Food for All in Africa: Sustainable Intensification for African Farmers

By Gordon Conway, Ousmane Badiane and Katrin Glatzel

Africa requires a new agricultural transformation that is appropriate for Africa, that recognizes the continent's diverse environments and climates, and that takes into account its histories and cultures while benefiting rural smallholder farmers and their families.

In this boldly optimistic book, Sir Gordon Conway, Ousmane Badiane, and Katrin Glatzel describe the key challenges faced by Africa's smallholder farmers and present the concepts and practices of Sustainable Intensification (SI) as opportunities to sustainably transform Africa's agriculture sector and the livelihoods of millions of smallholders. The way forward, they write, will be an agriculture sector deeply rooted within SI: producing more with less, using fertilizers and pesticides more prudently, adapting to climate change, improving natural capital, adopting new technologies, and building resilience at every stage of the agriculture value chain.

Food for All in Africa envisions a virtuous circle generated through agricultural development rooted in SI that results in greater yields, healthier diets, improved livelihoods for farmers, and sustainable economic opportunities for the rural poor that in turn generate further investment. It describes the benefits of digital technologies for farmers and the challenges of transforming African agricultural policies and creating effective and inspiring leadership.

Food for All in Africa demonstrates why we should take on the challenge and provides ideas and methods through which it can be met.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Comstock Publishing Associates
• Release date: Nov 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781501744426

Book preview

FOOD FOR ALL IN AFRICA

Sustainable Intensification for African Farmers

Gordon Conway, Ousmane Badiane, and Katrin Glatzel

COMSTOCK PUBLISHING ASSOCIATES

AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

To the memory of Calestous Juma,

a smart, dedicated man with a delightful sense of humor

Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword by Akinwumi A. Adesina, African Development Bank

Acknowledgments

List of Acronyms

Introduction: A Book for Optimists

Part 1 CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

1. African Farms and Farmers

2. Hunger and Malnutrition

3. The Threats to Food Security

4. Resilient Farmers

Part 2 SUSTAINABLE INTENSIFICATION

5. Sustainable Agriculture

6. Agriculture and Ecology

7. The New Genetics

8. Value Chains

Part 3 AGRICULTURAL TRANSFORMATION

9. Digital Farmers

10. Transforming Agriculture

11. Leadership and Performance

Notes

Author Biographies

Index

List of Illustrations

Foreword

Acknowledgments

List of Acronyms

Introduction: A Book for Optimists

Part 1 CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

1. African Farms and Farmers

2. Hunger and Malnutrition

3. The Threats to Food Security

4. Resilient Farmers

Part 2 SUSTAINABLE INTENSIFICATION

5. Sustainable Agriculture

6. Agriculture and Ecology

7. The New Genetics

8. Value Chains

Part 3 AGRICULTURAL TRANSFORMATION

9. Digital Farmers

10. Transforming Agriculture

11. Leadership and Performance

Notes

Author Biographies

Index

Illustrations

Figures

1.1. An insecure farm in Africa

1.2. Total area by size class for four countries in sub-Saharan Africa

1.3. Rapid population growth in Africa

1.4. Activities of Rwandan farmers in each livelihood group

2.1. The Global Hunger Index scores for sub-Saharan Africa in 2016

2.2. Levels of household food stocks, relating to the three growing seasons

2.3. The cycle of consequences of micronutrient deficiencies across the human life span

2.4. Hidden hunger scores, 2011

2.5. Prevalence of stunting in sub-Saharan Africa

2.6. Timing of health- and agriculture-based interventions to reduce stunting

2.7. Proportion of Rwandan households with children stunted

3.1. The recession and invasion zones of the desert locust

3.2. Hotspots of land degradation

3.3. Global warming over the past sixty-five years

3.4. Sahel precipitation anomalies, 1950–2017

3.5. The effects of a La Niña

3.6. The effects of El Niño

3.7a. Anticipated reduction of more than 5 percent in the length of the growing period in Africa by 2050

3.7b. Areas where the average annual maximum daily temperature is projected to exceed > 30˚C by the 2050s

