Washington — The World Bank report says that Africa's farmers can potentially grow enough food to feed the continent and avert future food crises if countries remove cross-border restrictions on the food trade within the region.
According to the report Africa Can Help Feed Africa: Removing barriers to regional trade in food staples, Africa has enough fertile farm land, water, and favorable climates to feed itself, yet it is forced to import ever-larger amounts of food from outside the region to keep up with rising demands from families across the continent.
The rising cost of importing food, however, has focused sharp attention on the effectiveness of current agricultural policies across the continent.
Africa's rapid urbanization increases the need for the continent to feed itself.
As drought, poor market conditions, and lack of access to capital, seeds and fertilizer, force more Africans to leave their small farms and move into cities in search of work, countries compensate for this loss in small-scale production and increase in urban populations by importing larger shipments of staple foods from outside the continent.
The cost is huge - well above $20 billion per year - and this figure is projected to double by 2020.
Rising demand
Estimates show that 860 million people live in sub-Saharan Africa, and the population is rapidly growing. Africa's demand for food staples is expected to double by 2020, but African farmers have not been able to increase productivity to satisfy rising demands.
Paul Brenton, head of the World Bank's Africa Trade practice and principal author of the report, says that if Africa is really going to provide poor people with better access to food, and help poor farmers earn higher prices for their food crops, opening up cross-border trade across the region is essential.
"Things like export and import bans, variable import tariffs and quotas, restrictive rules of origin and price controls, prevent consumers in one area from benefiting from staple foods and other agricultural resources in nearby areas," emphasizes Brenton.
Helping small famers
Small-holder farmers who sell surplus harvest typically receive less than 20 percent of the market price of their products. The rest is eaten up by transaction costs which in turn reduce incentives to farmers to grow more food for market.
This predicament undermines private sector confidence to invest in food staples, shifting the focus more towards cash crop production, with the result that locally-grown food ends up being significantly more expensive than foreign imports.
As a result, governments and policymakers are grappling with how unstable food prices affect their economic and social well-being, and searching for answers to improve the situation. More than 70 percent of Africans live in the country side and derive their livelihood directly from agriculture.
Trade and logistics
Food staples are generally transported in bulk by trucks, and the cost of moving goods by road in Sub-Saharan Africa is high. Transit times are uncertain and delays exceptionally long.
There are still key gaps in infrastructure and logistics between African countries. One of the more obvious and stubbornly persistent problems is road blocks, which not only cause delays but make trucks carrying food staples an easy target for bribes.
Then there is the problem of standards and their enforcement at the border because standards often differ from country to country.
"Countries with more open border policies for food staples have seen dramatic benefits through higher production, exports and trade," according to Brenton.
Export and import, tariffs and quotas, rules of origin, price controls, need to be harmonized across the continent and focus needs to be placed on improving the infrastructure.
Example of success
Mozambique for example has consistently, freely, allowed both imports and exports of maize. Traders in Northern Mozambique routinely sell their grain to Malawi and Eastern Zambia, which enables the resulting deficits in Mozambique's southern cities to be met by imports from South Africa, which has allowed trade to stabilize prices in the capital Maputo compared to other capital cities in the region.
Linking the rural areas with surplus food to the urban consumers in nearby areas requires a well-functioning regional market. Trade policy for food staples in Africa needs to be openly defined with clear objectives relating to agricultural policy.
What next?
Everyone - from high level authorities, officials working at the border, farmers, cross border traders, ordinary people and even the international community - has a role to play in improving trade in Africa.
Africa should not have to depend on foreign imports of food to feed its families. As this new report shows, Africa can feed itself.
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The world bank is the biggest supporter of "land grabs" in Africa yet they keep putting out these press releases and articles talking about how Africans can "feed themselves" yet the only thing they have done over the last 5 years is tell African countries they need to give more land over to foreigners for export crops.
