Agriculture won't step up production if farmers are afraid of their lives and their livelihood. There is an urgent in Nigeria need to identify the main causes of insecurity, address the issues, and ensure that strong systems are out in place to avoid future occurrence, says Babatunde in this week's letter to his farmers.
Achieving food security is the desire of all nations, and is hinged on continuous planning in improving the food system. This is one of the sustainable development goals: that by 2030, all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life (United Nations’ Committee on World Food Security).
Agriculture cannot work for us all in a hostile environment where farmers are afraid of their lives and their livelihood. There is an urgent need to identify the main causes of insecurity, address the issues, and ensure that strong systems are out in place to avoid future occurrence. Also, relevant agricultural stakeholders should collaborate with the government in providing guidance for palliative distribution for farmers, especially smallholder farmers, to reduce the impact of COVID-19. This will serve as a short term measure and also develop a long term policy to help improve agricultural productivity towards achieving food security.
There is no better day than now to rise to the needs of the farmers in creating an enabling environment to thrive for sustainable growth.
Yours-in-Service
Babatunde Olarewaju
In his weekly column Letter to my Farmers, Babatunde Olarewajo writes about personal experiences and insights on farming, curated through working with smallholder farmers in Africa. Last week's letter is available here.
Agriculture cannot work for us all in a hostile environment where farmers are afraid of their lives and their livelihoodIn Nigeria, to achieve this goal by 2030 is quite impossible, as factors such as insecurity, high food inflation, weak food distribution system and COVID-19 lockdowns have impacted the food system. For instance, insecurity is a big threat to production as many farmers have abandoned their farmlands to avoid being kidnapped or killed by terrorists in some farming communities. This has affected the volume of food available, and has largely contributed to food inflation (which stood at 20.57% in January 2021).
Agriculture cannot work for us all in a hostile environment where farmers are afraid of their lives and their livelihood. There is an urgent need to identify the main causes of insecurity, address the issues, and ensure that strong systems are out in place to avoid future occurrence. Also, relevant agricultural stakeholders should collaborate with the government in providing guidance for palliative distribution for farmers, especially smallholder farmers, to reduce the impact of COVID-19. This will serve as a short term measure and also develop a long term policy to help improve agricultural productivity towards achieving food security.
There is no better day than now to rise to the needs of the farmers in creating an enabling environment to thrive for sustainable growth.
Yours-in-Service
Babatunde Olarewaju
In his weekly column Letter to my Farmers, Babatunde Olarewajo writes about personal experiences and insights on farming, curated through working with smallholder farmers in Africa. Last week's letter is available here.
SDG #2; it is my own opinion that key to the achievement of sdg #2 or zero hunger in Africa is offering world class training to our young people (60% of the population) on how to raise fish and do agriculture commercially with small loans at the end. Do you know that Africa has 60% of the world's unused arable lands?
Africa Union 2019 budget was $681.5 million of which the larger share or 40% was for peacekeeping (i.e., $273.3 million). Member States only contribute 46% to the overall budget, the rest are donors including EU, China, World bank and IMF!
The 2018 EU budget was €160.1 billion! That same year, common agricultural policy (CAP) expenditures as a % of this budget was 37.2% almost 40%! It was 73% in 1985!
It is reported that 75% of CAP expenditures are direct payments to farmers (per surface or area farmed). For example, in 2016, the EU28 support to its wine industry was estimated at €0.15 per liter of wine produced
To sum up, for 40 years, Europe #1 priority in terms of spending has been agriculture! Africa #1 priority in terms of spending is peacekeeping! Sad. Even if AU allocated 40% of its 2019 budget to agriculture it still cannot compete with EU27 which invested X300 that amount in 2018!
Africa foods market is $1trillion
However, through the Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Program (CAADP), part of Agenda 2063, Africa economies should invest 10% of the State budget in agriculture! Few does that.
Africa union should allocate between 40-70 of its budget to agriculture as direct payments to african farmers.
Babatunde Olarewaju , thank you for this weeks letter; a storyline is developing.
And apparently the stakes are high, Hugue Nkoutchou referring, advocating to an African Common Agricultural Policy.
