Rates of hunger in Africa are unacceptably high and getting worse. According to the UN State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2024 report, food insecurity is highest in Africa where undernourishment is presently 20,4%, or some 298,4 million Africans. This is more than double the global average. This figure has increased steadily since 2015, and at present food insecurity is worse in Central and West Africa.
Although climate change and conflict are contributing to this problem, the postcolonial approach to guide how Africa produces food and seeks to reduce malnutrition is flawed, believes William Moseley, a professor of Geography and
Director of Food, Agriculture and Society programme at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He also believes conventional approaches have failed and he is looking at an alternative approach to tackle Africa’s hunger crisis.
In his new book Decolonising African Agriculture: Food Security, Agroecology and the Need for Radical Transformation, he argues that to feed Africa better, decision-makers and donors should:
• focus less on commercial agriculture in addressing food insecurity;
• stop regarding agricultural development as commercialising farming and supporting other industries; and
• adopt an agroecological approach that uses indigenous farmer knowledge and uses natural ecological processes to grow more food.
Six dimensions of food security
According to Moseley, many of the core ideas around agriculture date back to the colonial era. Agronomy, or modern crop science, was developed in Europe to serve their colonial interests by producing crops to benefit their economies.
“Although this approach has been criticised, it still heavily influences agriculture today. The idea is that producing more food will solve food insecurity.”
Food security has six dimensions, including availability, access, stability, utilisation, sustainability and agency. “While increased food production might address one of these dimensions – food availability – it often fails to address the other five: access, stability, utilisation, sustainability and agency.”
According to him, food insecurity is not always about a lack of food, but also people’s inability to get the available food because of unstable prices, lack of cooking fuel, unsustainable agricultural practices – in other words, when farmers have limited control over how and what they farm. He cites Mali in West Africa as an example, where the focus was on cotton exports to bolster economic growth that cotton farmers could use new equipment and fertiliser to grow more food. Instead, it led to destruction of soil resources, more debt for farmers and increased child malnutrition.
The rice crisis
The Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) funded a rice commercialisation project in Burkina Faso in West Africa with the aim to bolster domestic production of new rice varieties.
Moseley believes agriculture development should not be regarded as just the first step towards industrialisation, with commercial agriculture, focusing on a single crop with expensive external inputs like fertiliser and pesticides, and linked to faroff markets, as the main target.
In the process, smaller farms focused on food production for own use and local markets, are regarded as less important.
“These farms may not add to national economic growth in an important way, but they help the poor achieve food security,” says Moseley.
For example, the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) funded a
rice commercialisation project in Burkina Faso in West Africa with the aim to bolster domestic production of new rice varieties that appealed to the tastes of Burkina’s urban consumers.
Women farmers were encouraged to leave traditional practices behind, buy inputs, work with improved seeds, and sell to bigger urban markets. It was argued that the women will make a profit and that they would gain better nutrition.
Substantial funding went into training and supporting Burkinabè seed scientists who developed these new seed varieties, lining up rice millers who would sell the improved rice seed to farmers in project villages, purchase the harvest, mill the seed, and then have it packaged and branded as Burkina Rice (Le Riz du Burkina) before it went to retail shops for sale.
The rice project did not have the desired outcome, as the women who engaged in the project did not buy nutritious food for their families with the extra income.
In the villages where other development organisations had levelled fields in traditional rice growing areas, the land was divided into quarter-hectare plots and small dikes were constructed for irrigation during the rainy season. About a third of the participants in the project were women.
According to Moseley’s research, the project did not improve the participating women’s food security and nutrition. In fact, the women did not consume more healthy food or a greater diversity of food. Some women consumed more dark leafy greens, but also fewer types of vegetables, fish, oils and fats; they also consumed more sweets.
Why didn’t it work? First, the agronomists and seed companies controlled the value chain and received the majority of the funding. The millers who collected the rice couldn’t pay immediately, which was challenging for the women who had debts to settle and school-related expenses to be met. In some cases, they sold their rice, even at a lower price, to another merchant just to get cash.
Second, as soon as the pilot project was working, private sector involved in the project tried to replicate the process in a number of communities as they scaled up the project. As a result, local knowledge and understanding of local specifics was lost. Also, men controlled the rice lands, so the women lost out.
Since the women were not paid immediately for their rice crops, they sold it to other merchants to obtain cash.
Agroecology an alternative
Agroecology and agroforestry, where farmers’s indigenous knowledge and the local agricultural conditions are taken into consideration, are better ways to farm sustainable than commercialised agriculture.
An old saying goes: If the game is clearly killing you, maybe it is time to change the rules. “Mounting evidence of failure suggests it is time to try a different way of addressing Africa’s food security woes,” says Moseley, advocating agroecology as a decolonial approach. This concept embraces farming with nature and covers formal research by
scientists and informal knowledge of farmers who experiment in their fields.
“Agroecologists study the interactions between different crops, crops and insects, and crops and the soil. This can reveal ways to produce more with fewer costly external inputs. It is a more sustainable and cheaper option,” explains Moseley.
Poly-cropping, which refers to planting different complementary crops in the same field, and agroforestry, which refers to mixing trees and crops, are diverse systems that tend to have fewer pest problems, while maintaining better soil fertility.
“No African country has fully embraced agroecology yet, but there are promising examples, many unplanned, that point to its potential.”
He once again cites Mali, where farmers briefly abandoned cotton production due to low prices. There was an upsurge in sorghum production, which saved the country from local unrest and food price protests that happened in many neighbouring countries at the time.
Women in Burkina Faso preferred to use rice instead of traditional products like sorghum because it cooked quicker and provided a filling carbohydrate.
The beginning of a revolution
The beginning of a revolution “Agroecology is a promising way forward in addressing Africa’s worsening food crisis,” states Moseley. According to him, the practice has the backing of many African civil society organisations. “African government leaders and donors have been slower to recognise the need for a different approach. We are beginning
to see signs of change, though. For example, Senegal’s former agriculture minister, Papa Abdoulaye Seck, trained as a traditional agronomist, now sees agroecology as a better way forward for his country. And the European Union has also begun funding a small number of experimental agroecology programmes.
“It is time for a major shift in perspective. We shall hopefully look back on this era as the turning point that ended intellectual colonisation in the agronomic sciences,” concludes Moseley.
Source references
Moseley, W.G. (2024) Africa’s worsening food crisis – it’s time for an agricultural revolution. The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/africas-worsening-food-crisis-itstime-for-an-agricultural-revolution-244323?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20December%208%202024%20-%203192732558&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20December%208%20
2024%20203192732558+CID_455636a418c3141c6a76f88db9032566&utm_source=campaign_monitor_africa&utm_term=Africas%20worsening%20food%20crisis%20%20its%20time%20for%20an%20agricultural%20revolution
Moseley, W.G., Burlingame, B., Termine, P. (2021) The case for a six dimensional food security framework. ScienceDirect: https://doi.org/10.1016/j. foodpol.2021.102164Ge
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306919221001445
Moseley, W.G. (2024) Decolonizing African Agriculture: Food Security, Agroecology and the Need for Radical Transformation. Agenda Publishing. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.20912854. https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.20912854
Planned and unplanned agricultural calamities in Burkina Faso: the new green revolution for Africa and proliferating herbicides Decolonizing African Agriculture: Food Security, Agroecology and the Need for Radical Transformation, 2024, pp. 63-78 (16 pages). https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.20912854.9
The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World. 2024. https://www.fao.org/publications/home/fao-flagship-publications/thestate-of-food-security-and-nutritionin-the-world/en
