Tag Archives: agriculture

Africa is not spending enough on food

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This piece was posted by Hilde Faugli, Communications Intern at Find Your Feet. 

70 percent of people in Africa live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for food and income

While most talk about Africa these days centers on the World Cup in South Africa, sobering facts about the continent’s food situation have been presented in an International Food Policy Institute (IFPRI) paper entitled Public Spending for Agriculture in Africa: Trends and Composition. According to the paper insufficient spending on agriculture Africa means that the continent is “now facing the same type of long-term food deficit problem that India faced in the early 1960s.

 
70 percent of people in Africa live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for food and income. Spending money on food production is therefore critical. Regrettably, only eight African countries have reached the target adopted by the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) in 2003. Back then, the continent committed to allocating 10 percent of their budgets to agriculture. The countries to reach the 10 percent target are Niger, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Mali, Ghana, Senegal, Zimbabwe and Malawi.

 As a result of the inadequate investment in the African agriculture sector, the continent is vulnerable to frequent food crises and countries are dependent on emergency food aid and food imports. The paper argues that governments and donors in the past have devoted more resources to emergency aid than to long-term agricultural development, which further undermines the countries’ ability to generate economic and agricultural growth. “Consequently, poverty and hunger have persisted and threaten the likelihood that some countries will meet the MDGs”.  The authors recommend increased investment in what they call the prime movers – human capital, technology and institutional innovations – to increase farm production and accelerate agricultural growth. As climate change is likely to have an adverse effect on the continents food production, increased government spending will probably prove even more important in the future.

Meanwhile, donor funding for agriculture in Africa has dropped dramatically – from 15 percent in the 1980s to 4 percent in 2006- but the amount countries allocate from aid to food production also varies quite considerably. In 2007 Botswana and Nigeria spent less than 1 percent of all aid received on agriculture while Burkina Faso in 2006 spent 8 percent of its total aid on agriculture.

To be able to improve their food deficit, and stand strong against climate change, African countries will need to spend more of their budgets on developing their agricultural sector. However, just as important is that the agriculture is developed in a sustainable manner. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs), increasing use of chemical fertilizers and intense industrialized agriculture are, by some actors, seen as the solution to the food crisis.  This approach to agriculture brings with it not only possible health risks, it is also likely to lead to a loss of biological biodiversity.

It is important to remember that this type of agriculture is not the only way to go. In Malawi, a return to age-old, chemical-free farming techniques is improving crop harvests for many poor farmers. Agriculture is the life blood of many small communities, and should be supported accordingly. The conservation of biological diversity that sustains agriculture is essential, and should be put at the heart of any national or local strategies to improve food security. Read more about Find Your Feet’s approach to agriculture.

Download the paper Public Spending for Agriculture in Africa: Trends and Composition.

And if you’d like to read about a global campaign to promote More and Better aid to agriculture, click here.

Sustainable agriculture and conservation of biodiversity will prove important in improving food production in Africa.

What does Copenhagen mean to me?

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FYF Director Dr Dan Taylor reflects in The Evening Standard online:

We are standing at a crossroads. We look back at a period of food, fuel and finance crises, and forward to an even more uncertain future, overshadowed by the issue of global warming. The need for mitigation and adaptation in the face of long-term uncertainty, together with the need for a transition to a low carbon economy remains upmost in the minds of our political leaders as COP15 approaches.

So what do we want the world to look like in the future? The recurring mantra of business as usual is not an option has become an integral part of this policy discourse. It appears in a number of reports ranging from agriculture through to climate change to the global economy. But what does it mean?

For us at Find Your Feet it means an answer to a very specific question. What will the impact on poor rural families, particularly those dependent on agriculture, be? Globally, already over a million people go hungry, a number that is gradually rising as climatic unpredictability becomes the norm. That the voices of these people need to be heard in corridors of power is clear, but what is less clear is the impact that our uncertain future will have on their lives and livelihoods. Poor farmers mitigate risk in a number of ways: crop diversification, sequential planting, polycultures and mixed farming, some moving off farm to find temporary or even permanent employment. Despite the steady decrease in the global rural population the majority of the global poor are rurally-based and most rural people are dependent on the food they produce.

Given longer term uncertainty we suggest some priority areas for action:

1. Greater investment in agricultural research that links agricultural and the environment – agroecological systems that can sequestrate carbon.
2. Early warning systems to alert farmers to expected climatic variability.
3. More appropriate participatory farmer support
4. Plant breeding for resilience rather than yield
5. Promotion of ‘minor’ crops which are ‘major’ crops in the eyes of the poor
6. Protection for the agricultural markets of the poor
7. Agrarian reform which promotes the rights of smallholder farmers
8. A greater acknowledgement of the role of women in agriculture.
9. Greater awareness of the multifunctionality of agriculture. Agriculture is not just about production, it is also about culture, resource (biodiversity) conservation and livelihoods.

This calls for a new vision for agriculture, one that can produce food, sequestrate carbon, enhance livelihoods and ultimately conserve our planet for posterity. But what can we expect out of Copenhagen? Not much would be our answer. But we hope that the link between agriculture, food security and climate change will not be lost as all attention is focussed on the latter.