The similarities are there, the European CAP has been created after WWII with a vision a selfsupporting Europe. The discussion started by Babatunde is in a similar way looking forward an increasing and urbanizing African populating who needs to be feed.
The Dutch would look for the new Mansholt in this discussion, but maybe this development has to be more than the vision of one person.
At least we (as Dutch/European) have profited from our CAP and probably are still also paying our dues...
Dick Veerman , based on our European experience: A CAP for Africa, a wise thing do or the basis for big African Farmers Protest in 2063...?
With respect to stakeholders to smallholder and agriculture sector development engaging in ensuring that insecurity issues among other challenges, are handled, I agree with you Babatunde. But the question still remains, what specific ways can this narrative be quelled. Coen's suggestions could be relevant in this since smallholder farmers in the Netherlands have recorded success stories after coming up with a broad-based intervention to ameliorate such a debilitating situation. Kudos to Hugue for his brilliant submissions, as well
#3 Ikechi Agbugba , it were not only smallholders in the Netherlands, but it has affected agro-food stakeholders across the Union from the starting countries unto the current member states.
But even when in Britain after Brexit you’re still affected by it. And traveling back to Africa doesn’t help either, because Africa is o.a. facing import restrictions relating to the European CAP, or “dumping” of it’s access production e.g. meat from layer chickens.
So a simple answer in this subject is not going to be possible.
The credits for bringing this up, although go to #1 Hugue. So maybe for you as an economist; one of the fundamentals op the CAP is a collective public fundamental longterm investment into Agri-Food development.
Nowadays also not without discussion in Europe, but Hugue is proposing this for Afrika. What’s your opinion on this thought?
Thank you Hugue Nkoutchou for #1! You're launching a discussion a think tank in the Netherlands on African agriculture I regularly participate in, reflects on for over a year now.
First of all the think tank argues it's a no brainer: developing agriculture must have priority in Africa. Second, they think African markets should be better protected from imports in order to stimulate African production. Third, they think that cheap imports of food cater for Europe's need to export. EU farmers need to keep their production costs down in order to keep their incomes up. That results in overproduction and is, the think tank, says the reason EU countries required African countries to set low import barriers.
Recently Wouter v.d. Weijden and Niek Koning published a text in Dutch on the imports matter. I'll translate it automatically by Deepl and insert it below. Niek and Leo van Wissen (one of the foremost demographers in the Netherlands) are preparing another text that stems from the same think tank; it will be in English and be published here on Agrifoodnetworks.org. Niek is very critical of the EU's EPA's with regard to Africa.
Now, all of that doesn't mean the EU's CAP hasn't been successful. On the contrary, it has been highly successful as it assured European farmers incomes and made them invest.
At the same time, it is in a rather unhappy phase right now. Overproduction combined with ever higher ecological constraints threatens farmers' incomes (especially in northwestern Europe) while subsidies are being relabelled. From price guarantees in the 1970's, via income protection (1980's onwards) subsidies are being reduced and allocated to services in the public interest (2010 onwards). That's a threat to many farmers and that's why they are opposed to coupling the modern CAP with the European Commission's Green Deal. Coupling the two is really decoupling subsidies from price/income guarantees.
The EU is overproducing (as markets don't pay the prices farmers need), Africa is underproducing while having its borders wide open. As a consequence African prices should go up, but don't as long as imported foods feed the continent.
I guess Africa can learn many lessons from the history of European (and US!!) argricultural subsidies. According to Niek - he is extremely well informed on agricultural history and policies worldwide (I recommend his 2017 book on agricultural policies) - it is crucial not just to invest but to tax food imports at the same time, otherwise farmers still can't feel safe investing in their business. What Europeans (and Americans, Israeli's and Chinese ...) should export is technology and know-how to make Africa produce for itself and even help it export. Sell the rod, not the fish and help the fishermen to make international markets more inclusive and balanced.
Hugue, Batatunde and Ikechi, I'm curious te learn how you feel about that from your perspective and the actual situation in Africa/Nigeria right now with prices going up and a growing number of Africans who'll have to skip meals on a daily basis.
