Despite its much smaller population, Africa is overtaking Asia as home of the most poor people in the world. With trade liberalization and the retreat of the state accelerated by structural adjustment, Africa was transformed from net food exporter to net food importer, becoming more food insecure. Nevertheless, African family farmers still produce four fifths of the food consumed on the continent.
In 'Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers and the Battle for the Future of Food,' Timothy A. Wise argues that many millions of dollars spent on fertilizers and seed subsidies in Africa – and favoured by African politicians seeking rural votes – have not delivered their promised outcomes. For Wise, the Green Revolution has become a “high-input treadmill” on which farmers and their governments are “running without getting anywhere”.
Without publicly available evaluations of its effectiveness by either AGRA or donors, Wise estimated cereal output rose by only 33 per cent in the 13 AGRA countries between 2006 and 2014. As land planted with cereals has increased, actual land productivity gains were more modest.
Wise shows how transnational giants gain from farm input subsidy programmes. Without the subsidies, increased output rarely generated enough additional income to justify farmer purchases and application of commercial fertilizers and other inputs.
Subsidies have induced farmers to plant AGRA promoted crops, especially maize. After structural adjustment killed research in Africa in the late 20th century, promoting maize, well researched elsewhere, was tempting, but often meant abandoning nutritious, drought-tolerant traditional crops.
But even where yields and net incomes rose, increases often diminished once soils were depleted. Julius Sigei, a newspaper agriculture editor, notes that Kenyan farmers produce only a fifth of US maize yields on comparable land and a third of Chinese levels as soils in Kenya are too poor to sustain higher yields while increased fertilizer application raises soil acidity.
Although water was crucial for the Asian green revolution and is necessary for effective fertilizer application in Africa – long subject to accelerating desertification, and increasingly to uncertain rainfall and droughts, due to global warming – AGRA efforts to improve water supplies have been modest.
Food and agriculture expert, MaterneMaetz cautions, “it is risky to use fertiliser if you don’t have cash and are not sure about rain”. Hence, in the African context, he favours ‘associating’ leguminous with other crops and developing neglected,drought-resistant, traditional food crops.
Inspired by the neoliberal mantra of ‘vampire states’ exploiting farmers, and expecting markets to work better without governments, AGRA has promoted public-private partnerships, and may even have enabled land grabbing by the private sector.
Experienced Malawian agricultural analyst Mafa Chipeta observes “what little increased yield comes from subsidised inputs is often lost as predatory buyers beat down weak and balkanised farmers on produce price. Unless governments intervene to stabilise markets, the subsidy programmes will not help farmers.”
In some countries, transnationals have influenced national policies and laws in their favour, e.g., by seeking to outlaw farmers exchanging and selling seeds for planting. Such seed policies leave farmers with little choice but to purchase high-cost seeds and agrochemicals every season.
Thus, agribusiness transnationals, such as Monsanto and Yara, have not only benefited from subsidies from governments, official aid and philanthropies, but also abused their monopolistic perches in developing country markets, at the expense of farmers, consumers and governments.
Although the input support programme and Food Reserve Agency in Zambia took 98 per cent of the government budget for poverty reduction, according to Wise, “78 per cent of family farmers are … in extreme poverty, living below $1.25 a day”. Clearly, “farmers and consumers weren’t the main beneficiaries of Zambia’s ‘poverty reduction’ programmes in agriculture”.The promised African green revolution has failed, while inducing subsidy dependence, and reducing crop, food and dietary diversity, but little for agricultural climate resilience.
http://www.ipsnews.net/2020/04/green-counter-revolution-africa/
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