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Abstract
Sub-Saharan Africa has urgent need to improve its food security and to increase productivity in food-crop agriculture. How this is to be achieved is a matter of intense controversy. Few issues are the subject of so many misconceptions, alarmist reports and myths as those concerning global food production. Fact-based discussion of agriculture's role in poverty reduction and for improved food security in Africa has in recent years tended to be replaced by ideas and perceptions which, although expressing strong engagement and an admirable concern, are often misleading and sometimes incorrect, particularly when it comes to evaluating the progressive innovations within agriculture which have been implemented during the last 40 years, notably in Asia. This is very much the case when it comes to the possibility of a similar development in Africa south of the Sahara. This paper discusses some of those myths which in recent years have confused the discussion about basic problems and the prerequisites for development, poverty reduction and food security in sub-Saharan Africa.
Il est urgent d'améliorer la sécurité alimentaire en Afrique subsaharienne et d'améliorer la productivité des cultures vivrières. La façon d'y parvenir est sujette à controverse. Peu de questions sont autant l'objet d'idées erronées, de rapports alarmants et de mythes comme c'est le cas de la production alimentaire. Le débat sur le rôle de l'agriculture dans la lutte contre la pauvreté et pour l'amélioration de la sécurité alimentaire, basée sur les faits, a tendance à être remplacé ces dernières années par des idées et perceptions qui, bien qu'exprimant des engagements très forts et une prévenance remarquable, sont trompeuses et parfois incorrectes. C'est particulièrement le cas quand on en vient à évaluer les innovations progressives dans l'agriculture, mises en œuvre au cours des 40 dernières années, notamment en Asie. C'est encore plus le cas en ce qui concerne l'Afrique au Sud du Sahara. Cet article aborde certains de ces mythes qui, dans les années récentes, ont semé la confusion dans le débat sur des questions fondamentales et les préalables au développement, la réduction de la pauvreté et la sécurité alimentaire en Afrique subsaharienne.
Notes
1. A factoid means that the suffix -oid (from the Greek word eidos, ‘appearance’) is added to the word ‘fact’. A factoid, thus, is something that looks like a fact but is not. An anthropoid (an ape), for example, may look more or less like a human being (anthropos) but, in fact, is something else.
2. Parallel to the issues raised in this paper, there is another discussion going on, namely who is to blame for the low productivity of African agriculture? Is it negligent governments or misguided policies from donors and international financial institutions (development aid, especially to agriculture, has been substantially reduced since the neo-liberal project was implemented some 20 years ago). Also this discussion tends to become rather polarised, ideologically motivated and to contain its own mythologies. This paper does not address these issues (but see Holmén, Citation2005). Instead it concentrates on the perceived risks of a modernisation of African food crop agriculture and the technologies that may or may not be used to accomplish this objective.
3. The Green Revolution is commonly – in a rather reductionist manner – seen as purely a ‘technology package’. In reality, the Green Revolution went far beyond technology. See Djurfeldt et al., (Citation2005) and myth eight below.
4. See, for example, Rosenzweig's (Citation2004; quoted from Timmer Citation2005) question whether Africa should do ‘any agriculture at all’ and the DfID's chief economist Adrian Wood's (Citation2002) vision of a ‘hollowed out’ Africa with most of the population on the coast producing manufactured goods for export.
5. I am not particularly fond of using concepts such as ‘modern’ or ‘traditional’ agriculture (there are many ways to be modern and traditional agricultures were not static and furthermore had a diversity of their own). However, due to their frequent use in the literature investigated, I use these concepts here.
6. The concept ‘industrial agriculture’ does not refer to large-scale and specialised factory-farming. Instead, it is here used to designate farming that depends at least partially on external supply of inputs (e.g. seeds, fertiliser, veterinary services) and on markets, infrastructure, etc. since consumption of its produce mainly takes place outside the farm itself.
7. There is, however, another way to – correctly – claim that (much) ‘modern’ or ‘Western-style’ agriculture is less productive than often declared. There are many ways to measure productivity (e.g. yield per area unit, yield per man-hour, income per area unit or per man-hour, economic return per invested monetary unit). If we compare total energy input (muscular work, natural soil nutrients, energy added through fertiliser, fuels used for land-preparation, harvesting, transports, etc.) and total energy output in the form of nutrients per ton of produce, the balance is negative. It has been estimated that, on average, ‘the US food system consumes ten times more energy than it produces in food energy’ (Pfeiffer, Citation2003). Measured this way, ‘Western-style’ agriculture appears to be very unproductive. This, of course, raises questions about the sustainability of petro-dependent agriculture (ibid.; Madeley, Citation2002). It should be remembered, though, that there are great differences in energy balance between large, mechanised factory farms and other types of ‘Western-style’ farm units. Also, and more relevant for this discussion, there is always a trade-off between area productivity and labour productivity in agriculture (Boserup, Citation1965) and, apparently, all agricultural systems suffer from an unavoidable negative energy balance. For example, shifting cultivation (swidden agriculture) consumes large amounts of energy when bush or forest is burned and the plot can only be farmed for a few years before nutrients are exhausted. Then it takes decades for vegetation to recover and for the soil to regain nutrients lost so that the land again can be farmed (energy is used in the process). Although it seems probable that much ‘modern’ agriculture is less energy-productive than pre-modern types of agriculture, the comparison is a tricky one and the difference might be less than assumed.
