Agribusiness not a Panacea for Africa

Many people involved in aid and development programs for Africa think that science and agribusiness can reduce hunger and poverty. Governments, including Canada, promote this. They are wrong. Well, maybe in some hypothetical situation they can, but not in the real world. An example is Margaret Wente’s column about a year ago in The Globe and mail (Enviro-romanticism is hurting Africa, July 18, 2009). She said that in Africa, poverty and malnutrition are rising “largely because of primitive farming practices.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Poverty and malnutrition are rising because, among other factors, bad governance is ruining farmland, bad governments are leasing and selling farmland to foreign firms and governments, and bad international trade is preventing small farmers’ access to markets.

She said, “We could increase the global food supply by 80 per cent just by bringing the rest of the world up to the standards of modern agriculture.” This is pure nonsense. Many analyses of the global food situation, such as that of Lester Brown, “Plan B 3.0 Mobilizing to Save Civilization” (Earth Policy Institute, 2008), make it abundantly clear that global food production is on the decline. The improvements and innovations that gave rise to the “Green Revolution” during 1950–1990—mainly in large-scale irrigation, mass-production and distribution of fertilizers combined with plant breeding—have already been made and no amount of technological development can forestall the decline. Desertification (exacerbated by climate change), salinization of soils because of irrigation, and urban encroachment have reduced the global supply of farmland and rangeland. Water scarcity because of over-pumping of aquifers, over-use and degradation of surface water, and logging and other causes of more rapid runoff and erosion in watersheds are further reducing the amount and productivity of arable land. The world’s ocean catch of wild fish peaked at about 96 million tons in 2000. Aquaculture has allowed continued, modest increases in total fish production, but only at the expense of destruction of destruction of coastal ecosystems, especially mangroves, that support local shore-based fisheries and coastal farming.

Meanwhile, the increasing human population has meant that global per-person food supplies have declined. The wild seafood supply per person peaked at 17 kg in 1988 and now stands at 14 kg. The amount of grainland per person in 1950 was 0.23 ha, but in 2007 was 0.10 ha.

The global food crisis of 2007–2008 that saw food riots in several African countries, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Haiti because of dramatically increasing grain prices portends worsening food security. Today, in September 2010, people are rioting in Mozambique for the same reason.

Driving across Saskatchewan or Kansas, one sees Wente’s “modern agriculture”: vast distances of highly productive monoculture farmland with hardly any people. In our recent drive through four sub-Saharan African countries (Namibia, Botswana, South Africa and Swaziland), we saw a land densely dotted with small villages and single-family huts where people guarded their small herds and flocks, hoed their meagre maize and vegetable plots, and trudged by with heavy loads of firewood and water. Agribusiness may fit into the overall economic mix and productivity of these countries, but will not help the 60% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa who, as Wente notes, are “smallholder farmers, mostly women, who typically earn a dollar a day or less.”

Agribusiness is making their plight worse day by day. The report, “Land grab or development opportunity? Agricultural investments and international land deals in Africa” by the United Nations and the International Institute for Environment and Development, shows that big businesses in rich countries have been buying and leasing farmland in Africa at an alarming rate. Since 2004, governments of five African countries of re-allocated (sold outright or leased in long-term contracts) 2,492,684 ha of land (excluding allocations below 1000 ha) away from smallholders to big business, many of them foreign. They include governments or businessed in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, Qatar, India, Britain, South Korea, and China. The rate of farmland reallocation to foreigners has increased dramatically after the 2007–2008 food crisis as countries seek to increase their own food security. In May, the government of Madagascar fell because of a popular uprising against the government’s 99 year leases of almost 1.8 million ha of farmland to South Korean and Indian companies.

The biotechnology that Wendt and many others advocate as a panacea for African hunger is not bad by itself and may be an important part of the mix, but will not help the smallholders and often hurts them. What they need is for rich countries like Canada to tie its international trade and aid in poor countries to only those business deals and programs that help poor families.