Source – Forbes.com
Date – 13 August 2013
Website – www.forbes.com/sites/skollworldforum
Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series by the Financial Times’ This Is Africa publication on realizing Africa’s agricultural potential, in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation. The Skoll World Forum is a proud media partner for the initiative, and you can find the whole series here.
Eleanor Whitehead is a reporter at This is Africa, focusing on business, policy and development across the continent.
In northeastern Brazil, the dry bush of the Cerrado – a huge swathe of savannah covering 21 percent of the country – has given way to vast farmlands which have turned the nation into a world-leading agricultural producer. In under 30 years, the development of this one-time wasteland has powered Brazil’s transformation from an importer of food to one of the world’s biggest breadbaskets.
Across the Atlantic, in contrast, Africa’s agricultural story has been one of unmet potential. Despite employing 65 percent of the continent’s workforce, and accounting for more than 30 percent of GDP, the sector is struggling. Poor and degraded soils, non-existent irrigation systems, crumbling public infrastructure and insufficient access to credit are all hampering the growth of a sector that has the potential to redefine the continent’s development trajectory.
Clearly, there are lessons to be learnt from the likes of Brazil, and Agra (The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa) has set itself the task of replicating the green revolutions of the nations of Latin America and Asia across the continent.
The organisation, which began life in 2006 through a partnership between The Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, aims to support smallholder farmers and develop breadbasket regions in order to meet Africa’s growing food security issues. That involves the creation of whole value chains – from fertiliser distribution to market access.
It is a big task, and Jane Karuku, Agra’s president, favours taking a scientific approach to the problem. She wants to see research and development – an often neglected part of the agricultural story – put at the top of the agenda, both by countries and donors.
“The first and most important thing is that we have to continue building on the capacity of Africans themselves to do agricultural research,” Ms Karuku argues. “That requires investment in scientists and in research institutions, which receive very little funding by government, so that we can breed more seed varieties that are high yielding and resistant to pests and diseases.”
Further support must be provided throughout the value chain if those appropriate varieties are to be distributed across the continent, she says: “We have to think about the whole chain: who is going to do the work, how we are going to breed that better variety, how we are going to multiply that variety, and how we are going to distribute that variety to the farmer?”
Specifically, in order to multiply new inputs, more funding needs to be provided to local seed companies. To this end, Agra already offers grants for investments in capacity building and technology. That has yielded some results, spearheaded by successful groups like Kenya’s Western Seed Company and Tanzania’s Tanseed, which are producing varieties to meet their countries’ specific conditions. “In 2007, we supported less than 10 seed companies, producing about 2,500 tonnes of seed across the continent. Now there are about 80 of them, and together they have aggregate production of about 55,000 tonnes of seed,” Ms Karuku says.
Agro-dealers are also springing up, deepening the local private sector. “When we started, there were few viable agriculture dealers who could take those seeds from one point to another. Now we have trained about 15,000 of them. That is still very few, but it is a good step from a low base,” she argues.
And the impacts of these developments are beginning to be reflected in an uptick in farm yields, Ms Karuku says. “We can see a lot of improvement, starting from adoption of high yielding seed varieties. If you think about maize, in Malawi, Kenya, Zambia, the adoption rate for hybrid seeds is almost up to 90 percent. In cassava, mostly grown in west Africa, there is a high adoption rate of seeds, and yields have increased up to 40 percent. In rice, Tanzania is seeing high productivity by using technology and better agronomic practices, and we are hearing figures of 9.6 tonnes per hectare, which is really high,” she states.
But there is a lot further to travel in support of these areas. “There is a bigger role for donors in this space because some of these countries are starting at such a low base and governments are not spending a lot of money on their national institutions, like you’d find in the West,” Ms Karuku believes. “There is room for donor institutions coming to give that upfront support, whether at the personnel level and to institutions, or to the private breeders and commercial seed companies, to make them more viable at a business level.”
Going private
Huge challenges still remain in other areas, not least in soil health, the distribution of fertilizers, access to markets and storage facilities, the development of strong farmer organizations, and access to credit. But amid those problems, more money is flowing into African agriculture than ever before, leaving some stakeholders positive that prospects for the sector are finally changing for the better.
“At last, the noise around African agriculture is actually being reflected in rising investment,” Ms Karuku says. Sitting on 60 percent of the world’s uncultivated arable land, Africa is receiving the attention of investors looking to secure future supplies in the face of rising demand from a growing global population.
The G8’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, which aims to lift 50 million Africans out of poverty over the next 10 years by means of private investment, has already tabled billions of dollars in commitments from international investors since its launch last year. In Nigeria alone, $8bn has been invested in the agriculture sector since 2011, with money now flowing into new crop processing zones from the likes of Cargill and Unilever. Other initiatives like the Grow Africa partnership also aim to leverage private capital for African farming.
But Ms Karuku believes there is further to travel. “We need a lot more investment and a quickened pace in terms of deliverable actions, so that it is not just talking and we are actually going to do it,” she says.
Not everyone is pleased with Agra’s stance on commercial investment, though. Some civil society organisations argue that the private-led approach is the wrong solution to Africa’s growing hunger crisis. As with Brazil’s Cerrado, or other developing agricultural economies, they fear a new era of land grabs, and argue that the smallholders who produce the majority of the continent’s food could be pushed off their land to make way for big investors whose aim is to control African food supplies.
Ms Karuku refutes these concerns. “The way I see it, there is a big role for the private sector in African agriculture,” she says. “First, we have a growing local private sector that is playing an important part in making farming sustainable and profitable. Second are the multinationals that come to buy produce out of Africa, and this has been happening for a long time. The tradition of companies like Nestlé and Unilever linking their supply chains to African farmers has been a long one, and is positive.”
Rather than fearing private investment, more needs to be done to support governments at a policy level, she says: “The deals have to be worked out in an equitable and transparent process, but we cannot do without both local and international private sector involvement.”
With these growing investment flows, coupled with increasing commitments by African governments to agriculture, Ms Karuku sees reasons to be optimistic. “There is evidence that things are starting to change. The only challenge is that it is happening in pockets, and it is not wholesome – so it is a question of replicating that to get those effects across the continent,” she says. “My dream is to make sure that all of this trickles down, that the smallholder is touched by these initiatives.”