3.8. Greenhouse gases and global warming

3.9. Wholesale price of maize and beans in Kenya in recent years

3.10. The significant threats facing food security

4.1. The dynamics of resilience

5.1. Maize yield and production in Malawi

5.2. A West African rice field as an agroecosystem

5.3. The dynamics of agroecosystems

5.4. The trade-offs between the different characteristics of agroecosystems

5.5. World fertilizer price index

5.6. Sustainable intensification of African agriculture

5.7. Theoretical model of sustainable intensification

6.1. Renewable internal freshwater resources per capita per year (in m ³ )

6.2. Conventional (upper) and MBILI (lower) maize–legume cropping systems

6.3. Layout of a rural Tswana tshimo (home garden) in North West Province, South Africa

6.4. Long-term trials with maize, Kabete, Kenya

7.1. Average grain yields of elite OPVs and hybrids at sixteen locations in Zimbabwe

7.2. The growth of Chinese rice yields

7.3. Global, industrial, and developing country areas of biotech crops (million ha)

8.1. A schematic value chain

8.2. Effect of use of herbicides versus non-use in Ethiopia

9.1. Mobile phone use in sub-Saharan Africa

9.2. The flows in the e-wallet system

10.1. A secure farm in Africa

10.2. Labor productivity (value added per worker) in African agriculture (2017)

10.3. Agricultural output per worker, sub-Saharan Africa (constant 2004–6 US$)

10.4. Changes in poverty rates in major African regions

10.5 Agricultural sector underperformance and poverty

10.6. Changes in sectoral employment shares

10.7. Average change in working population by occupation, 2000–2012

10.8. The emerging processing sector

11.1. Sixty years of evolution of agricultural sector policies and strategies in Africa

11.2. Sector expenditure and growth outcomes among CAADP versus non-CAADP countries

11.3. Existence of inclusive mechanisms for mutual accountability and peer review

Tables

2.1. Dietary needs in calories per day

2.2. Household categories in Rwanda by poverty, hunger, and resources

3.1. Land degradation in Ethiopia

5.1. Unsustainable policies and potential remedies

5.2. Contested agricultural policies and practices

5.3. Using agroecosystem characteristics to compare a home garden with a rice field

5.4. Definitions of three outputs of agricultural intensification

5.5. Direct and indirect inputs to agricultural intensification

8.1. Growth in numbers of active cooperatives and their members in selected African countries

8.2. The added values generated by research and development in Africa

10.1. Economic and agricultural growth and productivity rates, sub-Saharan Africa (per annum)

10.2. The transformation of staples value chains and the rise of processed foods

10.3. Phases of development of staples processing sector and policy priorities

Foreword

Nearly twenty years ago Sir Gordon Conway was my president at the Rockefeller Foundation, where we worked together as colleagues. We were focused on developing new institutions and processes for agricultural development in East Africa, notably, village-level agrodealers, local seed companies, and the creation of bank guarantees for agricultural loans.

Conway wrote about these innovations in his classic book The Doubly Green Revolution and in a subsequent textbook, One Billion Hungry. For this new book he is joined by two co-authors: Ousmane Badiane, the director for Africa of the International Food Policy Research Institute at Dakar, Senegal, and a noted authority on the political economy of agricultural development in Africa; and Katrin Glatzel, program head of the Malabo Montpellier Panel, and a visiting researcher at Imperial College London.

Food for All in Africa is a deliberately optimistic book. As the authors say in the introduction, even though most African farmers are smallholders, with no more than two hectares of land, many have demonstrated that with the right advice and inputs they can feed their families and create sustainable livelihoods. The challenge is to bring these achievements to scale by linking them to modern and effective food value chains.

At the African Development Bank, we aim to strengthen agriculture and food security through an integrated value chain approach that can improve the livelihoods of Africans who live in rural areas. Many are reliant on subsistence farming, and a sizable proportion are chronically vulnerable to climatic uncertainty. Africa lives off its land, and more than 70 percent of Africans work on the land, an enterprise that too often fails to meet their needs. By continuing to invest in agricultural technologies and rural infrastructure, including rural roads, irrigation, electricity, storage facilities, access to markets, conservation systems, and supply networks, the African Development Bank will help countries to increase agricultural productivity and competitiveness.

The African Development Bank is investing US$24 billion in agriculture over the next ten years to help turn agriculture into a business for creating wealth and lifting millions out of poverty.

We are pleased to collaborate with the Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development in Germany and the Department for International Development in the United Kingdom in funding the new Malabo Montpellier Panel, co-chaired by Ousmane Badiane and Joachim von Braun. This is a successor to the original Montpellier Panel, chaired by Sir Gordon Conway, whose members included both African and European experts in agricultural development and whose aim was to demonstrate to European donors how to target European investment in Africa more effectively.

