Africa, the new granary of the world

In Africa, the agrifood market represents more than 35 billion dollars: the "green revolution" has begun.

Em África, o mercado agro-alimentar representa mais de 35 mil milhões de dólares: a "revolução verde" já começou.

This article has been translated from Portuguese. Click here to read the original from Publico

Prolonged droughts, floods, and mudslides, extreme malnutrition, wars, forced migrations of populations and an extremely weak productivity aligned with rudimentary farming methods: this image of agriculture in various African countries could already be in the past. There are big names working for change, like Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation, Graça Machel, Bob Geldof or the past Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan.

Machel, Geldof and Annan belong to the Africa Progress Panel (APP), a forum of ten personalities from the private and public sectors that defend the equal investment in agriculture in Africa combined with sustained economic growth. In the past month, the APP recommended to the African leaders the investment of 10% of its GDP in agriculture, so that the African countries could benefit from the population growth in the world. It is estimated that two thirds of Africans depend on agriculture to survive, hence "to invest in agriculture is an essential strategy to reduce the poverty and social inequality," says the report.

"If we want to enlarge the recent economic successes of the continent and the majority of the inhabitants of Africa, we cannot continue to neglect the communities that depend on agriculture and fish," said Kofi Annan. "The growing world population needs food and Africa, our continent, is in a great position to provide. We have sufficient resources to feed not only ourselves, but other regions as well. We have to take advantage of this opportunity.

Africa's Green Revolution

This "green revolution" is already in progress in various countries around Africa, potentially in the new granary of the world. In Nigeria, Ethiopia and Rwanda, governmental forces to develop the agricultural sector are reaping fruits in national economies. In an article from May in the magazine Forbes, the past President of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, wrote that agriculture was about to become the "new petroleum" of the country, even though the investment was a mere 1.6% of GDP. With 84 million hectares of arable earth, two of the major rivers in Africa and a young labor market, it is calculated that Nigeria will be self-sufficient in rice in 2015.

The price crisis of food in the end of 2007 led to various countries rethinking their investment strategy in the agricultural sector. "Until then, the trajectory was one of a continuous reduction of supporting resources to the agricultural sector, whether public, national, with origin in imports, or whether by external origin by the donors, and this reduction culminated, in the first years of the new millennium, in its lowest point," explains the Revista 2, Lídia Cabral, special investigator in cooperation for development, associated to the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), based in the University of Sussex, in the United Kingdom. The investigator collaborated as well with the Future of Agricultures, a consortium that reunites institutions of investigation of various African and British countries, as a forum of debate about the future of agriculture in Africa.

Finding Food Security

Lídia Cabral explains that, because of the price crisis of food, "there was a turn in the governmental discourse and that of the donors in relation to the sector" and initiatives were developed that dedicated a greater attention to agriculture.  Between others, there is the Food Security Initiative, led by FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) and the G8 countries in the 2009 meeting, in Aquila, Italy, in which the world leaders compromised to invest 20 billion dollars in three years in sustainable agriculture to combat poverty and hunger. Following is Feed the Future, initiative launched by the Obama administration in 2010, with the support from United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and finally, the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP), of the African Union, at the continental scale.

It is not a coincidence that 2014 is the year of the Agriculture and Food Security for the African Union: the Forum for Agriculture Research in Africa (FARA) just received in April a reinforcement of 19 million dollars from the European Commission, making the total investment of European donors in support of the agricultural development in Sub-Saharan Africa $53 million. What unites all of these projects is, explains Lídia Cabral, "the reinforcement of the investment and the increase of public policy for the agricultural sector, establishing compromises, whether in relation to growth, or to the investment of the public expenditure in the sector, outlining specific goals and clear objectives."

Role of the Private Sector

Despite the initiatives that occurred, the world crisis of 2008 has altered the way the governments came to see the investment. The crisis "signified less available resources for cooperation," explains the investigator. The alternative "was to call the private sector and intervene," rethinking the "role that this could play in the development of the agricultural sector in Africa." It is in this height that, through the private investors and those considered traditional donors (World Bank, IMF, countries of the OECD), enter the philanthropy scene, with organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that, together with the Rockefeller Foundation, created AGRA – Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, recuperating the spirit of the "Green Revolution" launched in the 1960s by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations in countries like Mexico, India, Pakistan, and the Philippines, through the planting of high yielding seeds.

These objectives came to profoundly change the African agricultural landscape, promoting better infrastructures to facilitate the arrival of the products to the markets, to provide access to protection insurance of the crops, protecting the diverse calamities, investing in the importance of fertilizers and seeds of a higher quality, supporting the neediest farmers, and, Olusegun Obasanjo added in Forbes, to increase the import taxes to boost internal production. This is also the theory of Gordon Conway, professor in the Imperial College, in London, and author of One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed the World? To Conway, who leads the consortium Agriculture for Impact (and who counts on the support of Kofi Annan and Bill Gates), the solution is in the concession of microcredits to small farmers and macro-investment in new technologies.

Criticisms

Despite the initial investment of close to 150 million dollars in various African countries, AGRA has not been free from criticism. In July of 2013, in the G8 Summit in London, close to 60 African civil society groups protested against the politics of AGRA, above all those who use genetically modified crops (or GMOs), favoring mega-corporations like Monsanto, who recently claimed the "right of property" of a series of high yielding seeds: "The private property of knowledge and material resources (for example, of genetically modified seeds) signifies the flow of capital outside of Africa directly to the hands of multinational businesses," explained the group, in a report presented by the IRIN, a news service supported by the United Nations. One of the anti-AGRA campaigns, AGRA Watch, even said that the Bill Gates Foundation "takes advantage of world-wide food crises and of climate change to promote industrial agriculture and high technology, directed by the market, managing profit for corporations, destroying the environment and impoverishing the farmers. These programs are a form of 'tropicalism philanthropy'."

Lídia Cabral recognizes that "the productivity of the African agricultural sector continues to be very low" and to that she adds "it is necessary to invest in technology, in investigation and formation, to facilitate the access to the market." But the debate about the availability of food also is accompanied by the "agricultural role in the production of bioenergy," namely of crops like soy for the production of biofuels and not for feeding the populations.

The entrance of these mega-corporations in African agriculture have sparked debates about problematic issues, like land grabbing, the race to the land rights, which has also revealed new actors in the terrain, like China, India, and Brazil (The BRICs). But Lídia Cabral equally highlights a "debate that is far from being resolved" in relation to the "concerns over the type of technology developed by Gates and Rockefeller, and to the promotion of utilizing crops and seeds that have been genetically modified: the GMOs are important to guarantee a growth in production, but there are those who say that they are harmful to the farmers and, potentially, to health," she continues.

Some opinions go in the direction that this investment in agriculture is the new "gold rush" in Africa: "There is a corporate takeover in African agriculture. But there are some positive initiatives. The uncertainty is: in what way is Africa going to benefit or not from this rush? And if yes, who in Africa? The concern is with the local communities that live in conditions of great vulnerability, to where they benefit from this from this investment," concludes Lídia Cabral.

Article Translated by Erica Kliment, Staff Intern with the Brazil Institute at the Wilson Center

Photo Credit: USAID via Flickr