Technology for the small-scale African farmer: Towards operational strategies

Nothing counts for more in the development of nations than sound and consistent  economic policy and efficient economic management.  How sound policies are defined varies among countries and over time.  

And efficiency in the management of national resources does not mean only the pursuit of increased output.  Increased output at what cost?  But, in the end, poor countries and poor people need economic growth; without it poverty endures and human potential continues to be wasted.  Wawa Jaiteh, 2006.    

Improved policy making and better economic management  - and self-reliance in these matters - are the central determinants for productivity growth and sustainable development.  For a long time, even to a reduced extend today, this has meant educating and training people in institutions of higher learning and on-the-job-training, building of polytechnics and, the intervention of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), community based organizations (CBOs) and filling gaps in local skills through capacity building.   

If present population growth rates continue, there will be twice as many Africans alive in 25 years time as there are today.  With the exception of few countries, most of the good arable land in the region is already in use.  Therefore, the only possible way to feed this huge population is by intensification of agricultural production.  

Either more crops per year must be grown, or the yield of existing crops must be increased.  Although sporadic  gains in food production have been registered in the continent in the last two decades, these will not be enough to avert a very serious situation by the end of the millennium development goal (MDG) target period, if present policies are continued.  

Various agencies estimated that unless decisive action is taken, the number of seriously undernorished people in Africa may rise to many, many millions.  The potential to avert this situation exists in abundance in the continent.  Production can be increased many times over, but only when sound and consistent economic policies and efficient economic management are in place.  

The gains from these can only be consistently reinforced and sustained when water supply and control are improved, and when fertilizer, other plant growth regulators, suitable time and labour saving equipments and capable and  committed service providers/front line agents are made available to the average farmer.  

Both governments and farmers have to invest more money and scheduled time into farming, for this to be made possible.  Governments must provide large infrastructure objects such as dams, irrigation and drainage structures, and the farmers must use more inputs such as fertilizer and animal traction.

However, at the moment, many countries in the region are not helping this to happen, since they are making it virtually impossible for the average farmer to buy the necessary inputs.             

Affordable Technology

Probably no two words in the English language have been so badly misused in the last decades as “Appropriate Technology’.  This has steadily come to mean technology which is simple and in many cases third-rate.  

I believe that the time has come for a different approach.  Let us see what the farmer can afford, estimate whether this is adequate for requirements and, if not, what is required to provide him with the necessary technology.  

The technology in use in the continent today varies enormously, ranging from countries such as Zimbabwe and South Africa where the settler commercialized agriculture is almost completely mechanized, to countries where subsistence agriculture is predominant and the technology in use is still primitive.  

When looking at relative costs of agricultural inputs in different parts of the continent, one can translate them all into one currency such as U.S. $ and compare them.  However this does not give an accurate picture of what the farmer can afford, since the farmers currency is the crop he grows and which he must sell to obtain the money to make such purchases.  

Rice, other upland cereals, groundnuts and root crops are by far the most important crops of the continent, indeed are the most important food crops in the continent and the world at large.  It is useful, therefore, to cost inputs not in dollars, dallasy, CFA, cedi, kwacha, naira, rand or Zimbabwean dollar, but in how many metric tons of a particular crop that a farmer must sell to buy these inputs.  

Using figures from other countries, it shows how many metric tons of rice a farmer must sell in different countries in order to be able to buy an animal traction outfit and/or a small power tiller.  A huge variation is apparent from country to country.  

In practical terms, this means that it is much more difficult for a subsistence African farmer, who cannot produce enough to feed himself, to be able to afford higher level inputs to improve his lot by producing a marketable surplus, and be able to feed the nation/continent and invest in his farming operations.  The operation strategies and action plans are yet to be a continent wide phenomenon.    
          
One can take the implications one stage further.  Using production data across the continent, for an average farmer in the West African Sahel cultivating an average sized farm (far less than I hectare), with an average crop yield of 1 ton/hectare, how many complete crops (over a five year period), must be sold by him to purchase a 6 kW power tiller or land master?   

Granted that the power tiller or the land master could be sold at a give away price of D70,000.00 per unit.  Any subsistence farmer intending to buy this, must work conscientiously and work extremely hard, on a targets-based production approach, to produce enough and sell a minimum surplus of 5 tons of cereal at a price of D700.00 per 50 kg/bag.  

