AFRICA is producing as little as a third of the world’s average grain yields 10 years after the continent pledged to unleash a "green revolution", says a report by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra).
"In Asia, grain yields have doubled or tripled since the 1960s.
"In Africa, they have stagnated," one of the report’s authors, David Ameyaw, said during its launch in Maputo yesterday.
Statistics like this are sobering, yet the tone of the launch reflected a sense of Afro-optimism.
Rather than pointing a finger at governments for their failure, the organisation, chaired by former United Nations (UN) secretary-general Kofi Annan and backed by the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations, is hosting a two-day discussion in the Mozambican capital to try to breathe life into smallholder-based African agriculture.
Agra’s focus is on bringing the private sector into a conversation with policy makers on how farmers can be empowered to farm smarter, secure credit lines and insurance (usually far out of the reach of most subsistence croppers) and gain better access to markets. Neither the venue nor the timing of the gathering is an accident.
In 2003, African leaders met in Maputo and promised 10% of their national budgets on agriculture.
Today, only eight out of 54 have achieved this budget allocation.
As a result, few are able to boast reaching the 6% annual growth in agriculture needed to bring about the revolution. Two years ago, Agra decided to start collating agricultural data and lessons learnt from the projects it sponsors in 16 sub-Saharan African countries into a report that would serve as a "benchmark" for African agriculture. "We need to be able to capture the progress made in the green revolution and access the outcomes and impacts," says Agra’s vice-chairman, Zimbabwean-born telecoms entrepreneur Strive Masiyiwa. He says that even getting reliable, recent statistics from some countries has proved impossible.
Ten years after the "Maputo declaration", the stakes are very different for Africa. The UN expects the world’s population to reach 9.1-billion by 2050. To feed these extra people, it says, global production needs to rise by 70%.
Increasingly, international investors are noticing that Africa has vast swathes of underused land. "Most of the world’s unused arable land is in Africa" as US President Barack Obama told a Group of Eight (G-8) meeting in May. The scramble is on to be able to exploit this resource.
The G-8, through its "New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition", is pushing for big corporations to make big investments in Africa to end hunger.
One example is G-8 support for the world’s largest grain company, Cargill, to develop 40,000ha of farmland in Mozambique.
Some commentators see Mr Annan, through Agra, spearheading a different approach focused on smallholders — one he advocated during the Africa Progress Report released last year.
"The report needs to be read both for what it says and what it does not say. Note that there is simply no mention of the kind of big land-grab investment being promoted by the G-8," UK-based author and expert on Mozambican agriculture Joseph Hanlon told Business Day. "There is no support for big hedge-fund foreign investment, giant mechanised farms, and land grabs," he said. "Instead, the way to increase food production is through smallholders — and getting them money, technology and markets through increased state investment and a bigger state role."
Mozambique, like many other countries on the subcontinent, has vast swathes of underutilised land. Despite the country’s galloping economic growth of nearly 8% last year (on the expectation of a mineral resource rush), most farming is still done the old way: using hoes, with families eking out a subsistence on plots no larger 2ha. Few can afford to buy fertiliser, and irrigation systems are virtually unheard of.
"Low soil fertility is a general problem in Mozambique," says maize-seed developer Pedro Fita, who works in an Agra-funded project to develop new, disease-and drought-resistant maize varieties at a research centre on the outskirts of Maputo.
Maize is the staple food for many Mozambican families (as it is across the subcontinent) yet farmers are lucky if they get a yield of one tonne a hectare. Climate change is another challenge farmers face. "In the past, the rains began in September," Mr Fita says. "Now it is impossible to know when it will start."
In the neighbouring field is an imposing building, a reminder of the many players now involved in African agriculture. The $6m centre was built by the Chinese to help train local farmers in Chinese farming methods.
The aim is to significantly raise Mozambican rice crop yields.
The Mozambican government granted the Chinese firm that runs the centre a large concession further north to grow rice. In the northern Nampula province, a joint Brazilian-Japanese farming project growing soya and other staples has come up against opposition from local farmers who fear they will be forced off their land.
With many, competing visions of what the future of agriculture should look like, and pressure building for access to land, Africa has key decisions to make over what kind of investors it wants and what model to follow as it decides on a strategy for the next decade.