The successor, the Malabo Montpellier Panel, has a predominantly African membership and is based in Dakar. It produces periodic reports on key issues of interest to African government, non-government, and private sector leaders. The first two reports, published in 2017 and 2018, are titled Nourished: How Africa Can Build a Future Free from Hunger and Malnutrition and Mechanized: Transforming Africa’s Agricultural Value Chains. The reports have helped to raise awareness of the importance of these topics in regard to agriculture in Africa.

As we continue to tackle the challenges of transforming Africa’s agriculture, I look forward to reading more such insightful reports in future.

Akinwumi A. Adesina

President of the African Development Bank

Acknowledgments

Much of this book is based on our work, as well as that of our colleagues, under the auspices of Agriculture for Impact, the Montpellier Panel, and its successor the Malabo Montpellier Panel.

Agriculture for Impact (A4I) (2010–16; www.ag4impact.org; www.canwefeedtheworld.org) was an independent advocacy initiative based at Imperial College London. A4I encouraged European decision-makers to provide more effective support to sustainable, productive, equitable, and resilient agricultural development for smallholder farmers in Africa. A4I convened the Montpellier Panel (2010–16), a group of European and African experts in the fields of agriculture, trade, ecology and global development.

The Montpellier Panel’s successor, the Malabo Montpellier (MaMo) Panel (2017–; www.mamopanel.org), is facilitated jointly by the International Food Policy Research Institute, Imperial College London, and the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn. It convenes leading African and international experts in agriculture, ecology, nutrition, and food security to guide policy choices by African governments to accelerate progress toward food security and improved nutrition.

We have also greatly benefited from the inputs of the staff and members of the panels. We would like to thank them for their considerable expertise, innovative ideas, and important insights, without which the work of the panels and this book would have been much poorer.

Acronyms

AGRA Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa

AGRODEP African Growth and Development Policy

APRM African Peer Review Mechanism

CA conservation agriculture

CAADP Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme

CGIAR Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers (previously Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research)

CIMMYT International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center

CO2 carbon dioxide

COMESA Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa

CSA climate-smart agriculture

DAP diammonium phosphate

ECOWAS Economic Community of West African States

EU European Union

FAO Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

FAW fall armyworm

GHGs greenhouse gases

GHI Global Hunger Index

GMOs genetically modified organisms

GPS global positioning system

HGSF Home Grown School Feeding

IFPRI International Food Policy Research Institute

IPM integrated pest management

ISM integrated soil management

IWRM integrated water resource management

MDGs Millennium Development Goals

N2O nitrous oxide

NDVI normalized difference vegetation index

NEPAD New Partnership for Africa’s Development

NGO non-governmental organization

OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

OPV open pollinated varieties

PRSP Poverty Reduction Strategy Programs

ReSAKSS Regional Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support System

SADC Southern African Development Community

SDGs sustainable development goals

SI sustainable intensification

SOC soil organic carbon

SPO smallholder producer organization

SSA sub-Saharan Africa

WFP World Food Programme

WHO World Health Organization

NERICA new rice for Africa

Introduction

A BOOK FOR OPTIMISTS

This is a book for optimists. Even though most African farmers are smallholders, with less than two hectares of land, we believe they can feed themselves and their families, and that they can generate enough income from their crops and livestock to send their children to school and to purchase medicines when they get sick, as well as have funds to invest in improving their farms.

Why do we hold this conviction? Partly because we know many farmers throughout the continent who have produced four, five, or six tons of maize per hectare, whereas in the past their yield was as little as 750kg. They have accomplished this with drought-tolerant maize seed combined with the application of blended fertilizer appropriate for their locality plus a much-needed soil ingredient, such as boron in southern Ethiopia or lime in Mozambique. In other communities similar massive increases in yields are possible for rice.

The challenge is to bring these achievements to scale. Many African economies have experienced unprecedented rates of economic growth, and agricultural growth has averaged about 7 percent per annum since 2005. Thanks to these achievements, African countries have started to reduce poverty, hunger, and malnutrition. Populations are rising, which presents both challenges and opportunities. By 2050 over half of the African population will be living in urban areas; both urbanization and urban incomes are rising fast, a consequence of migration from rural areas. As a result, Africa’s demand for food is projected to more than double by mid-century, owing partly to demands for more food staples, more varied and nutritious foods, and more processed food and partly to improved intraregional trade. This is generating a pull factor that reaches down the value chain to smallholder farmers.

