by Jessica Ham
Voices From Africa: African Farmers and Environmentalists Speak Out Against a Green Revolution in Africa, a report from the Oakland Institute, offers an important counter perspective to the discourse on agriculture, food security, and poverty dominated by agricultural development programs backed by big money and big names. The report highlights how the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and similar programs such as the G8 Alliance for Food Insecurity and Nutrition operate within a paradigm that equates food insecurity with poor agricultural production and thus relies on market based solutions to human need. The solution to poor agricultural production is to increase yield by shifting from systems of mixed cropping to systems of mono-cropping and by integrating externally derived inputs in the form of improved seeds and synthetic fertilizers into farming practice. In this way, yields are set to rise, as are farmer incomes. These programs, therefore, see their business-oriented solutions as not only ending food insecurity, but poverty itself.
This paradigm, however, fails to acknowledge that food insecurity is not solely caused by the failure of food production. There are other causal factors for food insecurity, effects of the greater political economy that are often heightened under such programming. The NGO leaders, scientists, journalists and grassroots leaders who lend their perspectives in the essays in this report underscore how this dominant paradigm often perpetuates food insecurity by confining farmers to systems of practice that require costly inputs, constricting farmer ability to make management decisions and placing farmers in risky and often exploitative world market systems. As a result, the report details how farmers need access not to external knowledge, technology, or markets, but rather to the policy-making circles that influence the parameters for how and what they farm.
These voices parallel my own findings as I conduct dissertation research in the Upper West Region of Ghana. Here, farmers are already quite enmeshed in systems of farming reliant on costly inputs. The soil, as farmers here put it, is no longer sweet. Because of a decline in soil fertility, farmers are expanding the acreage on which they grow and rely more on hiring the costly services of tractors. They also become more dependent on buying expensive chemical fertilizers. However, despite increased investment in their farms, maize, the crop that is prioritized in this region and that is more fertilizer-reliant than other crops, is failing to yield well, if at all.
The ultimate cause for such crop failure is the increasingly variable rainfall patterns. In the Guinea Savanna belt of West Africa, the unimodal rainy season is changing from what was a fairly predictable pattern that guided farmers in knowing when to plant. Here, climate change is unveiling itself as a trickster figure of sorts. Rains will start at their expected time, and farmers take their cue to plant. Shortly after planting, the rains stop and a drought period ensues before the rains pick back up, thus ensuring that many crops will yield low or fail all together. This is a scenario where improved, drought-tolerant seeds could help. But improved seeds are not the only solution to livelihood distress.
Farmers and local authorities identify access to dry-season farming as key to improve their livelihoods in this variable climate. Through building dams or securing water-pumping machines, farmers who are able to grow vegetables during the dry season are making money that is important for carrying the household through severe food insecurity and that also enables saving money for the dry season’s farming input. Saving money enables households to forgo the process of begging for a loan from a friend or family member for hiring a tractor and buying fertilizer, and further ensures that any yield they do harvest is not spent on repaying that loan. What I’m seeing, an echo of the findings from this report, is that farmers want more options for their practice, not fewer. They want to retain control of their ability to adapt to the changing climate. Though farming is a frustrating endeavor, farmers want to continue to put up an effort to reap more from their agricultural initiatives. They want to continue farming, even if yields are low, because for many it’s the only profession they have access to. For all, it’s the only livelihood enabling them to be their own boss, someone who can make decisions that can dually manage the needs of the farm and the needs of the house. With an arsenal of seeds and the ability to experiment with planting different varieties of crops as well as cropping systems that reduce the risk of total crop failure, farmers are equipped to experiment with the variability of the agro-ecological conditions. Experimentation is the key to their adaptability. Adaptability is key to their long-term food security and livelihood improvement. When farmers have options, they are better equipped to react not only to ecological change, but also to mechanisms of the political economy, such as trade policy, price volatility, and agricultural subsidies that are the true instigators of global food insecurity.
Jessica Ham is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Georgia. She is currently conducting her dissertation research on the connections between food insecurity, mental health and livelihood stability in the Upper West region of Ghana.