A continental crisis, and a few green shoots

African countries are fighting an addiction: import of food items, which happens at the cost of domestic farmers. Despite the unprecedented import volumes, the continent faces famine and extreme food insecurity. Countries have started taking definitive st

WHEN CHARLES Tawazadza, a farmer in eastern Zimbabwe’s Middle Sabi area, tried to borrow money from the bank to finance his farming business, the bank rejected his application. He has land but doesn’t have title deeds to use as collateral for the loan. Tawazadza is one of the thousands of beneficiaries of President Robert Mugabe’s controversial land reform programme launched in 2000. The programme brought Zimbabwe’s once vibrant agricultural sector to its knees. The government seized farms from up to 4,000 commercial white farmers but most of it was distributed to members of the ruling party. Mugabe argued that the programme was necessary to address the colonial imbalances that saw minority white farmers controlling the country’s prime agricultural lands. But this terribly disrupted the agriculture economy. Before this reform, farmers of the Middle Sabi area met the country’s wheat requirements; but not anymore. In just two decades, the country has become a net importer of basic crops, such as maize, which is imported from as far as Brazil and Mexico. Chronic drought and unpredictable weather due to climate change compounded the problem. Zimbabwe is no longer southern Africa’s breadbasket. Since financial resources are limited, most farms have been lying fallow. These include big farms, which once earned millions of dollars by exporting crops like sweet corn and baby corn, a variety of beans and horticultural products like Kondozi in Manicaland province. This has pushed the country into the import trap.

Eddie Cross, the country’s leading economist and agriculture expert says the country’s agricultural output is down by about 70 per cent and Zimbabwe is importing over 80 per cent of all its foods, which are now priced at import parity. Zimbabwe’s food import bill ballooned to more than US $1.5 billion at the height of the El Niñoinduced drought in 2016, according to the country’s Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa.

Cross says if all food imports could be produced locally, the benefits would be huge. “Replacing the import means creating 0.35 million jobs locally and saving some US $2.5 billion per annum in foreign exchange.” Take the case of the lucrative poultry business. Enock Mbendani of the Manicaland Poultry Producers Association, a group of poultry producers in Manicaland province, says there are enough locally produced poultry products for domestic consumption; but they are more costly than the imported ones.

Due to the rising food import bill, there have been some efforts to make farming tenable again. But they have failed due to corruption and abuse of government facilities. For instance, in 2007, through the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, the government introduced the Farm Mechanisation Scheme, but it failed because most farm mechanisation resources were given to the political elite.

And late last year, the government came up with another programme, the Targeted Command Agriculture, aimed to ensure food self-sufficiency. Under the three-year-scheme, targeted farmers are given agricultural inputs by the government, with each participating farmer committing 5 tonnes of maize per hectare towards repayment of

loans. Though originally the Targeted Command Agriculture, spearheaded by Vice President Mnangagwa, targeted maize production, it has also been extended to livestock production, wheat farming and fishery. “Command Agriculture is a policy intervention by the government informed by the imperative to substitute grain imports through increased agricultural production and productivity, thereby revitalising various agroprocessing value chains and helping the country to re-industrialise,” Mnangagwa said during a public lecture at Midlands State University in Zimbabwe’s city of Gweru early this year.

NIGERIA: new efforts, new results

AGRICULTURE REVOLUTION is the new buzzword in Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy. For a country that came to treat oil as its main economic crop, it is an unusual turnaround.

Though agriculture remains the largest sector of the economy and employs two-thirds of the labour force, production hurdles have stifled the performance. Between 2011 and 2015, agroprocessed exports declined by 41 per cent. Over the past 20 years, it is estimated that Nigeria has lost US $10 billion in annual export opportunity from groundnut, palm oil, cocoa and cotton due to a decline in their production.

Across most key crops, the rate of consumption has outstripped production in Nigeria. The deficit has been met largely by imports, making the country a net importer, a trend evident since 1975. Currently, Nigeria imports about US $3-5 billion worth of food annually, especially wheat, rice, fish and fresh fruits. Wastage remains high in production areas, reducing supply of feedstock to processing factories, requiring them to keep importing supplies. The effect has limited job growth across the agricultural chain. Import dependence has also made Nigeria vulnerable to global agro-price fluctuations.

Emmanuel Oladipo, an environmentalist and Nigeria’s consultant to Global Environment Facility’s Food Security Programme, says, “When the oil money started coming, we became affluent and discarded the local brand of rice.” This left marginal farmers in limbo. Local production could not match the price of cheaper imported rice. Oladipo says the current situation is encouraging for farmers because they are regaining importance. In the 1990s, people could get money from the oil, and there was no policy to guide farmers, which led to massive desertion, he says.

After an initial effort by the past administrations that turned out to be a false start, fresh policy changes have been introduced in Nigeria. For instance in 2012, the government introduced the Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ata) to improve farmers’ income, food security and to generate employment. ata is said to have increased agriculture output by 11 per cent, to 202.9 million tonnes, between 2011 and 2014. It also reduced the 2014 food import bill by US $1.29 billion.

More recently, the government launched the Agriculture Promotion Policy aimed at overcoming food shortages and improving the output quality. In addition, the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ergp) prioritises food security and aims to achieve self-sufficiency in tomato paste, rice and wheat, by 2017, 2018, and 2019/2020 respectively. ergp projects that the value of agricultural production would increase by 31 per cent in 2020.

But still the agriculture sector faces many challenges, notably an outdated land tenure system that constrains access to land (on average, a farming household has 1.8 ha) and a very low penetration of irrigation facilities (less than 1 per cent of cropped land is under irrigation). Other factors include limited adoption of technology, high cost of farm inputs, poor access to credit, inefficient fertiliser procurement and distribution, inadequate storage facilities and poor access to markets. These have kept agricultural productivity low (average of 1.2 tonnes of cereals/ha). According to Bala Dogo, coordinator of Kaduna-based Care and Action Research, a non-profit, there was a misplaced priority. “It was an issue of planning ‘for’, and not ‘with’ the people,” Dago says.

KENYA: overreliance on rain, maize

THE LAST harvest in October 2016 was one of the worst for Justus Mutai, a 54-year-old Kenyan farmer from Kericho county in the country’s Rift Valley region. From his 4 hectares under maize, he only managed 100 bags of the staple food, a far cry from the 300 bags he would usually harvest in a good season. Poor rains and sub-standard government-supplied subsidised fertiliser were partly to blame for this. “The crop hardly improved as it should have after the use of fertiliser, and the situation was made worse by inadequate rains,” says a dejected Mutai.

Across most key crops, the rate of consumption has outstripped production in Nigeria. The deficit has been met by imports, a trend visible since 1975