Agricultural production and distribution are essential in the process of African development., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.
Africa's battle for agricultural development
MARK TRAN - Sep 13 2011 08:57
Fine dry dust scatters in the wind as Wayua Mwanza slams a hoe into parched soil where rains -- feeble ones at that -- last fell in April.
The 36-year-old mother of three is digging a hole known as a zai pit. It is backbreaking work but, with the help of fellow farmers and her three boys, she has pockmarked her 1.2 hectares with 110 holes, 600cm to 1.2m in length, breadth and height, in preparation for the next rains in October. She gets up at six in the morning and digs until 10, when it becomes too hot.
Once a pit is dug, it is filled with a compost of leaves and stems and then topped with manure. It holds water and the food is grown on top.
The humble zai pit is a simple, yet ingenious low-tech innovation for farmers such as Mwanza as they try to eke out a living in the semi-arid part of eastern Kenya, a region blighted by the worst drought in 60 years.
Famine in the Horn of Africa and surging food prices are concentrating the minds of policymakers on the need for long-term solutions, particularly for small farmers. If they can become as productive as their peers in Asia, the argument goes, they can move from self-subsistence, make a decent livelihood, and ultimately drive economic development on the continent.
Agriculture, predominantly small scale, accounts for about 30% of sub-Saharan Africa's GDP and at least 40% of export value. Having fallen out of favour in the development debate in the last decade, agriculture these days gets its own G20 summits and there are moves to make agriculture the centrepiece of the he Rio+20 global development summit next June.
Small African farmers such as Mwanza stand on the frontline in the battle for higher productivity and agricultural development, a struggle being fought not with tractors and GM crops but with hoes, wheelbarrows and indigenous drought-resistant crops: cowpeas, pigeon peas, green grams, sorghum and millet.
Kitui, an hour and a half's drive from Nairobi taking in the partially completed superhighway being built by the Chinese, is particularly prone to drought, with neighbouring Mwingi even more so. It is an unforgiving land for farming, where plots can be as small as one acre.
Despite the poor April rains, Mwanza managed a June harvest of 10kg of green grams. The bean, used for stews, is much in demand and so fetches good prices.
"My only harvest this year came from zai pits, otherwise there would have been no food," said Mwanza, who runs the farm while her husband works in town painting signs. Most of the farmers in Kitui are women, while the men look for manual work in town.
Star farmer
Many other farmers failed to get any sort of harvest, so Mwanza's achievement marks her out as a star. Her family managed to eat daily throughout July. When supplies ran out, they had to rely on food relief, a monthly supply of 4kg of maize and beans. Having seen the effectiveness of zai pits, Mwanza wants to dig 400 more. She is sculpting her land for survival, not just with zai pits but also with terraces, which will break a long slope into a series of shorter ones. This, together with negarims (small, semi-circular barriers of earth), will control the flow of water, slowing its run-off.
But low-tech can still be costly. Mwanza says she would like more hoes, but at $70 a hoe, it is far more than she can afford. The simple brick house she lives in with one of her children is no bigger than a small bedroom.
Farmers like Mwanza face other, more intangible challenges. Kenyans have acquired a taste for maize, which is prone to failure in drought.
"It's been a generation since maize came into Kenya. Our parents liked it and we do too. It could take two generations for tastes to change," said Peterson Mwangi, a crops officer with Farm-Africa, a British NGO providing 6 000 farmers in the region with seeds, tools and equipment to grow drought-tolerant crops and drill bore holes.
Peterson argues that, by buying sorghum and millet instead of maize to stock up their strategic food reserves, the Kenyan government and international agencies such as the World Food Programme can play a vital role in driving demand for drought-resistant crops.
Professor Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, argues small-scale farming can be as productive as large-scale farming, if not more so. He says it contributes to the alleviation of rural poverty and rural development. He points out too that, for poorly qualified rural workers, there is simply no other option in manufacturing or services. But a number of conditions must be satisfied to ensure decent livelihoods and to allow them to move beyond subsistence agriculture.
"Small-scale farmers must have access to markets, which means routes and means of transport, or else they depend entirely on the goodwill of middlemen, who pay them low prices and vis-a-vis whom they are in a very weak bargaining position," he said. "They must have support from the state in the form of agricultural extension services and training and they must have access to inputs."
De Schutter points out that South Africa's ambitious land reform scheme is an almost complete failure because the land being redistributed after the break-up of large, white-owned commercial farms cannot be used by beneficiaries of land reform who have no training, no state support, no access to markets and who are not organised and thus almost always unable to achieve economies of scale.
At conferences in Paris, Rome and Addis Ababa, phrases such as food security and resilience trip off the tongue; on the ground, Mwanza and her fellow farmers in Kitui are grafting to turn those notions into reality. She wants to grow enough food first to feed the family, then to sell to raise money for school fees for her children. Even if the odds are against her, Mwanza is nothing if not determined: "I hope to be a rich farmer in five years."
- guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2011
Source: Mail & Guardian Online
Web Address: http://mg.co.za/article/2011-09-13-africas-battle-for-agricultural-development
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