[Pen-l] African agriculture

[raghu <mraghu01@xxxxxxxxx>]

The Eurotrib site has a link to this relatively positive take on the successes of African agriculture. Of course according to the article its success comes despite having all the opposite characteristics of industrialized farming: small farms, little fertilizer or machine use, local markets, no use of manufactured seeds, crop diversity etc. So naturally, lots of people want to change that and help Africans "modernize"..

The author is Pascal Zachary, a Stanford journalism professor. According to Eurotrib his "wish list for African farmers" includes this bizarre concept called "agricultural airpower". However I could not find a reference to the term in Zachary's article itself.

http://www.eurotrib.com/?op=displaystory;sid=2008/4/6/213029/7395
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Indeed, as soon as Pascal Zachary turns from reporting to policy making, reality is left behind again, as one of the items in the "wish list for Africa's farmers" is, "Agricultural Airpower" ...

Just as the mobile phone bypassed the vastly expensive challenge of upgrading dysfunctional African land-line systems, a big push into rural-based aviation, aimed at moving crops from the bush to African cities and beyond, would leapfrog the problem of bad roads.

http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=359819
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 To Americans, bombarded with dire images of ­Africa—­starving Africans, diseased Africans, Africans fleeing disasters or fleeing other Africans trying to kill ­them—­Madi may seem like a character from a novel. But he is no fiction. Despite the horrors of Darfur, the persistence of HIV/AIDS, and the failure to end famines and civil wars in a handful of countries, the vast majority of ­sub-­Saharan Africans neither live in war zones nor struggle with an active disease or famine. Extreme poverty is relatively rare in rural Africa, and there is a growing entrepreneurial spirit among farmers that defies the usual image of Africans as passive victims. They are foot soldiers in an agrarian revolution that never makes the news. In 25 visits to the region since 2000, I have met many Souley Madis, and have come to believe that they are the key to understanding Africa's present and reshaping its future.

After decades of mistreatment, abuse, and exploitation, African ­farmers—­still overwhelmingly smallholders working family-tilled plots of land—­are awakening from a long slumber. Because farmers are the majority (about 60 percent) of all sub-Saharan Africans, farming holds the key to reducing poverty and helping to spread prosperity. Over the longer term, prosperous African farmers could become the backbone of a social and political transformation. They are the sort of canny and independent tillers of the land Thomas Jefferson envisioned as the foundation for American democracy. In a region where elites often seem more committed to enjoying the trappings of success abroad than creating success at home, farmers have a real stake in improving their ­turf. Life will still be hard for them, but in the years ahead they can be expected to demand better government policies and more effective services. As their incomes and aspirations rise, they could someday even form their own political parties, in much the way that farmers in the American Midwest and Western Europe did in the past. At a minimum, African governments seem likely to increasingly promote trade and development policies that advance rural interests.

[....]

African farmers do share much in common. "A man with a hoe" remains an accurate description of nearly all who till the soil. Mechanization is rare. Less than one percent of land is worked by tractors. Only 10 percent is worked by draft animals. Nearly 90 percent is worked by hand, from initial plowing to planting, weeding, and harvesting. Irrigation is also rare; only one percent of ­sub-­Saharan cropland receives irrigation water. Unpredictable weather, often drought and sometimes too much rain, bedevils farmers in many areas. Relatively little fertilizer is used; globally, farmers apply nine times as much per acre as Africans do. "Much of the food produced in Africa is lost" after harvest, according to one estimate, because of inaccessible markets, poor storage methods, and an absence of processing facilities. Finally, use of improved seed varieties is very limited by global ­standards. 

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