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Namibia: What Happened to the Joy of Harvesting?
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Namibia Economist (Windhoek)
OPINION
25 July 2008
Posted to the web 25 July 2008
Daniel Steimann
Windhoek
I usually, when confronted with a really stupid observation, play a mind game on my own. I assign awards to aspiring dummies in various categories, specifically designed for stooges. This week I came across a whole report that certainly qualifies for one of my short-listed candidates to take the gold in the "Unbelievably Dumb" event.
Earlier in the week I was sent the speech of some or other minister or something of one of the east African countries. It was this gentleman's considered opinion that eastern and southern Africa can be self-sufficient in food supply.
Wow! If ever there was a delightful insight, this must be it. Further, it was my learned compatriot's considered opinion that political leaders in eastern and southern Africa only need to sit together and devise a strategy, draw up a roadmap so to speak, and voila, in the long-term we can be self-sufficient in terms of our sustenance.
But let's look back from where we came.
I am not aware of a single African country that grows and produces enough food for its own population and that includes the mighty South Africa. And here I am not referring to the spread of culinary delights civilised nations are used to, I am talking about basic staple - pap and sous.
But there was a time when southern Africa produced so much food, it dumped various products by the tonne, or had it sent to Ethiopia when the UN was prepared to pay the transport. This was in the seventies.
Sadly, in the sixties, seventies and in some countries, well into the eighties, food was produced in such abundance, and food was so cheap that we cracked corny jokes about starving people in Ethiopia and West Africa. Granted, this was in extremely poor taste, but I think few of my fellow Africans would have believed me then, were I to say that come the new millennium there will come a point where a substantial portion of the continent's population will be faced almost constantly by deprivation and ultimately, by starvation.
I did a quick Internet search. It was a baffling exercise. Africa was the leading producer of so many types of food. We were seen, not only as our own breadbasket, but as fallback for certain items when these got scarce in other parts of the world. To give you an idea, we use to be leading producers of white and yellow maize, various animal feeds, various meats, various fruits especially citrus, deciduous and tropical, a wide range of vegetables, cassava, palm oil, etc. etc. And these are only the types we produced in real bulk. Of almost all the food imaginable, larger or smaller quantities were grown, harvested and marketed somewhere on the continent.
It is also an interesting exercise to compare population growth to food production. And perhaps here is where one starts to find a hint of what went wrong. Our population increased steadily at an average rate around 3.1%. In the sixties this was somewhat lower but the rate increased gradually over a 25 year period until eventually it reached 3.3% per annum some fifteen years ago. I don't know about West and North but after that, southern Africa's rate declined rather markedly to where we stand today at around 2.1% depending on the reliability of the censuses we are so fond of conducting every decade.
As a counterweight, food production in many countries south of the Sahara declined by anything between 60% and 90%, also over a 25-year period. In some countries, notably Angola and Mozambique, food production became so minimal; it basically ceased as a formal activity. For millions of people, growing food became a matter of subsistence.
This all points to only one thing. We do not need to go and find out how to produce food, in other words a road map is an exercise in futility. What we need to do is look as the political aspects that determine food security.
Killing the farmers in Zimbabwe did not increase production or relieve poverty. It created a chain of events with the unavoidable outcome the current famine for most of the population. And this is only the latest example and it cuts across the entire spectrum. We have a 30-plus year history of destroying our own productive means, of cutting stud animal's Achilles tendons just to destroy, of burning coffee plantations because it belongs to an African not belonging to my political party.
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So, dear sir, we don't need a strategy to become self-sufficient, we need political structures that recognise human rights, property rights and the Rule of Law. We need leadership that really cares for their voters and not just view them as exploitable. And we need to let the food growers get on with their job. Then we can feed ourselves within five years.
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