A Doubly Green Revolution

Twenty years ago, one of us published a book entitled A Doubly Green Revolution: Food for All in the Twenty-First Century.¹ The original Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was highly successful, increasing yields and production of staple crops to such a vast degree that famine in Asia and Latin America was averted. Yet in its wake the revolution brought serious environmental problems as well. We argued then for a new revolution that could be both applicable under highly diverse conditions and environmentally sustainable. In effect, we needed a Doubly Green Revolution, one that would prove to be even more productive than the first Green Revolution, even more green in terms of conserving natural resources and the environment, and even more effective in reducing hunger and poverty.

In the intervening years much has been achieved. Attempts are now being made to reduce the excessive use of agrochemicals, such as fertilizers and pesticides. More attention is paid to environmental threats like soil degradation and especially to the consequences of global warming and climate change. Almost everywhere in Africa there are small projects funded by governments or NGOs that create sustainable approaches to food and fiber production—approaches based, for example, on conservation agriculture, agroforestry, crop rotation using legumes, crop-livestock integration, or fully organic systems.

Doubly Green Value Chains

How do we take what we have learned and bring it to scale? At the outset we recognize that African smallholder farmers are not interested just in hanging in, that is, subsisting on the edge of poverty. They are businesspeople who want to step up, who want not only to feed their families but also to make a modest income that enables them to send their children to school or buy much-needed medicines. And the most entrepreneurial engage in an effort to step out, connecting to input and output markets that transform their productivity and their income-earning capacity.²

Inevitably this means linking farmers to markets where they can buy appropriate, environmentally friendly inputs and transform them through value chains into profitable and sustainable incomes. Value is generated along value chains from research and development at the base, through seed and fertilizer companies, village agrodealers, and farming practices, to storage, agroprocessing, urban retailing, food services, and agricultural trade. In Africa around 20 percent of gross domestic product is generated by such agribusiness and food-related business. Some of this value extends down to small and medium enterprises and to the farm and rural households. With government support, farmers will create a trillion-dollar food market by 2030.

At the same time, imports of raw and processed foods have increased to about US$35 billion per year and are estimated to rise to about US$110 billion by 2025. Many of these imports could be produced in Africa. According to one estimate, if Africa was more intensively farmed, the continent could easily produce another one hundred million tons of grain equivalent—as much as is produced in the US corn belt. And Africa could become net agricultural exporter.

The Virtuous Circle

It is possible to envisage a virtuous circle generated by agricultural development. As agriculture develops, resulting in greater yields for both subsistence and cash crops, farmers become more prosperous, and the rural poor, whether landless or on smallholdings, benefit through wage labor. Chronic hunger decreases. The rural economy also grows through the creation of small rural businesses, providing more employment and improved rural facilities, especially schools and health clinics. The development of roads and markets allows the rural economy to connect efficiently to the urban economy and the growing industrial sector. Free trade offers opportunities for expanding imports and exports, especially high-value agricultural exports like coffee, cocoa, and cotton as well as fruits and vegetables. Better infrastructure, free trade, and growing urban demand for food can accelerate investment in agricultural development, further intensifying the virtuous circle.

It is a circle that recognizes the interconnections with other virtuous cycles, conceived in a similar fashion. In each cycle a problem solved leads to a subsequent problem that, on the basis of the first solution, is more easily solved, and so on. In total through the cycles’ interactions they form the basis of a sustainable future for Africa and, indeed, for our world.

Our Aim

This book is a discussion of how Africa’s farmers can be helped not only to feed themselves and their families but also to gain income by producing food and other crops as well as livestock products for sale to growing urban and export markets. For this to happen we believe Africa requires a new agricultural transformation that is appropriate for Africa and one that recognizes the continent’s great diversity of environments, climates, histories and cultures.

Part 1 describes the key challenges African farmers face and some of the opportunities for progress.

