Farming Assistance in Africa

This entry is a collection of some contributions from others - which I found very interesting. This blog has been pestering about issues in the developing parts of the world.  The solutions I have been reporting are all "community based".  These are Small groups, working to empower people to make a difference in their lives. This article takes a totally different tack.  Instead of community based efforts that work to change how people see themselves and their opportunities, this effort is a huge commercial investment in agricultural productivity.

As this works out, the society could make the same shift that most western ones did - moving from individuals farming to urban and manufacturing - or whatever replaces manufacturing in the future.

Midwest Farmer Helping in Africa
The initial article on this was a piece on MPR - Minnesota Public Radio - by Dan Gunderson.  It recounts the plans of a Midwest farmer to travel to Africa to help the people there learn how to raise their productivity in agriculture.  You can find that article here:
   http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/12/27/business/midwest-farmers-operations-africa/

This gentleman, Wallie Hardie, is part of an organization known as Aslan Global Management. You can find their website here: http://www.aslan-global.com/.
In this project, they are working to assist Mozambique to raise their production of corn and soybeans.  "Hardie said the plan is to develop a large intensive agriculture system, using profits to help local residents start their own farms."  That sounds very positive, but the way these things normally go, the foreigners make a bunch of money, and the locals are left wondering what happened when they are gone.

One of the co-founders of Aslan stated their plans this way: "It's very important for us to not be in Africa to extract wealth," Larsen said. "We are in Africa to create wealth or to create value. And that's a very big distinction between what we're doing and what others do."

These farms are huge.  The one in Mozambique is 25,000 acres, and the one planned in Tanzania is 98,000 acres.  They are talking about helping the locals start farms that are more like 100 to 200 acres.  Based on my limited experience in Tanzania - I've been there twice - that still sounds like a very large farm for local producers.  I was thinking that they are probabably not going to be able to get the local population to buy into that approach.  They may work on the farm, but it will take some time before they can actually manage 200 acres.

A MN Farmer Perspective
Knowing very little about this, I sent a copy of this article to a friend of mine who is a retired farmer, and who has been working for the US AID office to help establish agricultural cooperatives around the world.  His response was generally negative.  And for very good reasons, I thought.  This is the text of his response.
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I am not very enthusiastic about this proposal. First, a (government) lease on a huge block of land will displace a lot of people who are now eking out a subsistence living on that same land.  No matter who has title to the land, needy people are squatting on it and trying to get by.  Will the new enterprise hire any of them and pay them a living wage?  I doubt it.

Second, most agricultural production on existing, subsistence farms is food for the family:  milk, goat meat, corn, beans, bananas, other fruits and vegetables.  Corn  and soybeans are commercial crops, and will bypass the local food economy.

Since the principles in this enterprise are Americans who plan to grow American crops, I presume that they also plan to use capital intensive (American) production methods, like they do in the Red River Valley.  More capital input means less labor input.  Big tillage and harvest machinery will displace hundreds of manual laborers.  A principle of economics  is that when labor is cheap, and capital is expensive, use more labor, and vice versa.  Labor is cheap and abundant in that part  of Africa, so labor  intensive production is likely to be more profitable, and certainly would be better for the multitude of work and income starved laborers in the area.

I saw a similar farm from the road north of Nairobi in Kenya.  The crop was pineapples on thousands of acres of contiguous land.  There were no people living on  that land, and I didn't see any workers in the field. They probably showed up at harvest time, but maybe that was done by machine.  I didn't see any schools, hospitals or social institutions associated with that farm.

