More access to credit, cutting red tape and improving storage and food processing all could help cut hunger crises in the region, the authors say
Food scarcity is a daily reality for much of sub-Saharan Africa, with yet another hunger crisis accelerating in West Africa’s Sahel region, just as drought-driven famine in Somalia eases.
So as extreme weather and other climate impacts strengthen in the region, about 150 of the world’s foremost thinkers on agricultural markets believe the time has come to take an innovative approach to the challenges complicating African food production and allocation.
Rather than focusing on global market influences in Africa, a new book published by the Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) zooms in on the everyday African marketplace.
Improving domestic agriculture markets could help avoid future food crises, especially in relatively infertile areas such as the African Sahel, a 1,000 km-wide band of land stretching the width of the continent immediately south of the Sahara.
“African farmers face many challenges in the field and pasture, but they will continue to lack the means and the incentive to boost crop and livestock yields if we continue to neglect our underdeveloped agriculture markets,” said Namanga Ngongi, the president of AGRA, in a press release.
In the Sahel, where farmers in most places get only one crop a year, cutting inefficiencies in transport, policy and credit could make a big difference in cutting hunger, said Abdou M. Konlambigue, a program officer with AGRA in West Africa.
“Because the Sahel is at risk, it is important to manage better the cropping season,” he said in an email interview.
UNLOCKING CREDIT
Programmes aimed at unlocking credit and reducing waste, for example, could have clear benefits. A system operated by the East African Grain Council and Kenya’s Maize Development Programme offers warehouses where farmers can store milk, grain and other crops, protecting them from spoilage and infestation. Farmers are also issued with a receipt for their deposits that they can use as collateral for obtaining loans.
In Africa, post-harvest losses often slash incomes and endanger food security. Research has shown that, on average, 25 to 50 percent of crops produced on African farms spoil in the fields. In East Africa $90 million of milk is lost each year, the book notes.
“We understand that credit is crucial for expanding production on African farms - as it is everywhere in the world - which is why AGRA is working with commercial banks to unlock millions of dollars in loans for smallholder farmers across Africa,” Anne Mbaabu, interim director of AGRA’s market access programme, noted in a press release.
Getting credit to small farmers is good business for both banks and farmers, the book suggests. Small-scale farmers given access to credit through a programme implemented by the Rockefeller Foundation in Uganda repaid 98 percent of the loans, it says.
That shows “the potential for increased lending to African farmers to be a win-win: farmers can get the money they need to boost harvests and lenders can cultivate a new pool of reliable borrowers,” the book notes.
Credit is key because it enables money to flow where it is needed most - into machinery for future plantings, for example, or to meet immediate cash requirements.
But greater access to credit is just one innovative agricultural solution to chronic food insecurity.
“When many people think of a food crisis in Africa, they picture crops withering in the field or dead or dying livestock, but rarely do they think about the market issues that are part of the problem as well,” said Namanga Ngongi, the president of AGRA, in a press release. To address the problem, AGRA has invested $30 million over the last four years to improve market opportunities in Africa.
One problem facing farmers in sub-Saharan Africa is “non-tariff barriers” – all the various laws, regulations and technical requirements that make it hard to move food from one country or region to another.
1,600 DOCUMENTS TO CROSS BORDERS
A recent report by the World Bank mentioned in the book recounts how in Zambia, the grocery store Shoprite spends about $20,000 per week securing import permits for food. Its trucks also carry up to 1,600 documents each year required for border requirements.
The bank estimates that “African countries are forfeiting billions of dollars per year in potential earnings by failing to address barriers”.
How do such barriers play out in food prices in Africa?
Recent research by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in collaboration with the Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa (ASARECA) found that, even when global food prices fell, African domestic food prices stayed high. In the fourth quarter of 2008, for instance, maize prices in Tanzania, Ethiopia, Zambia and Rwanda increased, while international prices dropped by 12 percent.
That suggests that local policies ARE hindering the flow of food around the region, the book says.
But there are opportunities for low-cost, high-impact changes, particularly in processing food to boost income and make it less perishable.
“There could be a major opportunity to boost income for African farmers by focusing on post-harvest processing of cassava,” the book says. Cassava, an extremely abundant but perishable root crop – and one highly resistant to climate change impacts – can have a much longer shelf life if turned into cassava flour or chips, for instance.
If farmers produce enough cassava and there is sufficient investment in transport infrastructure such as roads to bring the crop to market, cassava-processing factories could be very profitable, the book suggests.
An analysis of factories in Tanzania shows that “even facilities that were operating at around 50 percent capacity still turned a profit”.
Samuel Nota is an AlertNet Climate intern.
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