The Hardest Case - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 129

If you pay a visit to a rural community of smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan
Africa, most of the farmers you meet will be women. In fact, three-quarters of all
labor in African farming is performed by women. The men, after completing some
heavy seasonal tasks such as plowing or repairing terraces, will often leave in search
of work in urban areas, because labor on the farm pays such little reward. Most adult
women in rural Africa are unable to read or write in any language. They are always
busy, since the time they spend laboring to grow crops such as yams, maize, beans,
sorghum, millet, or cassava must be fit in between numerous other tasks, such as
preparing meals, caring for children, fetching water, and gathering fuel wood for the
cooking fire. Typically, these farmers will have no improved seeds, no irrigation, no
electrical power, and no access to chemical fertilizers or a veterinarian for the animals.
These farmers are hardworking and highly resourceful, yet the returns on their labor
are minimal given what little they have to work with. They are working within what
economists call a “poverty trap.” In the memorable phrase of T. W. Schultz, they are
“efficient but poor” (Schultz 1964).
Innovations in agricultural science in the form of high-yielding “Green Revolution”
seed varieties helped bring hundreds of millions of destitute farmers out of compa-
rable poverty in Asia in the 1970s and 1980s, but these technologies had only limited
application in Africa, because they required a substantial use of chemical fertilizers
and irrigation, assets either not available or not affordable for most African small-
holders. So as Asian farming surged forward near the end of the last century, African
farming remained stuck behind. Today, more than four-fifths of all land in develop-
ing Asia is planted with scientifically improved crop varieties, compared to less than
one third for Africa. Only 4 percent of cultivated land in sub-Saharan Africa is cur-
rently protected with irrigation, compared to roughly 40 percent in South and East
Asia. In India, average fertilizer use is roughly 100 kilograms per hectare, compared
to less than 10 kilograms per hectare in Africa (Paarlberg 2008). These deficits explain
why cereal yields in Africa are less than one-third as high as in developing Asia, and
why income from farming is so low. In Kenya, where farming is doing better than in
most other countries on the continent, the average yearly income of a small farming
household is just $553. In Zambia, it is just $122. In Mozambique, it is only $59 (Jayne,
Mather, and Mghenyi 2005).
The inability of African farmers to access more productive technology has led them to
use less sustainable methods to boost production in pace with population growth. One
example is the shortening of fallow time, a practice that mines soil nutrients and can
eventually lead to an actual decline in crop yield per hectare. The shortening of fallows
is now removing nitrogen from the soil at an average annual rate of 22-26 kilograms per
hectare in Africa, too much to be offset by current rates of fertilizer application, which
average only 9 kilograms per hectare. The result of this “soil mining” is a deficit in soil
nutrients that causes annual crop losses estimated at between $1 billion and $3 billion.
And this is not the end of the problem. As cultivated soils become exhausted, farm-
ers extend cropping onto new lands, cutting more trees and destroying more wildlife
habitat.