Protecting soils to help combat climate change

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This piece was posted by Mahara, Agriculture Coordinator of the FAIR programme in Malawi in response to an article in Alertnet.

I am the Agriculture Coordinator of FAIR Programme in Malawi jointly funded by Find Your Feet(UK), Self Help Africa (UK)and Development Fund of Norway.

Zambia is our neighbour so the weather pattern is similar and the effects of climate change have no significant differences.

FAIR Programme activities are similar with what has been raised in your report and I want to agree by giving examples when it comes to creating water-holding soil basins, reducing tilling and planting trees that help fertilize but let me also add use of manure may help the continent’s small farmers cope up with effects of climate change.

The programme has been promoting sustainable agriculture activities that include agroforestry practices,soil and water conservation, use of manure, small scale irrigation, crop diversification etc. but at the time being I will comment on use of manure on maize planted on ridges and in pits.

For the past three years we have been demonstrating use of manure on maize planted on ridges and pits comparing it with maize treated with inorganic fertiliser (Urea & 23: 21:0). Bokash and Liquid manure has been used for Bassal and Top dressing respectively as analysis of the two has shown that they have higher nutrient content and are lesser labour demanding in making.

During a dry spell, maize applied to inorganic fertliser suffered more moisture stress than maize applied to manure. While maize planted in pits seemed to have not suffered at all.

Maize Pit planting is a technology where maize is planted in pits of 30 cm deep, 45cm apart and 55cm between rows. The pits are filled 20l decomposed manure mixed with sub soil. 5 plants are planted per pit. Same pits can be used for four years. Pits act as basins and coupled with manure(holds water like a sponge)the result is more water conserved for crop use. The soil is not disturbed for the next 4 years or more.

Current average yields realized by smallholder farmers in Malawi ranges 1,400- 2400 kg/ ha for open pollinated maize varieties.(Guide to Agriculture Production; 1994).Yet yield results from 2008/09 Trials and demos where manure only was used on ridges were at 3.8 mt/ ha and where pits were used it almost doubled to 5mt/ ha and 3mt/ ha were recorded where fertiliser only was used on ridges of the same maize variety .

Etlida Luhanga from Rumphi district of the northern part of Malawi was one of the farmers that practiced Pit planting last year. She says because of good results more than 10 farmers have followed her in the technology this year.

So let me agree that technologies that will help less disburbing of the soils while conserving more water and adding organic matter to the soil may help farmers adapt to the effects of climate change.

‘Feeding Africa’ – Find Your Feet in The Guardian

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FYF Director Dan Taylor was asked to write a comment on an article in The Guardian ‘Feeding Africa.‘ Visit the comment for a fascinating debate on the future of agriculture in Africa.

In the Guardian’s editorial (Feeding Africa, 29 July) the suggestion is made that, without improved seed varieties and fertiliser, African agriculture is a lost cause. This cannot go unchallenged. Farming in the UK elicits a peaceful picture of sheep grazing on green pastures, large fields of crops, and tractors. This image is far from the reality of the farms that produce the majority of Africa’s food. The average African farm is less than a hectare, the farmer is normally a woman and her main implement of cultivation is the hand hoe – this situates African agriculture in a very different context.

The editorial cites “subsidised seed and fertiliser” as the reason for Malawi’s farming transformation, “more than doubling productivity in a single year”. More than 25 years of working in rural Africa has taught me that this is an oversimplification of a very complex set of structural constraints and one that lulls us into a false sense of security. The suggestion is that if you get modern seeds and fertiliser to farmers then Africa’s food insecurity is solved. This modernist assumption that the industrial model of agriculture can solve Africa’s problems simply returns us to the failed policies of the 1960s and ignores the deleterious environmental impact of high input agriculture.

This puts Malawi’s “success” story in a different light. Malawi’s over-dependence on maize for national food security is short-sighted. Input subsidies do not target the poorest and the strategy depends on continued donor support, thereby raising questions of affordability in the face of growing fertiliser prices. Since the scheme is subject to state patronage, it breeds farmers’ dependence on the state.

In attributing the success of the Malawian scheme to farming inputs alone, your leader pays insufficient attention to the optimal rainfall that Malawi experienced over the past agricultural seasons. Droughts and floods in Africa have put paid to best intentions; at some time in the future crops will fail again, at great cost to Malawi’s farmers.

The conclusion that “growing more food … is the part that matters most” is unhelpful since it overlooks the question of longer-term sustainability. Hunger is an abomination, but alleviation in the short term is merely food aid in a different form. A permanent solution is required. We need alternatives to monocultures and fossil fuels. My organisation, Find Your Feet, promotes agroecology – agricultural systems that more closely mimic the natural ecosystems that have served African farmers for millennia. These resource-conserving approaches reorient attention from single crops to diversified risk-reducing strategies that mitigate the effects of climatic unpredictability, and return control to Africa’s farmers.

Business as usual is not an option: new solutions to new problems are needed and science and technology must play a role. Agroecology challenges us to acknowledge the perspicacity of Africa’s farmers and resist the inclination to transfer to Africa more of the same old package – the technologies, market freedoms and mindsets – that created the food crisis in the first place.