Setting the Scene

Poverty and Food Insecurity in Africa

Dr Judith Rodin, (3rd left) The President of The Rockefeller Foundation leads a Team from her Organization to Visit Chwele (Bungoma, Kenya) cereals Bank which has greatly improved the Marketing of Grains by Smallholder Farmers in the Area.In the world today, at least 1.2 billion people live on less than US$1 per day, over 800 million people are hungry and a further 2 billion people are malnourished and unable to access sufficient nutritious food at affordable prices. Agriculture treads heavily on the environment. Various species of flora and fauna are lost as their habitats are converted to agricultural uses. Crop cultivation, livestock production and forestry put pressure on natural resources.

Science has been a key contributor to development and provided the foundation for the “Green revolution” that was based on the development of high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat. The “Greek revolution” led to a profound transformation of agriculture and helped avert a Malthusian spectre of famine. It bypassed Africa, however, where average cereal yields are 1 ton/ha compared to nearly 3 ton/ha now achieved by Asian farmers, with research helping to feed more people than ever before. In 2002, the area planted by transgenic crops was approximately 58 million ha in 16 countries (James, 2002). Four countries (USA, Argentina, Canada and China) accounted for 99% of the area and the principal Genetically Modified (GM) crops cultivated commercially were Soya beans, maize, cotton and canola.

Poverty and Declining Agriculture in Sub-Sahara Africa

Whereas small-scale rural farmers are the main producers of staple foods such as maize, cassava and bananas in Sub-Saharan Africa, they face a wide range of problems, the major ones being declining soil fertility, pests and diseases and lack of markets in recent years. A deeper examination of these problems reveals that they are not caused by technological inadequacies (Rosset, 2001).

Colonial land policies pushed small-scale rural farmers into marginal and infertile lands. Independence did not help sort out the problem and today the issue of land tenure remains one of the most serious problems in our time. The best lands in most of the countries within Sub-Saharan Africa were converted to production land for export, instead of producing staple food for local consumption. These became extensive coffee, tea and cotton estates or livestock ranches. As the population in the rural areas grew, the people resorted to felling of forests, and in the process many fragile ecosystems have been subjected to unsustainable agricultural production systems. The fertile lands used for growing cash crops have become degraded through continuous cropping.

The resultant effect has been declining farm productivity in the recent past. This is not because the lack of “novel” seeds that contain their own insecticides, but because farmers have been sidelined and marginalized from the center of resources, knowledge and markets. The farmers face macro-economic policies that are increasingly not favourable to food production and marketing. These are real causes of poverty and hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa, which biotechnology cannot solve. Since independence, many countries have been unable to establish healthy domestic markets. There are chronic low prices and few buyers, and many producers are forced to sell their produce at half the production cost.

Maize Production in Sub-Saharan Africa

In most of Sub Saharan Africa, food is maize. Where there is no maize, there is no food. The demand for maize is expected to increase from 27 million metric tones to 52 million by 2020. So we have to ask ourselves, can domestic supply and regional trade meet demand in East and Southern Africa? Even when a country is self-sufficient, maize is moving across borders. The people right along the border do not know that the border exists, as they are moving from one side to another. We would like to see the barriers to trade removed, and the barriers are not just borders but also trade policies and regulations and their implementation procedures.

We would like to see a “maize country” for this part of the world, where maize moves freely from surplus to deficit areas. The reason for cross-border maize movement is that when some countries are harvesting maize, others are experiencing the lean seasons. And still others are trading. Maize deficits are usually seasonal deficits. Production and consumption may be balanced over the course of a year, but seasonally there will be deficits.

Challenges of Maize Production

With many small buyers and producers and a high cost of production, our transition costs are very high. But our social contract with farmers says that they will get a good price for their maize. And we have a social contract with consumers that say the price of food will stay very low. As you can see, these contracts are contradictory. As a result, governments in Africa tried to subsidize grain marketing to the point where it was draining public resources. The liberalization that we undertook was forced on us by the World Bank, and we all know that. There were a lot of policy reversals but in many places, the legal framework for maize marketing was not changed. The policy says we are liberalized, but we are still using the pre-liberalized legal framework.What are some of the impacts of liberalization? Per capita maize production has declined by an estimated 18-30 per cent. Consumer prices are reduced -this is one positive impact we can acknowledge. There are high seasonal price fluctuations, sometimes as high as 80 percent in six months. There is the emergence of a large number of informal traders, who not only lack knowledge but also lack capacity. Price transparency is limited, rewards for high grain quality are inadequate and input supply systems are performing poorly. Before liberalization, input supply and credit were linked but these two are major problems. We also had strong cooperatives during the pre-liberalization era, but now when we need them the most, they are all collapsing. So generally, we have increasing imports and increasing food insecurity in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Challenges Facing Smallholder Farmers in Kenya