Chapter 1. African Farms and Farmers. Over 80 percent of African farmers are smallholders, and in many respects they are highly efficient. At the same time, medium-scale farms, those between five and one hundred hectares, account for a rising share of total farmland. Nevertheless, African populations are growing extremely fast, and in many countries smallholder farm sizes are shrinking and land is becoming more intensively and extensively cultivated, leading to further degradation. The way forward lies in farmers developing resilient livelihoods that encompass sources of income off farm. Diversity in the livelihood includes rural women, young people, and other disadvantaged people, all of whom need to integrate with agricultural and agribusiness value chains.

Chapter 2. Hunger and Malnutrition. Despite significant advances, severe hunger and malnutrition are all too common. Detailed nutrition and food security surveys can provide valuable information on how to reduce vulnerability and food insecurity. Undoubtedly the most shocking statistic of all is the incidence of child malnutrition, often referred to as hidden hunger, which measures the lack of essential micronutrients. This complex challenge involves distinct disciplines and agencies, but in recent years there have been successes by experts in health, nutrition, and agriculture working together over the life of the child to intervene in various ways and at different stages in the child’s life.

At the same time, Africa is urbanizing rapidly. A steep surge in the growth of the African middle class has taken place, especially in the 2000s. The effect of such an increase is rising urban demand for more and better food, which provides opportunities to increase and diversify food production in rural areas, resulting in greater value capture and rising incomes for smallholder farmers.

Chapter 3. The Threats to Food Security. Although chapter 2 ends on an optimistic note, many challenges arising from a range of threats external to the farm household lie ahead. Severe biological threats from pests, disease, and weeds continue. Healthy, fertile soils are the cornerstone of food security and rural livelihoods, but African soils are degrading. Water is just as important for the productivity of plants. Agriculture uses over 90 percent of freshwater withdrawals in SSA but only about 6.5 percent of the cultivated land is irrigated. Lack of water leads to chronic and acute stress.

Africa is already battling the impacts of climate change. Rising temperatures and variable rainfall are increasing the exposure of smallholders to drought, famine, and disease. Agriculture is an important emitter of greenhouse gases (GHGs), not only carbon dioxide but also such powerful gases as methane and nitrous oxide. In addition, there are often severe socioeconomic challenges, including unstable and high prices of basic commodities. Finally, conflicts cause disruption to food security.

Chapter 4. Resilient Farmers. We define resilience as the capacity of an agricultural value chain and its elements to withstand or recover from stresses and shocks and thus bounce back to the previous level of growth and development. Resilience can be strengthened in many ways and at different levels in the value chain through political, economic, sociological, and technological interventions.

Magic bullets do not exist, but there are solutions that combine a range of sustainable inputs, including organic technologies and limited amounts of selective synthetic inputs, combined in an integrated fashion appropriate to the local conditions. These include integrated pest management, integrated soil management, and climate-smart agriculture. Higher up the value chain are technologies for resilient storage and resilient markets. An opportunity also exists for businesses to invest in resilience technologies. African smallholders are businesspeople capable, at least potentially, of making profitable returns from their smallholdings.

Part 2 presents the concepts and practices of sustainable intensification as an answer to these challenges and opportunities.

Chapter 5. Sustainable Agriculture. We propose that the way forward will be a prosperous and sustainable agriculture sector deeply rooted in the concept of sustainable intensification (SI): producing more with less, using inputs like seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides more prudently, adapting to climate change, reducing GHG emissions, improving natural capital such as soil moisture capacity and the diversity of pests’ enemies, and building resilience.

One approach to SI is to employ precision agriculture, ensuring that inputs—whether nutrients, pesticides, seeds, or water—are used in a precise, sparing, effective, and strategic way in order to minimize their environmental impact. Thus microdosing permits the prudent, targeted use of inputs such as fertilizers, thereby improving soil quality and moisture while reducing the environmental impact that excessive use can cause. It also reduces costs and helps improve nutrient use efficiency and protection against drought.

Precision farming focuses on just one aspect of SI. More generally, it is a concept that includes three mutually reinforcing pillars: ecological intensification, genetic intensification, and socioeconomic intensification.

Chapter 6. Agriculture and Ecology. Ecological intensification involves the use of ecological processes more intensively and in a sustainable manner. The aim is to use land, water, biodiversity, and nutrients ecologically efficiently and in ways that minimize negative environmental impacts. Such systems can conserve and utilize natural capital, thus improving the quality and quantity of food production. Conservation agriculture is one such integrated system of soil, water, and biological resource management, combined with carefully selected external inputs. This and similar systems can reduce GHG emissions from agriculture.