Maybe the proponents of this enterprise know how to grow more and better crops than the locals do, and that may serve the shareholders, but it is hard to see how the locals will prosper from it.
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My Reflection
I trust this gentleman's perspective, and share it to some extent.  Folks from the Midwestern US probably have a very poor idea of what is going on there at the moment.  But, I think the idea of using labor versus other techniques is a touch of Luddism - we do not create wealth by utilizing labor intensive methods.  There would clearly have to be some transition from the existing methods to more productive ones.  Africa has to eventually get more productive to feed its population.  When the U.S. was founded, 97% of us planted crops and harvested them. Now less than .7 % do the same task with a much higher level of productivity.  It does not create wealth for anyone to keep a bunch of high school graduates keying prices into cash registers, when automated registers can do the same job for less expense.  Increased productivity actually generates wealth.  Of course, we have to find a way to share that wealth with the displaced cashiers, a problem we are still working on!

Another Perspective from Tanzania
That said, I also shared this  piece with another  friend who has been living in Africa for the last 35 years.  He had a very different perspective - he wished these folks well.  And his reasoning got my attention.  See what you think:
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Wallie Hardie is starting from a successful farm in the U.S.  It's good to start from success.  My experience, of others who have tried and who have listened well to what's going on locally, is that it CAN work and IS needed.

Mozambique, however, is quite different from Tanzania.  We have lots of very fragile and only minimally fertile land here.  It is, for example, more expensive to bring locally produced fertilizers into Mbeya (where there is lots of rain but poor soil) to grow maize and soy beans, than it is to import them from the U.S.  That is even without considering the government subsidies.  So you have to do the math first to see if it will work.

The farms have to be big.  While I am all in favor of competition, and often small IS beautiful, small farming -- anywhere in the world -- is a ticket to poverty.  It's not always true if you are growing poppies or marijuana of course, but that's another discussion.

There IS indeed an element of neo colonialism in all of this.  But I still remember the bumper sticker on an old rusty taxi driven in Arusha in Tanzania during the worst of the economic crisis in the 1980s.  It said: "Bring Back the British."  Interestingly, despite the politicization against stuff like that, the Tanzanian taxi driver drove the car around for years, venting what appeared to be common sense for all except the politicians.  People want things to work, but they often don't know how, or can't get past the bureaucracy.  Big farmers have a better chance at that.

A current case in point is the flower growers in Arusha.  They are the largest single employer of local labor.  More than 40,000 people in Arusha get work from the mostly Dutch flower farmers.  But for months, seedlings that need to be exported to European markets daily, have been sitting in warehouses or have been destroyed for lack of simple plastic bags to ship them in.  The government banned plastic bags for many good environmental reasons, but wouldn't exempt the flower growers who, by EU regulations, must have flowers packed in such bags to import the seedlings into Europe.  It took months for this large farm lobby to get the exemption.  No small farmer can weather that kind of impasse. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been lost.

Another aspect is that lots of land is NOT being used by small farmers or anyone for that matter.  Some is extremely fragile with topsoils only an inch or two thick.  It can be farmed once.  Some, as in Mozambique, is still covered with land mines from the war.  It would be great for large scale farmers to plow through the whole area to explode the mines and get the land useable again.  Other vast areas are infested with tsetse fly and the sleeping sickness it carries.  Clear cutting a 400 foot perimeter of a large land area and using spray planes once inside the perimeter makes the area tsetse free.  But this is not something a small farmer can do by hand or even with ordinary sized tractors.

Local attitudes need real skills and lots of time to help change.  The part of Tanzania where I live has had the best rains in a hundred years this year.  This was accurately forecast by the Tanzanian meteorological department.  I talked with my staff about planting food crops in October rather than waiting till February.  We would have had a bumper harvest in the coming dry month of January.  Instead I was told that we couldn't do that because we would be the only farm with food then.  It would all be stolen by the neighbors who will not plant till February no matter what the experts say.  Large farms can change those attitudes.  On our 16 acres, we can't.

The religious motivation and basis in respecting the local people is a potentially important added ingredient of the Aslan group.  I DO think it can make a difference.  These are the people who tend to stick with such projects for long periods.