In Kenya, smallholder farmers are trapped in what we call the “good season/poor market” dilemma. Every time they have a bumper harvest, they end up with very low prices, a situation that discourages production the following year. Then prices go up, farmers produce more, and the prices go down again. This situation discourages technology transfer, as well as surplus production. Opportunistic middlemen, not farmers, dictate the prices. Farm storage losses of maize are increasing. Before liberalization, we used state stores and grain store-to-store maize, but now there is increased farm storage. With the arrival of the larger grain borer and most recently the dreaded Scanier pest, post-harvest losses in the region are now estimated to be more than 40 percent.

Another problem is that our farmers were only used to producing. Before liberalization, they produced the cocoa and the government sold it. But now production is only half the job. Farmers also have to market it. Liberalization was done so quickly, without proper consultation with farmers that the farmers were not prepared for it. But for farmers to work in these liberalized markets, they need capital, they need capacity, they need business acumen, they need strong producer associations, they need transport and they need market information. All of these things are lacking. So how do farmers play a role in this kind of market?

For many years it was believed that the farming methods that rural communities were using in Africa were not suitable, and that people needed to move to towns to work in industries and in the process spur industrial growth. The growth has stopped to take place, and there has been a continuous spiral into abject poverty and marginalization. The irony is that food and other farm products flow from areas of hunger and need in Sub-Saharan Africa to areas where money is concentrated (in the industrial North). One now finds soils that are rapidly being degraded in the short-term pursuit for exports, profits, and competitiveness. There has been a continuous and rapid decline in soil fertility and farm productivity owing to soil erosion, water logging, a growing resistance of pests to chemicals and loss of farm biodiversity.

With liberalization of agricultural markets over the last decade, African farmers lost bargaining powers that were mostly enriched in cooperatives that were poorly managed and state-controlled. These markets saw agricultural credit vanished almost overnight and each small-scale farmer now tries to access fluid and unpredictable markets often full of middlemen. How are individual small-scale farmers expected to competitively access free globalized markets? The answer remains elusive to many farmers as well as development specialists.

Rationalization of Biotechnology

While biotechnology can increase farm productivity, it will not create buyers or markets. What are needed are structural changes in access to land, and having agricultural and trade policies that support the efforts of smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa. Biotechnology research also needs to be oriented to crops grown and consumed by the poor, and to their ecologies. New technologies must target the special needs and agro-ecological niches of small farmer production systems of the South. Specifically, such research must address the problems and constrains faced by small-scale farmers by way of biotic stresses (drought, heat, floods, salinity) and abiotic stresses (pests and pathogens).

OTHER CHALLENGES AGGRAVATING POVERTY IN AFRICA

Poverty can be defined as a situation of deprivation, which not only includes lack of income and wealth, but also social inferiority, physical weakness, disability, sickness, vulnerability, physical and social isolation, powerlessness and humiliation. This situation results in a state of low income and low consumption-a state usually referred to as grinding or abject poverty. People in this state cannot afford the minimum required calories of 2250 per day for physical, mental and psychological health and well-being. Some of the main factors that have contributed towards aggravating the poverty situation in Africa include but are not limited to the ones presented and discussed below.

Persistent Dependency and Handout Culture as a result of Ineffective Leadership

Trappings of materialism bedevil leadership in most Sub-Saharan countries. A leader’s worth is often judged by how much money (s)he can cough or dish out. Leaders are expected to give without regard as to where they derive these monies and handouts. In craving to continue satisfying their communities, the leaders have resorted to corruption, looting and embezzlement of national resources, grabbing public utility land and converting it to their own private use land. Recognizing that leadership plays a critical role in the socio-political and economic transformation of our societies, there is need for effective leadership at all levels, and that there is need for a more creative, charismatic and visionary calibre of leadership to address the challenges of the 21^st Century.