That is the reason why Africans cant feed themselves, because the foreigners are taking the best land and using it to export crops. Meanwhile Africans are left to feed themselves from food grown on tiny plots by "smallholder" farmers who have little to no wealth primarily because they don't own the land they are farming on. But of course the world bank crowd will try and convince you that these "smallholders" who don't have enough land to feed their own village, yet alone a country are going to be the "future" of African agriculture. If that is the case, then why on earth aren't other first world countries practicing this type of agriculture? Because it doesn't make any sense in the modern industrialized world. It is simply a recipe for failure that they push because it allows them to keep coming back year after year proposing solutions and meddling in Africa's internal affairs, purely for the benefit of foreigners and multinational agrobusinesses not the Africans. Smallholder farmers are the weakest link in the food chain and easily manipulated by foreign schemes which turn them into sharecropping slaves who depend on income received in return for growing crops and using seeds provided to them by these foreign operations. Such operations are also not about "feeding Africans" either. But they allow the foreigners to put out a bunch of happy sounding PR to make it look like they are trying to make a difference.
With all the big press releases and announcements of the world bank and FAO over the last 5-10 years about improving African agriculture why haven't we seen any results? Because these are simply PR scams not real solutions. Case in point, the African Green Revolution forum recently held. That whole forum is set up by and dominated by foreign agrobusinesses and their interests. Yet they put out PR to make it seem like it is about Africans having food to eat when it is not. These people shouldn't be allowed to put on these forums and symposiums which are blantantly using African people as "poster children" in a dishonest scheme for getting more profits for these foreigners as opposed to actually helping Africans.
Until you stop these wolves in sheeps clothing the agricultural situation will never ever change because these people don't want to change it to benefit Africans.
Another question to ask is if this is such a great solution propagated by the World Bank, then why haven't African government's tried this many years ago, even before the 5-10 year mark? It sounds like it would have been a no-brainer to import food from neighbors if these nations had to rather than import food from abroad. Could this be partially due to World Bank and IMF conditionalities that have nations 'liberalize' their markets before they are ready to, or in other words, let foreign imports flood domestic markets and drown out domestic production and perhaps imports from neighbors? They do these things and then come out and say that Africa can feed itself. Surely, the continent can, but the World Bank, at least indirectly, frustrated Africa's bid to do so. One must wonder what their agenda is now. As willd1mind referred to, it may very well be cover while they support forced land grabs, which we are hearing about all the time on this website.
I should have added at the end that the name of the game is control and recolonization of Africa in a new form, which political scientist would call neo-colonialism. Let us not think that this threat has subsided since Africa's nations gained independence from their European masters in the 1960's and 1970's.
Africa has always been able to feed itself. It just refuses to do so, because Africans would rather starve to death than take any responsibility for their own actions, as posters ookorafor and willd1mind demonstrate. The IMF doesn't force African farmers to grow cash crops, corrupt African leaders do that because they would gleefully butcher a million farmers just to buy ten gold rings instead of having to settle for just nine. The IMF isn't even trying to recolonize Africa, because they would lose trillions in the eventual liberation just like the Boers did. But Africans would rather blame witchcraft and make-believe conspiracies to explain why burning down farms makes them stop growing food, than stop setting their neighbors' farms on fire for the tiniest insult or disagreement.
Bottom line, most of the stories you see about Agriculture on this site are funded in one way or another by the same folks who colonized Africa. It is all part of a massive campaign to make the colonizers look good and Africans look dumb and stupid. You know this because not once do any of these stories talk about the fact that much of the agriculture in Africa is dominated by foreign run plantations and agrobusiness whose roots go back to the colonial era. Look at all the tea plantations in East Africa. Look at the Cocoa and Sugar plantations in West Africa. Look at the rubber and palm oil plantations in Central Africa. And look at all the plantations in South Africa. If there was such a problem with the environment then how on earth could there be so many plantations making billions of dollars for foreigners all over Africa? The problem isn't the environment, the problem is that these foreigners aren't in business to feed Africans and because they don't want people to know that they still have plantations that work Africans from sun up to sun down as minimum wage slaves, they give money to these PR agencies and created institutions like the World Bank and UN to hide their activities and put a positive spin on it.
There is absolutely no "natural" reason for starvation in Africa. It has everything to do with the history of colonization and plantations. But again, the people who run the plantations and have all the money have a vested interest in controlling the news and the stories about Africa in order to portray them in a positive light and in order to allow them to continue to meddle in Africa's affairs on all levels through NGOs and other globalist institutions. All of these programs that you hear about run by whites and foreigners in Africa are simply fronts funded by the same folks exploiting Africa. They are simply con games and gimmicks designed to make Africans and everybody else feel good about Africans being exploited.
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