African Agriculture – some notes

African Agriculture – some notes from Moeletsi Mbeki’s book ‘Advocates for Change: How to overcome Africa’s Challenges’, Chapter 9: Traditional Agriculture, by Mandivamba Rukuni.

This is a massive topic and one which I know far too little about. This note just highlights some unique features of African agricultural systems, which I think counts in our favour, for the most part. I omit the (obvious) explanations of the negative aspects of these features, and focus on the potential. The features were highlighted in the chapter, the comments are my own.

• Diversity of cropping systems: e.g. maize, sorghum, cassava, plantain, cooking banana, rice, yam, marog, millet etc. This to me shows a high potential for locally responsive solutions and an increased awareness to the importance of biodiversity.
• Thin rural infrastructure and information networks: While this is a massive challenge, investment can develop good, appropriate systems that is not hampered by existing infrastructure. My personal favourite is rail systems, and combining this infrastructure with ICT (I was thinking laying optical fibre in between the rail tracks, as an example).
• Undeveloped markets: The high rate of post-harvest losses means there is a lot of room for innovation into higher-value products, not just limited to food.
• Minimal mechanisation: This is a huge area for potential innovation, ranging from relooking draught animals, to hand-pump and pedal ploughs (still looking for the original link I thought of, but this one works too: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/05/pedal-powered-farms-and-factories.html) to high-tech, sophisticated applications that are appropriate, easy to use and easy to repair.
• Limited seasonal financing: I guess the most critical thing here is end-user education. There are growing micro-finance markets, but the end-users are often cheated in their ignorance. Growing innovation through the post-harvest losses may create alternative revenue streams, but the entrepreneurs need to be educated in basic business skills and the ideas must be scalable. Most importantly we can’t rely on aid, we need to do this ourselves.
• Competition with food aid: Food aid creates dependence and stifles innovation, incentive and ingenuity. I hate aid.
• Dominance of weathered and inherently infertile soils: There is much to be learnt at looking at how indigenous agriculture addresses this, and stepping away from agricultural methods developed in Europe and mediterranean climates. In particular, herbaceous, perennial seed bearing plants may do better. (reference The Land Institute – Wes Jackson and Jon Piper). Perennial, because they don’t have to disrupt the unstable soil upon harvest. Intercropping harvested by hand may further stabilise the soil, and because there is not an existing dependence on mechanised equipment, innovations on more suitable, smaller scale equipment may improve this even more, and economically, at scales not feasible in other agricultural systems.
• Weak agricultural support systems: Implementing suitable support systems not modeled on aid, donor agencies or mediterranean systems can work if there is not existing systems and the inertia that constraints them. Again, the people creating and being serviced by these structures need to be educated and keep themselves informed about the options available.
• Poor agricultural policies: This relies on having well functioning support systems noted above.

These features are all related, or affect each other. To me, they all come down to education, twinned with having disposable resources to experiment to find the best way forward. Having internet and mobile access combined with literacy is a good start, because the education required relies as much on word-of-mouth and indigenous knowledge as ‘formal’ education. Getting critical mass in a community may then over come the inertia/apathy/paralysis of being in a constrained environment.Another point that was mentioned in this chapter is that the ‘economies of scale’ often flouted in agricultural production is not real; small farms can be more efficient than large farms. Land tenure and various issues around it was also discussed. I need to do more research about this, but I think the research the author cites is from Frank Place, Mark Roth and Peter Hazell’s 1993 report – ‘Land Tenure Security and Agricultural Performance in Africa: Overview of Research Methodology’, in a book ‘Searching for Land Tenure Security in Africa’, edited by Bruce JW and Migot-Adhola SE (Kendall/Hung Publishing Company).