The Hardest Case - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 128

peace, rule of law, and adequate public investments in rural infrastructure and agri-
culture research. These goods are all critical to farm productivity growth, and in their
absence incomes in the countryside have remained low, ensuring that food security will
remain low as well. The problem expands numerically as the rural population continues
to expand.
Tracing Africa's Hunger Problems to
Low Farm Productivity
In sub-Saharan Africa, food production has struggled to keep pace with popula-
tion growth in part because the productivity of farming in Africa has been grow-
ing so slowly. When economists measure the growth of “total factor productivity”
in African agriculture (a ratio of the value of all outputs to all land, labor, and capital
inputs) they find that between 1970 and 1990 it increased—from a low level—at an
average annual rate of only .31 percent. Between 1991 and 2006 this rate of growth
was a bit higher, at .86 percent, but this was still far behind the productivity growth
rate for Latin American farming (2.44 percent) and for Asian farming (2.62 percent)
(Fuglie 2008).
With farm productivity growth lagging, food production in Africa has actually been
falling behind population growth for most of the past forty years. Between 1970 and
2000, food production per capita in Africa declined by 9 percent, even as it was increas-
ing in the developing world as a whole by 51 percent (FAO 2001). Maize is Africa's most
important food crop, yet between 1980 and 2006, per capita production of maize in
sub-Saharan Africa declined by 14 percent (FAO 2006).
Because most Africans are still farmers, these lags in crop production per capita
translate into little or no rural income growth, and hence into little or no increase in the
capacity to purchase food. Decades of lagging farm productivity have resulted in a dou-
bling of the number of Africans in deep poverty (those living on less than $1 per day), up
from 150 million in 1980 to approximately 300 million in 2013. Low-productivity farm-
ers fill the ranks of Africa's food insecure. A majority of Africa's farmers are women, and
it is among pregnant and nursing women and their preschool children that calorie and
micronutrient deficits are most acute.
Some analysts have tried to deny lagging food production is the source of Africa's
persistent poverty and hunger, arguing instead that Africa's poverty problems stem
from social inequality (Rosset 2000). This can be a powerful explanation for hunger in
South Asia, and especially in Latin America, but not in Africa, where most rural dwellers
have adequate access to land where social stratification is not so prominent. In Africa,
where roughly 60 percent of all citizens are still farmers, poverty and hunger problems
trace directly to the low productivity of labor in the growing of crops and the herding of
livestock.