Biodiversity is a key factor in maintaining stable, resilient agroecosystems. Included in conservation agriculture are various forms of intercropping that utilize the mutually beneficial ecological relationships arising when two or more crops are grown in association, either as mixtures or rotations. This serves, for example, to reduce pest and disease attack. Organic farming also aims to mimic nature by making use of natural ecological processes and resources. The potential increase in yields and farmers’ incomes sustainably is considerable in developing countries, especially in those areas faced with degraded soils, lack of capital, and low product prices. But care needs to be taken in determining where organic agriculture can contribute to sustainability and productivity and where it might have the reverse effect.

Chapter 7. The New Genetics. Genetic intensification consists of developing crop and livestock crosses that contain genes capable of producing improved yields on a sustainable basis. These crosses often show increased vigor, such that they tend to outperform both parents, although for reasons that are not fully clear. Today, hybrids and crosses are the basis for most improved crop and livestock breeds, including wheat, rice, maize, and dairy cattle.

Nevertheless, as has been long recognized, conventional breeding techniques have practical limitations. The application of modern cellular and molecular biology is pursued through four practical techniques: marker-assisted selection, cell and tissue culture, recombinant DNA, and gene editing. We examine the extent to which these interventions contribute to SI: improving nutrition, increasing resilience to pests, diseases, and climate change, and improving nitrogen fixation.

Chapter 8. Value Chains. The third pillar of SI focuses on the development of sustainable socioeconomic intensification. It encompasses the intensification of the relationships between farmers, which results in the development of innovative and sustainable institutions on the farm, in the community, and across regions and nations as a whole. Part of the response of rural people to the isolation they experience is to create associations, such as savings and loans associations and formal cooperatives.

The critical question is how these institutions can be taken to scale. We argue that the successful transformation of African agriculture lies in the effective integration of smallholder farmers into modernizing value chains. A food value chain describes the complicated process of transformation involving a sequence of events from the molecular product of one or more genes in crops or livestock, through intermediate stages of husbandry, harvesting, processing, marketing, and consumption, to the final molecular changes in the human who consumes the food product. Each component of the value chain, each structure or process has its distinctive characteristics, especially its own capacity to generate value.

Part 3 is about the technology and processes of agricultural transformation.

Chapter 9. Digital Farmers. There are numerous technologies and practices available to increase agricultural production and food security in a sustainable fashion; the challenge is to achieve this rapidly and at scale, efficiently, sustainably, and inclusively. There are experiences and tools at hand. Foremost among these are digital technologies, both hardware and software. The explosion in the number of cell phones in Africa is, in some respects, astonishing. Africa is going digital, enabling millions of Africans to connect for the first time. The effect is to revolutionize the lives of African farmers—by overcoming isolation, by speeding up change, and by taking success to scale.

Digital connectivity has enormous implications for agriculture and nutrition. It is already being used to disseminate information on nutrition and health, providing timely information on everything from weather predictions, crop selection, and pest control to management and finance. Technologies include the analysis of big data, using machine learning and blockchain technology applications that help to produce and analyze digital soil maps, to provide sophisticated insurance and faster breeding cycles for traditional African crops.

Chapter 10. Transforming Agriculture. Charting a course for a successful agricultural transformation leading to broad-based employment and income growth starts with a good understanding of the history of agricultural dynamics and the factors underlying it. The first decade of independent Africa was marked by strong overall economic growth, but things started to deteriorate rather rapidly in the following decade. The biggest impact on smallholders emanated from the far-reaching interventions by governments aimed at organizing nearly all activities in the agricultural sector.

Only in the last two decades have African economies experienced a remarkable recovery in economic and agricultural growth. Rapidly modernizing agribusiness value chains, in particular the staple foods processing sector, have provided a major opportunity for labor-intensive industrial development, including a large source of employment for youth and women. Rising incomes are driving rapid transformation in diets and thus staples value chains, with a rapid increase in processed foods. The fundamental changes in the quality of sector governance and increased public sector investment in the last two decades have to be sustained to bring about real transformation of African economies.

Chapter 11. Leadership and Performance. Africa, unlike any other developing region, has struggled for decades to find the proper strategic approach and direction for economic policy design and sector governance. The lack of leadership by African governments and constituencies in policy and strategy formulation in the agricultural sector has led to widely shifting policies, rules, and regulations that made it extremely difficult for smallholders to work productively.