Retention of Negative Cultural Values and Practices

Negative cultural values and practices have structurally marginalized women, youth and disabled persons for a long time. Values and practices such as wife inheritance, Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), early and forced marriages as well as gender-based violence have been visited inordinately on women in Sub-Saharan Africa. There is therefore need to collectively work towards abolition of discriminatory socio-cultural beliefs and practices.

More importantly, we need to ensure that women, youth and the disabled are accorded an equal opportunity to own assets and inherit land and other property so as to effectively participate in the mainstream decision making and development processes. What more, we seem to cling so tenaciously to cultural practices that even inhibit food people’s rights to own property/assets and participate in food production regardless of gender. We need to work towards the observance of individual rights to basic necessities, including food production, for the sustenance of livelihoods.

Deficiency in Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Culture

Most parts of Africa are still reeling under traditional modes of food production that have a proven track record of failure over the years. People are more prone to practice agricultural production as a social-welfare enterprise the same way our forefathers did it. For instance, food production, regardless of the sizes of the land parcels is not done as a business. Therefore the concept of Farming as a Business (FAB) is still far from getting rooted within the food insecure and resource poor rural agricultural communities.

There is dire need for all people of good will including development agencies to collectively work towards the promotion of a culture, institutions and programs that will regenerate a positive enterprise culture among smallholder farmers in rural and peri-urban communities.

Lack of Access to Information

Boniface Wamalwa a farmer at Siritanyi shows off his maize grown using the MBILI technology.Information, like knowledge is always a weapon that can be used either to liberate or subjugate the populace. In this age and era of globalization, most developed communities have increased access to appropriate information and technology. The most critical information that farmers need to access is the confluence of research and extension information, information on appropriate and user-friendly agricultural production technologies as well as timely and accurate information on marketing of farm produce.

It is imperative that both statistical and narrative information generated by both governmental and non-governmental institutions is analyzed and packaged and conveyed in a consumer-ready format and that it is disseminated to the people promptly. There is also good logic for governments and Non State Actors (NSA) to facilitate the establishment of community resource centers for information dissemination and nurturing of a reading culture.

Deficient Legal Framework and Enabling Environment

An enabling environment is critical for investment, psychological and mental health, and release of people’s productive as well as organizing power. Productive and regenerative activities do not occur in a vacuum. They require a favourable environment to allow for necessary human interaction as people perform their roles in society. Effective participation of civil society, government and business/private sector is critical for national well-being and progress.

Favourable legal and fiscal policies are required to facilitate an important role in encouraging the contribution of the corporate sector in social development activities. Notwithstanding the step taken to liberalize the economy, much still needs to be done to ensure the effective participation and contribution of all in nation building. Recognizing the fundamental role of an enabling environment in economic, social and political transformation, all the people of Africa need to work for and defend the basic rights of everyone to contribute meaningfully in sustaining food production for livelihoods and survival.

Weak Institutional Capacity and Lack of Empowerment

A community’s institutional framework and diffusion of power and decision making authority within those institutions is a key determinant of the community’s ability to influence and control the course of its development. These institutions affect a people’s whole approach to life. They present a major indicator of the community’s ability to survive and grow. Most indigenous social, political, and economic institutions in Africa were destroyed through the imposition of colonial rule. As a result, most smallholder food producers suffer from lack of institutional capacity and civic empowerment to effectively mobilize and harness their resources for development.

African countries need to undertake some of the following interventions.

Promote the process of effective decentralization and devolution of decision-making power to the lowest levels possible in existing institutions.
Lobby and advocate for the elimination of obstructive bureaucracy within all support systems, government, private sector and civil society organizations.
Ensure that the government and local authority institutions demonstrate greater accountability in the use of public resources and those public delivery systems are strengthened and empowered to be able to deliver on their social obligations.
Strengthen and empower all Community Based Organizations (CBOs) to enable them assume greater control and responsibility for decision-making, information gathering and dissemination, and creation of goods and services for consumption and productive effort.
Create and/or strengthen partnership between all stakeholders, government institutions, private sector, NGOs, CBOs, and donors as well as other sponsors aimed at maximizing the use of resources available, avoiding duplication of development efforts and enhancing coordination of development programs.