The agriculture-based countries have, by definition, a high share of total poverty in the rural sector and a high share of GDP growth originating in agriculture, the latter fundamentally because agriculture accounts for a large share of GDP. They include all the SS-Africa countries else than South Africa as a transforming country and some mineral-rich countries. The current role of agriculture in the development of these countries is not only for industrialization and for economic diversification away from agriculture . Instead, in the emerging paradigm, agriculture has multiple functions for the development of these countries in helping trigger growth at early stages, reduce poverty, increase food security, equalize gender status, reduce ruralurban income disparities, conserve resources, and provide environmental services. These multiple functions can be win-win, but more generally imply trade-offs and the consequent need for country-level priority setting in deciding how to effectively use agriculture for development.Agricultural growth in SS-Africa has been lagging relative to other regions of the world, especially in value added per capita. The latter has stopped declining since 1994 but remains sluggish in a comparative perspective . Area expansion has been the main source of output growth in cereal production in SS-Africa, by contrast to East and South Asia where rising yields were the main source of growth, and to Latin America where area expansion that was initially the main source of growth has also given way to rising yields . However, more than in most other parts of the world, rising land scarcity has become a stark reality for SS-Africa, compromising reliance on area expansion as a future source of growth,rolling benches and calling for emulation of the Latin American growth reversal . Yet, cereal yields have been overall stagnant while those in other regions have increased steadily , with some better performers such as South Africa, Côte d’Ivoire, and Zambia showing the way forward.
Accelerated growth thus requires, and will increasingly require, gains in land productivity that have to this date not materialized at an aggregate level, i.e., a “Green Revolution” for Africa.The food crisis with higher and more volatile international market prices is particularly threatening to SS-Africa where most countries are net food importers and where most of the population spends a high share of its income on food staples.The transmission from international to domestic prices has been highly uneven across countries and commodities, ranging from high transmission for rice in Senegal, Cameroon, and Ghana to low transmission in most other countries, in particular Madagascar, Guinea, Niger, and Malawi, with Uganda an intermediate case . Higher transmission for a particular commodity tends to be associated with greater import dependency and lower diversification in consumption, but the determinants of transmission are also highly idiosyncratic to countries depending on policy interventions,real exchange movements, transactions costs on markets, and the competitive structure in imports and processing. Frequently assumed full transmission has led to overblown predictions of impact. There is a price policy dilemma originating in the contrast between: more stable consumer prices for imported foods with eventual shocks as in the 2007-08 food crisis where there is high transmission as in Senegal, and prices disconnected from the international market for local cereals but with very high and visibly rising variability . The food situation for the world, and especially for SS-Africa, has changed drastically in the last five years. New pressures have emerged both on the demand side associated with continued rapid population growth, income effects, demand for bio-fuels, and on the supply side originating in fluctuating energy prices, climate change, water scarcity, soil depletion, and pandemic zoonotic diseases.
With rising international market prices signaling that supply is overall not keeping up with demand, and rising price volatility in a context of low international grain stocks, defensive trade policies, and speculative movements on commodity markets, much greater focus needs to be placed on the supply side of food, and in particular on achieving sustainable productivity gains and greater resilience to shocks. Dealing with international market price volatility and domestic yield instability raises anew the issue of food security as a major policy concern, when it had slipped off the policy agenda following structural adjustment and trade liberalization. This requires revising policy decisions regarding trade when international market prices for staple foods are more volatile, use of national food reserves, social safety nets for the vulnerable, supply response in agriculture for greater domestic self-sufficiency, and promotion of subsistence farming for “farm-financed social welfare” for those beyond the reach of social safety nets when exposed to shocks. Securing access to food thus requires focusing not only on chronic poverty but also on vulnerability to transitory poverty, with a need to adjust current social assistance programs that are better equipped to deal with the former than with the latter. Assessment of the welfare incidence of price changes needs careful identification of net sellers and net buyers among rural households, most often revealing the surprising fact that a large majority of landed households are in fact net buyers of food, and thus negatively affected by higher and more volatile prices.In spite of greater public concern with agriculture created by the food crisis, the resilience of rural poverty, and the contributions of agriculture to climate change, public budgets allocated to agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa still fall short of the 10% NEPAD guideline and of the 15% allocated to agriculture by successful Asian countries . Similarly, overseas development assistance allocated to agriculture in SS-Africa remains at historically low levels with only modest improvements after 2006 . There is also continued under-investment in agricultural research when comparing rates of return on investment to the opportunity cost of capital shows that there are high payoffs from such investments. The neglect of agriculture is also apparent in structural adjustment programs that have been highly detrimental to the institutional infrastructure of agriculture, followed by highly incomplete reconstruction of an alternative institutional structure. This includes market facilities, financial services, property rights, producer organizations, and governance for agriculture. An improved performance of agriculture clearly depends on greater attention to the institutions that serve the sector.