8. In those countries in Asia where the Green Revolution was successfully implemented, market development was one important ingredient in the reform (Djurfeldt et al., Citation2005) but markets were not ‘free’. Instead, they were in various ways guided or disciplined.
9. This is illustrated by the fact that ‘[t]he biggest 25 percent of EU subsidy recipients receive more than 60 percent of all subsidies. In the U.S. 60 percent of farmers get no support at all, while the biggest 7 percent account for 50 percent of government payments’ (Watkins and von Braun, Citation2003: 4).
10. While this claim is a gross exaggeration (see below), the protective capacity of pre-modern agricultural systems appears to be exaggerated as well. Haggblade (Citation2005: 148) reports that, in Uganda, ‘a virulent form of mosaic virus caused the disappearance of 500 local varieties’. This also indicates that the differences among local varieties may not be so great after all.
11. Lomborg (Citation1998) has shown how many figures about the extent and rate of loss of biodiversity lack empirical evidence and tend to be fabricated to suit political and/or funding purposes. Likewise, many warnings about loss of biodiversity in Africa have been based on methodological errors and/or misinterpretations (Helldén, Citation1991; Leach and Mearns, Citation1996).
12. A variant of the claim that ‘modernisation’ (often translated into ‘Westernisation’) causes loss of biological diversity, and which comes in slightly different shapes, is that ‘globalisation’ leads to world-wide loss of cultural diversity as it also threatens ‘indigenous people's’ identities, livelihood systems and ways of life. Therefore, agricultural commercialisation and scientification must be rejected due to its far-reaching cultural implications (see e.g. Egzhabier, Citation2002; see also myth nine).
13. Note that it is the residuals, which remain when edible parts of the plants are removed from the field, that are used for green manuring. Everything that is removed has to be compensated for by some other (external) supply, otherwise it will not be possible to maintain fertility in any cropping system. Hence, applying green manure only may slow down the process of soil-mining but it is not likely to do the trick.
14. It should be noted that in an investigation in soil fertility management practices in Africa, Scoones and Toulmin (Citation1999: 35) found that ‘[t]he best result (in terms of long-term sustained yield response) invariably were those treatments that combined inorganic and organic inputs’.
15. Much of these apprehensions actually concern another discussion – how deep into the innermost nooks and corners of life can we allow ourselves to venture, for example, because of pure curiosity? The next question is: ‘How and to what extent are we allowed to use the knowledge so obtained in order to change ‘the natural order of things’? Are we allowed to engage in stock and plant improvement? Are we allowed to move species from one continent to another? Such transfers have throughout history, some drawbacks notwithstanding, had a tremendous effect in raising the world's supportive capacity. Is it permitted to create ‘hybrids’ of plants and animals or should we accept nature as God-given or for other reasons ‘untouchable’? Or do we have to make a halt before, for example, cloning of animals and/or transgenic modification as when a plant receives a gene from a fish so that it can be grown in cold climates? Where do the limits have to be drawn? These are ethical and philosophical questions which have no obvious or ultimate answer. It will also be tremendously difficult to reach consensus on these issues. The problem is further complicated because man has always to some extent ‘created nature’ and nature in itself is neither stable nor normally in balance. This is so no matter whether we look at single species (Darwin) or entire eco-systems (Simmons, Citation1997). Random alterations and mutations (e.g. AIDS, bird flu and crop viruses) change the preconditions for our existence and we need to adapt. It can be argued that modern crop science's controlled and laboratory-based experiments offer a much higher degree of safety than do ‘traditional’ trial-and-error methods. So, where do we draw the line against ‘trespassing’? As mentioned, this discussion is beyond the scope of this paper.
16. See, for example, de Grassi's and Rosset's (Citation2003: 70) statement that ‘biotechnology is … clunky, expensive, elitist and potentially dangerous’.
17. Many critics of the Green Revolution would argue that these technologies are alternatives to, rather than part of, the Green Revolution. This is because they often have a rather narrow and rigid definition of the Green Revolution and do not want to acknowledge that it has developed since the 1960s.
18. It is symptomatic that, for example, Trainer's (Citation1994), Knox and Agnew's (Citation1998) and Seitz's (Citation2002) references about negative social consequences of the Green Revolution are all from the 1970s. That these expectations were not fulfilled and that much has happened since then, these authors prefer not to acknowledge.
19. According to Östberg (Citation1995), these peasants believe that once the eroded soil has reached the sea, it starts its journey back. ‘[T]he Burunge hold that rain emerges from waves in the sea, and since waves carry soil particles, these are carried up into the rain clouds and brought inland’ (p.94). But land, according to the Burunge, is also ‘coming up’ from below, thus adding new soil to where old soil has been lost. The evidence was that skeletons of people buried at a depth of one and a half metres were after some years found at only a half metre's depth. This was not explained as a consequence of erosion and disappearing soil. To the contrary, these skeletons were believed to be ‘pushed upwards’ as new soil approached the earth's surface from below (p.96ff).
20. Sometimes the abbreviation LEISA (Low External Input Sustainable Agriculture) is used. This is a self-flattering expression. While LEIA can be sustainable under low population densities, it remains to be seen whether it can be sustainable also under high population pressure. This is even more the case with a more extreme form of external input avoidance. Madeley (Citation2002: 43), for example, suggests ‘permaculture’ viz. an agricultural system that does not use any external inputs at all, not even manure or credit, as a solution to overcome poverty and food insecurity.