The text by Wouter & Niek (translated automatically by Deepl), which was conceived from a concern with growing poverty that can countered by stepping up the economy and doing so by creating food security and making food available and affordable:
Rapid population growth in Africa is unsustainable. Reducing this growth requires not only population policy, but also investment in agriculture and rural areas. The European Union can help, for example by adapting trade treaties.
Although population growth is decreasing worldwide, it remains far too high in sub-Saharan Africa. The United Nations expects the population there to double over the next 30 years to over 2 billion. The consequences are primarily felt in Africa itself: more poverty, more depletion of natural resources, more social, political and ethnic tensions. Also, the high number of pregnancies leads to unnecessary maternal and child mortality.
In Europe, the population explosion in Africa leads to much discussion, often motivated by the fear of mass immigration. The solution is often sought in more medical care, information and contraceptives (so women do not have more children than they want), in more education for girls (so they marry later and more confidently) and in more rights for women. These measures - often advocated in the context of women's empowerment and sexual and reproductive health and rights - are indeed very important. In Africa itself, there is still resistance to them, although it is reversing somewhat.
Agriculture and rural poverty reduction
But much more is needed than just population policy measures. A real improvement in the situation demands economic growth per capita and a less unequal distribution of it. In almost every country in the world, an increase in prosperity is accompanied by a decrease in the number of children, mainly because girls then go to school longer, and because children then become less important as a means of providing for their parents. But if the increase in prosperity remains unevenly distributed, poverty remains high and the birth rate high.
How can prosperity be improved? We can get the surprising answer from the large Tracking Development study by Leiden University, which compared the economic development of Africa since 1960 with that of Southeast Asia. Indonesia, for example, was poorer than Nigeria at the time, but has experienced rapid per capita economic growth since 1967, Nigeria barely. The government succeeded by giving high priority to agriculture and rural poverty reduction. It set a goal for Indonesia to become self-sufficient in rice, stabilized rice prices, subsidized fertilizer and credit, and invested heavily in irrigation, roads, and electricity. Oil revenues and development funds were also used for this purpose. In addition, it invested in family planning. The success of this policy was unprecedented: rice production per hectare grew much faster than the population, the income per inhabitant grew steadily, poverty fell sharply and the country became a rice exporter in 1984. All this paved the way for successful industrialization. Young people moved en masse to the city, where jobs were created in the export sector.
Oil wealth distracted
Oil-rich Nigeria took a different path. It invested its oil revenues mainly in industrial development, but little in rural areas and agriculture, and even then only in large farms. As a result, food security remained low, poverty high and the country had to import more and more food. Without preparatory agricultural development, attempts to set up steel, pharma and petrochemical industries also failed. Labor costs were too high and labor discipline and skills too low. Little was done in the way of family planning. The birth rate remained high and the country was stuck in an economic-demographic trap: too little growth in per capita income and too high a percentage of children's mouths that working people had to feed.
More per hectare
According to the World Bank, investments in agriculture contribute more than 2x as much to poverty reduction as investments in other sectors. It should not be a question of expanding the area of agricultural land, but of increasing production per hectare. African agricultural soils fortunately still have considerable growth potential. This requires improving soil fertility with organic matter and fertilizer. And also better seeds, roads, agricultural research, land rights, storage facilities and other amenities. With higher yields, food prices can fall and with them wages (which are now no lower than in Vietnam!), which offers better opportunities for industrial development and modern service sectors.
What can we contribute to that from the EU? Not much, but some. Specifically: more support for 1) education, 2) agricultural development, 3) rural road building and 4) family planning. And further: in the free trade agreements that the EU has more or less imposed on African countries, give these countries more room to protect their farmers with levies against cheap food imports. The EU stopped that, but has done it itself for decades. A wide range of benefits are in sight: higher food production per hectare and per capita, less poverty and more food security, a stronger basis for industrialization, more employment, a lower birth rate, less forced emigration, and less pressure on rainforests, biodiversity and climate. The upcoming Dutch coalition agreement can contribute to this.