For the subsistence farmer without a time-bound supervised institutional support, this challenge is like attempting to fetch water in a basket.  In Sahel West Africa where power tillers and/or land masters are, in real terms to the farmer, unaffordable, then very few are privately owned.  However, which farmer, anywhere in the world, can find someone to mortgage him for between 7 and 10 years complete income?  
    
As stated in the introduction, there is a very strong requirement for increased food production in Africa over the next 25 years.  The production data around the continent showed three things:
a) that, the current yields are at a subsistence level;
b) that, there is a potential for increased and sustained food production in the continent; and
c) that, this potential will not be reached unless farmers are given a strong and consistently supervised institutional support, by way of participatory service provision, by way of credit, temporary input subsidy and participatory research and development system, to be able to intensify food production.

Indeed I would go so far as to ay that, in many cases, the major problem in agriculture in Africa today is not a technological one at all.  A great deal of suitable technology exists in the continent, and is being used in some countries by farmers with the means.  

Some tractors, power tillers, land masters, trans-planters, seeders, weeding equipments, fertilizer applicators, some of which have been developed in the continent.  The main problem is not the availability of technology, it is the provision of institutional support, which has been inconsistent and, has made it impossible for the average farmer in many countries to avail himself of the available technologies.  

This is evident in the inability of farmers to adopt the fertilizer application rates recommended by research.  If farmers cannot apply the fertilizer rates recommended by research, simply because they cannot afford it and, in most cases, cannot also provide their own seeds for planting, how does stand alone research, specialist services and extension services benefit the farmer and the continent at large?  Besides, how do the various nations justify budgetary expenditures on these disciplines?    

Conclusion

The crude facts of our dilemma are plain enough.  In spite of a century of increasingly successful achievements in agricultural science and technology, and the expenditure during the last fifty years of vast sum of money on agricultural research and development, the numbers, and perhaps even the proportion, of underfed people are relentlessly increasing.  

If the present rate of production continues, more than 70 percent of Africans will live in countries which cannot at present provide enough food for their inhabitants.  The great majority of the hungry are themselves resource-poor farmers, farm workers and their families, whose remedy would seem to lie in their own hands.   

Food production in Africa can be increased to meet the projected demand over the next 25 years.  However, attitudes to food production planning and implementation will have to change if this is to be made possible.  This is of course a highly charged political issue.  The urban and peri-urban dwellers in many countries may find it difficult to pay more for locally produced food.

The alternative, however, is that Africa may be seriously short of food in the near future.  The African farmer has shown that he is perfectly capable of increasing production up to the required levels for import substitution.  However, he must exploit the available comparative advantage and intensify cost effective production to be able to do this.  If his income is not large enough to afford the necessary inputs, then all his skill and determination will count for nothing.   
    
More than 80 years ago, when the Soviet Union started its transition from a predominantly rural society to the highly sophisticated society it was before the break-up of the Republic, industrial development was made a top priority and agriculture was made to finance industrial development.  

The result was that even at the time of the break-up, the Soviet Union was not able to adequately feed its own population, and had to import millions of tons of grain to meet its food requirement.  No African country would like to repeat this mistake.  The United States trade embargo on Cuba and the collapse of the Soviet Union turned Cuba into the most successful nation-scale experiment in alternative agriculture.  
      
The Cuban example is a model for employing locally adapted ecological insight and knowledge instead of standardized mechanization and agro-chemistry to feed the world.  The Cuban solution should be seen as simply not producing cheap food, but keeping small farms as we have in Africa - and therefore farmers - on the land, and even in the cities.  Cuba’s necessity-driven move towards agricultural self-sufficiency, provides a lesson for resources-poor African countries to learn from.

Part of the ‘operational strategies’ and ‘action plans’ of the recently repealed National Agricultural Development Agency (NADA) were designed along this line.  NADA’s methodologically designed ‘operational strategies’ and ‘action plans’ can be counted as one of the best in Africa.  So far all African countries have failed to reform their agriculture on the idea of ‘people centered production system’ as a dominant productivity growth factor.  
This is not because of lack of awareness but because of the gruesome fact that the direction entails a paradigm shift, involving radical changes in perception, attitudes, participation and institutions.  NADA was designed to turn Gambian agriculture around, as Cuba did, in the space of less than ten years.
     
If agricultural development planning and the provision of institutional support services are to help the small-scale African farmer, there must be selective emphasis on technology appropriate  for the typical small farm situation of scarce financial resources, poor access to information and farm advisory services, a scarcity of market outlets both for purchasing agricultural inputs and selling farm produce, and, of course, an ecologically cost-effective production system.