. Some experts on Africa state categorically that should effective and thoroughly modern farming methods be employed, the Highlands of Ethiopia alone could feed the whole of Africa. As it is, the whole of Africa cannot feed itself by itself.Now interestingly, the way Zimbabwe (and shortly Namibia and SouthAfrica) are going about things, they are actually forcing more and moreBlacks into agriculture but the Black farmers do not yet have up to date knowledge, experience or capital. So the irony of the situation is this: the moreBlacks are forced away from other employment into becoming ‘peasants’...the less food they will have! Proponents of this viewpoint claim that all of Africa is proof that this is so.

In our original part of the world – Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar and Sri Lanka – we are all agriculturally based nations. The majority of our peoples work on the land in climates with relatively long growing seasons. A great deal of our land area has an all year round growing season with no dormant winter period at all. However, somehow, we can barely feed ourselves and have little to export from our farm produce.

In Bangladesh, the government is worried about the wide gap between yields from the experimental farms and the commercial farms; apparently the small-scale self-employed farmers cannot match the outputs by the scientists on the government farms. In some regions of South Asia a major problem for small farmers is theft. Unless farmland is watched carefully by persons able to back their vigilance by effective force, crops and livestock gets stolen. Sometimes farmers have to organise the defence of their plants and animal herds 24 hours a day, every day of the year. This is a tremendous expenditure of manpower, time and effort.

One method of solving part of the problem, I submit, is for new laws to be enacted making it illegal to earn one’s livelihood from holdings that are below certain stipulated extents. This would in effect outlaw sub-economic farming methods.

The agricultural land would then, by and by, be farmed either by individual rich husbandmen and/or by corporations who would be able to use economies of scale to make their capital more productive. Expensive modern equipment could then be used. Combine harvesters and big tractors would then become everyday sights in our rural regions. Security concerns could be addressed more effectively on large landholdings. The large farms of the future could employ agricultural specialists whose services are currently beyond the reach of small farmers.
Perhaps, both in Africa and in South Asia the secret of agricultural success is: organise …organise …organise…


THE END