Not until the beginning of the millennium did a series of developments on the continent create the conditions for the establishment of real African leadership. The agenda for the agricultural sector was articulated in the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), a continent-wide framework for agriculture-led growth and development with clear targets. However, there are risks of policy reversal. Mutual accountability processes are crucial to increasing cooperation and coordinating action among multiple stakeholders—for example, governments, farmers, input suppliers, processors, and donors—in solving issues that no single group can address alone. Such review and dialogue platforms are all-important building blocks for more effective African leadership and improved policy processes and outcomes in the future.

The Basis for Optimism

We believe Africa requires a new agricultural transformation that is appropriate to Africa and that recognizes the continent’s great diversity of environments and climates and its histories and cultures. In this book we describe, with examples from African practices and experiments, how this can be achieved. We do not pretend it will be easy, but the physical, biological, economic, and social tools for achieving it are available, and this offers us a broad basis for optimism. By combining the ingenuity of farmers and scientists we believe we can achieve sustainable food production and access for Africa’s growing population.

Part 1

CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

1

AFRICAN FARMS AND FARMERS

Sylvester and Beatrice Namarunda farm a hectare of poor, eroded land in western Kenya. They have four children, two boys and two girls, all under the age of twelve. They share the farm work, but Beatrice is also responsible for producing food, fetching water, gathering fuel, ensuring the children go to school, and looking after them when they are ill. They face shortages of almost everything. Their soil is exhausted from many years of continual cropping. They also lack access to money for investment. As a consequence, they often can’t provide the youngest children with food they need, so they go hungry and are frequently ill.

Maize is their traditional staple crop, but they also plant small amounts of bananas or cassava and, occasionally, beans and some vegetables. Fertilizers and seeds are expensive where they live, and they can’t get credit. The seed they sow is acquired locally; the maize is a poor, open pollinated variety (OPV) that yields about two tons per hectare in a good year. Like most farmers in Africa they must contend with pests, diseases, and weeds that attack their crops and cause severe damage, sometimes wiping them out altogether. The farm also faces periodic drought that greatly reduces yields. At the end of each season they usually harvest less than one ton of maize, an amount insufficient to feed their family (figure 1.1).

The Namarundas’ farm is just one of millions in Africa of a similar size and in a similar precarious position but existing in differing climates and environments and subject to different cultural, economic, and political circumstances.

FIG. 1.1. An insecure farm in Africa

Source: Gordon Conway and Gary Toenniessen, Science for African Food Security, Science 299, no. 5610 (February 21, 2003): 1187–88, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1081978. Reprinted with permission from AAAS.

Africa is extraordinarily diverse: one only has to look at a map of the soils to see this. They range from highly acidic and harshly weathered to dark, moderately leached soils with rich organic topsoil. Even western Kenya, where the Namarundas live, contains a considerable diversity of soils.

On top of this the climate is equally characterized by extremes of rainfall and growing periods. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the rainfall is nearly year-round, and cropping of annual crops is almost continuous. At the other extreme, along the southern fringe of the Sahara and at the borders of southern Africa, rainfall is barely enough to grow a single crop. In between, going north and south of the equator, rainfall varies from two crops a year toward the equator to one crop more distant. There are also short growing seasons in the Horn of Africa, in Ethiopia and Kenya. In the deserts of northern and southern Africa crops can be grown only with irrigation, if it is available.

This intersection of soils and climate determines the natural biomes and ecosystems of Africa as well as the human-crafted agroecosystems. African farmers are thus often faced with challenging environments in which to create a decent livelihood. Yet, against the odds, millions of small farmers do just that. In this book we describe how they manage to overcome the constraints impeding them, both natural and those caused by cultural and economic diversity and by political boundaries.

The Size of Farms

The Namarundas are not typical farmers, but they represent many millions of poor farmers who live in Africa. Over 80 percent of farmers in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are smallholders, defined as farmers with less than two hectares of land.¹ But this reality is changing: much of SSA is experiencing new land ownership patterns that may contribute to greater agricultural productivity. A study by Thomas Jayne of Michigan State University and colleagues has assessed changes over the past decade in the farm size distributions of Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia.² Medium-scale farms, of between five and one hundred hectares, account for a rising share of total farmland (figure 1.2).³

Medium-scale farms are likely to become