While reversing the neglect of agriculture requires increased public expenditures and overseas development assistance to agriculture, the financial crisis is likely to make commitments to agriculture by governments and international donors more difficult to be met. Greater emphasis must consequently be directed at improving the quality of public expenditures and of foreign assistance to agriculture, an area with considerable room for improvement. There are also encouraging new initiatives in progress including the CAADP policy guidelines, a more pro-active role for GFAR, increased budgets for the CGIAR, successful disbursements under the World Bank’s Global Food Crisis Response Program, and the Gates-Rockefeller Foundations’ Agra program. These initiatives need to be supported by high quality monitoring and impact evaluations for guidance and improvement, a support still largely incipient.One of the reasons for poor past performance of public investments in agriculture has been insufficient recognition of the difficulty in doing so. There should be no illusion that successfully using agriculture for development is a complex and multi-pronged enterprise that requires conceptualization, resources, capacity, coordination, political commitment, and time. Short run impacts on poverty are easier and faster to achieve via transfers , explaining the rising popularity of transfers over rising autonomous incomes as instruments, but they cannot be sufficient and adequate to solve the rural poverty problem. Rising autonomous incomes for the rural population has to be the main focus of sustainable poverty reduction strategies. Rainfed agriculture, that accounts for 88% of SS-Africa’s cultivated area, is characterized by a high degree of heterogeneity of conditions . Managing this heterogeneity requires decentralization and participation in order to design and implement local solutions. Heterogeneity also originates in highly varied social systems with a great diversity of institutional arrangements. Multiple constraints require a multi-sectoral approach. Key issues to be addressed include exhausted soils, insufficient infrastructure , low levels of education and health, a private sector limited by an uninviting investment climate, incipient producer organizations, and weak governance for agriculture. Small countries and large economies of scale in such investments as R&D and infrastructure invite regional cooperation. In using agriculture for development, the process through which growth in agriculture is obtained is as important as the outcome, in particular to achieve poverty reduction, gender equality, and environmental sustainability. Smallholder farming must for this reason be the dominant approach in spite of some advantages associated with large scale farming and the contracting out of land to international agribusiness that has recently been advocated by some development economists and pursued by some governments.We see these challenges being successfully addressed in large number of locations. The list of success stories is long and varied . It ranges from land certification schemes that provide security of access and support land rentals, to technological innovations in dealing with drought resistance and improved nutrition, ebb and flow bench more complete financial services that combine credit with savings and insurance, commodity exchanges to improve domestic market performance and create links with international commodity markets, extension systems that more effectively cater to clienteles in using IT capacities, community-driven development schemes with local participation to the delivery of public goods, and producer organizations able to not only serve their membership but acquire voice in the definition of public policy. These success stories need to be better identified, understood, and scaled up so they become reflected in aggregate statistics. Opportunities exist for profitable investments in agriculture, as can be seen in impressive gains achieved in the production of non-traditional exports.
And there is a clear renewal of interest in the private sector for the investment opportunities offered by agriculture. We cannot assume that we know the answers as to how to use agriculture for development in SS-Africa since a productivity revolution has to be idiosyncratic and locally adapted. Useful lessons can be derived from historical successes in other regions and from widespread local achievements in SS-Africa. There is a huge deficit of good social science scholarship applied to issues of agriculture for development in helping identify answers.The Special Feature on Diversified Farming Systems is motivated by a desire to understand how agriculture designed according to whole-systems, agroecological principles can contribute to creating a more sustainable, socially just, and secure global food system. “How to feed the world” is an increasingly urgent and looming concern voiced by many people, from local community groups to national and international governing bodies. By 2050, the world population is projected to rise to 9+ billion and food demands to double from current levels. At the same time, climate change, interacting with increasingly uneven access to declining oil, water, and phosphorus supplies, will greatly exacerbate the year-to-year unpredictability of agricultural production, potentially undermining the entire agricultural enterprise . Meanwhile, industrialized agricultural techniques are exacting a huge toll on surrounding environments, polluting waterways, creating dead zones in the oceans, destroying bio-diverse habitats, releasing toxins into food chains, endangering public health via disease outbreaks and pesticide exposures, and contributing to climate warming . Moreover, industrial agricultural methods are inherently unsustainable in mining soils and aquifers far more quickly than they can be replenished, and in their high use of fossil fuels . These numerous environmental and social externalities create a huge economic cost that industrialized food producers seldom pay. For instance, pesticide use alone causes up to $10 billion in damage to humans and ecosystems in the United States every year . Finally, although the agricultural sector currently produces more than enough calories to feed humanity, one billion people remain hungry and an additional one billion have micro-nutrient deficiencies . This paradoxical situation occurs because many people still lack access to sufficiently diverse and healthy food, or the means to produce it, which is primarily a problem of distribution rather than production . As further evidence of this paradox, global obesity rates have more than doubled since 1980 , reflecting an overproduction of food in industrialized countries that creates strong incentives for agrifood companies to absorb excess food production into processed foods and to market and distribute them to customers in supersized portions . This series of articles examines the proposition that diversified farming systems, with their focus on local production, local and agroecological knowledge, and whole systems approaches reduce negative environmental externalities and decrease social costs associated with industrialized monocultures, enhance the sustainability and resilience of agriculture, and contribute significantly to global food security and health.