African agriculture and the World Bank: Development or impoverishment?

Summary by Atakilte Beyene

The World Bank’s World Development Report 2008 examines agricultural development worldwide by categorising it into agriculture-based, transforming and urbanised. It compares African agriculture, characterised as agriculture-based, relative to performance in the other continents. It stresses that agriculture has a unique potential to alleviate poverty. This, according to the report, resides in the comparative advantage in agricultural exports in the agriculture-based worlds. To achieve this, large-scale commercial farming and vertical agricultural value chains structured by agri-business and supermarkets need to expand. For this to take place, the WDR 2008 advocates a continuation of World Bank rural policies of the last quarter century, namely further liberalisation of national markets. Intensive models of state investments and systems of supporting and targeting smallholder farmers are discounted. These are contradictory objectives that the humanitarian concerns of poverty alleviation clash with a Darwinian market fundamentalism.

Agriculture’s dominant role in Sub-Saharan Africa’s local, national and regional economies and cultures throughout pre-colonial history has been foundational to 20th century colonial and post-colonial development. No other continent has been so closely identified with smallholder peasant farming. Nonetheless, smallholder farming has been eroding over the last three decades, perpetuating rural poverty and marginalizing remote rural areas. Donors’ search for rural ‘success stories’ merely reinforces this fact. The current role of agriculture and rural development in African national economies and its potential for improving material standards of living and life chances is thus of pressing concern. It is time to ask if agriculture spells welfare enhancement or decline for Africa’s rural dwellers.

The report African Agriculture and the World Bank: Development or Impoverishment? by Havnevik et al (2007) offers a critical reflection of the World Development Report 2008’s portrayal of world agriculture with respect to Africa. It presents an overview of African land, labour and capital market dynamics since the oil crises of the 1970s, contextualising the current institutional state of play. Examining three decades of agricultural decline in Sub-Saharan Africa, it also highlights the roles of major policies imposed on Africa by international institutions, such as World Bank, in determining the relative roles of the state and private sector and agricultural output trends. Farmers’ economic and social choices are highlighted before probing the central issue facing Africa’s rural dwellers, namely the increasing displacement of their agrarian labour. The question is what are the implications of the World Development Report 2008’s recommendations for the survival of smallholder farmers? The book by Havnevik et al suggests measures to raise agricultural productivity and reduce rural poverty in order to invigorate, rather than marginalize, African family farming.

To be effective, the approach to African agricultural development has to be based on a thorough understanding of local smallholder rural institutional settings, including the gender and inter-generational relationships, and rural–urban interconnections. This implies that the social, cultural and political dimensions of agrarian change, including state–smallholder relationships, cannot be ignored. Further, efforts have to be open to timely measures to subsidize and protect smallholder farmers and their organisations to give them the economic means, motivation and self-esteem to produce for national staple food markets and to compete more fairly with capitalized farmers elsewhere. These measures have to be individually tailored to the many agricultural and food production systems of the continent.

Considerable investment is required to reinvigorate smallholder African agriculture. This is critical not only to smallholder welfare but to national economic development – providing the necessary foundation for occupational self-esteem and work identities as well as political stability and a sense of basic security upon which a strong non-agrarian future can be built.

Key areas in which timely action is needed:

• Productive investments in research, extension, infrastructure, rural finance and mutual learning and knowledge developments.
• Trade and marketing improvements that gradually strengthen the knowledge and capacity of the farmers.
• Support to rural entrepreneurship, formation of independent local organisations and networks.
• Understanding of rural institutional settings, including gender, inter-generational and rural–urban relationships.
• Dimensions of agrarian change, including the state–smallholder relations and the role of the state.
• Promotion of policies that lay foundations for occupational self-esteem, work identities and a sense of basic security.

Unless this comes about, African agriculture and rural areas will constitute a vast ‘holding ground’ of immense social and economic misery with potential dramatic impacts on global politics, migration, environment and climate.