One comment on people just sitting, not working, being a motivation to Hardie:  He might be seeing something whose reality is actually very different.  For years, southern Tanzania exported enormous amounts of cashews.  However, now, few people will work the labor intensive farms for wages which are affordable for the farmers to pay.  It is cheaper for them to send the unhusked nuts to India where they are shelled, roasted and canned and exported, than it is to pay Tanzanians to do the work.  Indians will work for much less pay.  There is also -- all along the coast -- a feeling that all work is beneath the dignity of a free person.  All work is seen as something for slaves.  Free people don't work.  That is a hard post-slavery attitude to change.  Also, why would someone who has all the food they want from sending the children to catch a fish once a day, and bring a coconut down from the tree, why would they want to work?  For what?  We work because we want.  If one feels no want....

The line that really struck me was the following:

> "Sub-Saharan Africa has enough land to feed five times its
> population," Larsen said. "But currently it's dependent on other
> countries for two-thirds of its food.  Our view is if we can come
> alongside with some capital and some know-how, they will be feeding a
> very large chunk of the world 15 or 20 years from now."

This is not doing the math.  Tanzania has 45 million people now. Conservative UN projections show it will have 310 million by the year 2100!  Africa's population is growing 53 times faster than Europe's! Six times faster than North America's.  Far from Africa being able to feed a large chunk of the world in 15 or 20 years, the reality is that scientists see 2030 as an end point -- a perfect storm -- for the whole world, where there will be mass starvation, nowhere near enough fresh water, and an ever growing population of people with insufficient education to make a difference.  The reality is that those of us doing medical work are working too well.  We are creating a population bomb. Education, farming, and every other field is falling further and further behind the population curve.  Africa might have enough land to feed five times its current population now, but Tanzania's population will be six times higher in 2100 than it is now.  Forget feeding the rest of the world.

That said, I am still hopeful, but not in farming as an end solution. The efforts of people like Wallie Hardie are needed right now.  But food will ultimately have to come from carbon-based nano-engineered foods.  Farming in any form will shortly be as obsolete as a Model T-Ford -- functional, but not useful.  Employment will not come from farms but from cities.

(I deleted a reference to a document on population growth in Africa that was attached to the original.  Pat sent it to his community for their General Chapter.  If you want to see that - let me know.)

A couple of weeks ago I flew a Dutch gynecologist from a remote rural Catholic hospital in central Tanzania back to Arusha.  He had, in his 30 days there, done more than 100 gynecological procedures.  More than half of them were to repair botched illegal abortions.  That shows the absolute desperation of rural women in Tanzania where practical birth control is simply not available, where the leaders of the government and the churches and the mosques have their eyes firmly shut to reality, and where large families have no realistic way out of poverty.  We need to combine modern food production with serious population planning, even -- I'm afraid -- if it is coercive.

Pat

Flying Medical Service
P.O. Box 508
Arusha, Tanzania
Phone: +255-(0)27-250-8760
Phone: +255-(0)27-250-8583
Phone: +255-(0)784-416217
Web:  flyingmedicalservice.org
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Conclusion
As always, Pat brings a unique perspective, and makes me think.  The good thing here is that someone is working on a solution to the agricultural productivity of Africa.  The downside is that it seems to require an absolutely immense investment. This is not a community based effort.  This is a major commercial undertaking.  I guess if the Dutch can profitably grow tulips in Tanzania and employ 40,000 people to make it work, that is not a bad thing. I had envisioned the solution to poverty as something based on the sustainable development espoused by Jeffrey Sachs.  What Pat is saying is that this is the historical path taken by the Western countries - tremendous increases in agricultural productivity, with urban development that provides the jobs as people move from the countryside.  Well, that has been the actual experience of most of the planet - why not Africa.

Pat's reference to the local sense that free persons do not engage in labor is also interesting.  That has reference to all of the "cultural" issues that I have focused on in other entries in this blog.
See:  http://carlscheider.blogspot.com/2011/01/culture-and-developing-nations.html.

I trust that this has given you an opportunity to reflect on some different ideas.  Any comments here below?