Africa Can Feed Itself?

There are lots of opportunities in agriculture to turn the African continent from food-deficit to food-surplus, but all sensible commentators agree that it is smallholder agriculture particularly that deserves attention if we are to achieve this goal. Questions are: Why are smallholders still net importers of food into their homesteads? And why does 30-40% of African agriculture go to waste every year?



Better seeds, fertilizers, market information, roads, post harvest storage, local value adding, more facilitative regulations, access to credit - all these are cited as important responses and necessary to the 'green revolution'. But one fact stands out starkly: only 4% (or 6% according to some) of African agriculture is irrigated. This means that 96% is rain fed.



Rain fed means feast-famine, glut-shortage production cycles which are out of whack with demand which is constant (and indeed rising). Increasing the productivity of rain fed agriculture will compound the existing problem of 30% - 40% waste, by placing additional strain/demand on already inadequate infrastructures. Nowhere else in the agriculture world does anyone depend so heavily on rain fed production.



Asian agriculture is 43% irrigated! So why can we not apply this solution here? Some say it is because Africa is water scarce ... but it absolutely is not. Others say that it’s because irrigation is so phenomenally expensive - big schemes, large dams, small dams, other storage systems like RWH tanks do indeed cost a lot. But irrigation need not be so expensive as we have shown:



At KickStart we have developed an irrigation technology that:



* Costs less than $400 per irrigated hectare (versus $5,000 - $10,000 for conventional irrigation schemes)



* Is as conservative of water (arguably even more conservative) than micro-drip - and is less expensive per hectare and much easier to set up and use



*Only uses surface or shallow groundwater (e.g. from hand-dug wells), which is renewed/recharged every rainy season



* Is already used by over 90,000 rural families - who have invested in the technology themselves without any assistance from anyone



The technology has transformed from subsistence to profitable commercial agriculture as a result; increased productivity and incomes by typically 300% to 1200%; provided new employment to over 120,000 people in rural areas; generated over $90 million per year into local economies and can be used by between 15-20 million families in SSA (i.e. ~10% of the SSA population) because they live in places where the pump can physically work and where it makes economic sense to do so



This technology is well designed and made. The human powered pressure irrigation pump for example, is widely distributed, marketed and sold in Kenya and Tanzania and Mali. The two models - one for $100 and another for $35 are guaranteed.



Smallholder farmers themselves make the decision to invest in them. No government or NGO funds are needed. The farmers themselves have gone on to reap the benefits and make the impacts that are cited above. Currently around 2,000 smallholder farmers per month buy one of these pumps.



Rural people can come out of poverty and into prosperity in as short a time as possible - using market based approaches. There is potential here for 10% of Africa's people to increase their productivity by a factor of 5 (or so) which would mean doubling current food production on the continent. And it would cost them and their governments only a very small fraction of the money that other, less effective, solutions would cost.



We need brain-fed but not rain fed agriculture to turn around the smallholder sector in Africa and transform rural people from 'liabilities' on national books of account, in permanent need of charity and relief welfare, to 'assets' who are using their skills and knowledge to add value and create wealth. It is not rocket science to do so. Just a question of looking critically at our agricultural systems and processes, and identifying where the tightest bottleneck is and removing this first, before going on to address secondary and tertiary bottlenecks.



Right now, I fear that many policies and interventions in this sector can be likened to the non-solution to traffic congestion we are witnessing along Nairobi's Mombasa road. By widening and smoothing this road, as they have done, a whole lot more cars can get a lot more quickly to the Nyayo stadium roundabout and get stuck there, so we now get a 2km long, 4 lane wide, jam instead of a 4 km long, 2 lane wide, jam. The net effect is zero.



By Nick Moon,

Co-Founder; Managing Director,

KickStart International