How Africa can feed the world – Adesina (1)

  Farmers and their voice or political power

If you take a look at agriculture in Nigeria, or other African countries, 80 percent of the farmers are small-holder farmers. But being small-holder farmers does not mean that they cannot produce and be technically or economically efficient.

For the small-holder farmers, the real challenges that they face have to do with technology, markets, finance and infrastructure, organisational capacity to engage markets, and we are investing heavily on that. You can only achieve this kind of revolution when you have millions and millions of small holder farmers participating.

The experience of green revolution in Asia was not by large farmers. It was actually by small farmers. So, small-holder farmers are technically and economically efficient. They just need to have a number of boundary conditions dealt with, which are finance, infrastructure, market access, information and insurance, in particular, in the context of climate change.

The issue of pitting the small holder farmers versus large in Africa is not the right kind of bifurcation that we need. Africa has a lot of land. We just have to be able to optmise around small holder farming population. Medium scale farmers and large scale farmers can actually co-exist.

Africa, today, is where the land frontier is. When we talk about large scale farmers, we are sensitive to the issue of environment. We are sensitive to the issue of local ownership. The revolution we are talking about must be an inclusive one that creates robust opportunities for millions of small-holder farmers. That is where our focus is.

Foreign money inflow, urban growth and land grab

We should not be afraid of growth. Africa clearly needs a lot of foreign direct investment. We have taken agriculture in Nigeria as a business, a business that creates wealth for millions of our people. For that you need a lot of capital. So, we encourage a lot of foreign direct investment and also domestic investors. In Nigeria’s agriculture, in the last one year we have been able to attract $8 billion worth of foreign direct investment commitments into our agriculture.

We don’t encourage land grab. It is a partnership in which the business is coming to invest their money, whether in processing capacity or in feedlot. However, the voluntary code of conduct has to be respected in the sense that the right of the community has to be protected. The communities must have a share in a lot of these businesses. We have to make sure in particular that women are not dis-empowered when things like these happen and that we use modern agriculture, when it comes in, to build our own capacity.

For example, in Taraba State, we set a strategy for us to be self-sufficient in rice. Nigeria is the largest importer of rice in the world today. It makes absolutely no sense. We can produce rice all the way from the north of Nigeria to the deep south mangrove land. It is all about finance and technology. We were able to attract an investor, which is Dominion Farms, the largest producer of rice in Kenya, into Nigeria.

They are putting in domestic investment of $40 million. The total enterprise is about 30,000 hectares. That is not 30,000 hectares for the investor. The investor only gets 3,000 hectares. The rest of it is actually in out-growers’ schemes in which the communities are in out-growers’ schemes. A lot of the youth, about 15,000 youth, will have land allocated to them, to have their own farms and they will be able to produce paddy and supply to a world class mill.

That is the win-win partnership that Africa needs. To avoid win-lose, we need to improve transparency in how these kinds of investments are done in Africa. We have to make sure that the communities are involved. We have to make sure they know what they sign; the legal issues that support their communities. That is where the issues of civil societies’ support is very important. In Nigeria we are not doing the issue of large scale people coming and grabbing land.

Selling out land to foreigners

When you have a situation where Africa is where the land frontier is; to be able to meet the global food supply that we have to feed 9 billion people by 2050, there is no doubt that we all have to have a lot more larger farms and a lot more foreign direct investments. What is important is how you manage them, to make sure that concerned farmers are empowered; that things are transparent; that small holder farmers are not displaced; that you do not go into excessive mechanisation; things that destroy the ecosystem.

The responsible investment framework that was put together by FAO, IFAD and the World Bank is the way to look at it. There is a compact between the business sector and the communities that this has to work for the communities.

Climate change, flood, farming and Sub-Saharan Africa

Climate change is here to stay. We have to find a way of adapting under a context of climate change. There are number of things we can do, but we have to prioritise. We must deploy intelligent technologies for remote sensing and satellite imagery that allow you to be able to predict – through early warning systems – seasonal forecasts, how much rain you are going to get, how much inundation for flood are you going to get; how fast is that flood water going to recede so that you can do flood recession agriculture. 

SIAKA MOMOH