Sub-Saharan Africa’s small-scale farming future

My two previous blog posts talk about the potential for small-scale irrigation to increase yields, benefit farmers, and consequently improve social and economic development. But I wanted to take a step back and look at smallholder farming practices in general in Sub-Saharan Africa, regardless of irrigation. The future of small-scale farming is worth looking at, as there would be no point in developing small-scale irrigation technologies and encouraging the implementation of them if smallholder farming does not have a secure place in the Africa’s farming future.

It is also important to consider the challenges of smallholder farming, and whether the benefits of small-scale irrigation make smallholder farming worthwhile despite the challenges. I have decided to look at an article written by T.S.  Jayne, David Mather, and Elliot Mghenyi, titled ‘Principle Challenges Confronting Smallholder Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa’, and I will focus on the issues that may hinder the implementation of small-scale irrigation technologies.

The aim of the study was to highlight the growing challenges of smallholder agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa and to review the policy and public investment options to address these issues, which the researchers believe to be key influences impacting smallholder farming in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using survey data from Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Zambia, Jayne et al. identify empirical similarities in terms of problems. The five countries that were studied were chosen according to the availability of data sets, with the majority of data being collected by national statistical services. Although this was probably the most feasible method of finding and collecting the appropriate data, national statistical services can vary between each country, and the reliability of the surveys conducted can be debatable. Some surveys were devised by ministries and government bodies, such as in the Mozambique, whilst the surveys carried out in Kenya were created entirely by universities. It is important to be wary of who created and published the survey data, as government-published statistics could potentially be biased in order to create a more positive representation of the actual reality. Nonetheless, there is a thorough description of each type of survey used in each country and how the samples were selected.

The paper describes how there has been a steady decline in land-to-person ratios, meaning that the area of arable land that each person controls is getting smaller and smaller. For example, more than 25% of the small-scale farms that were surveyed were controlling less than 0.11 ha of farmland per capita, meaning they are getting close to landlessness. Farmers tend to settle where there are advantageous agro-ecological conditions and where there is easy access to markets, resulting in highly dense farming settlements with competition for resources. There remains lots of free land in rural areas, but the undesirable remote locations mean that no one wants to move there.

The farms were also ranked by per capita land size and divided into four equal quartiles to reveal some surprising results – for example, a doubling of income from crops in households that were in the bottom quartile (such as by switching to new technology or increasing inputs such as fertilisers) would have a minimal impact on their absolute level of income. This is a point worth elaborating on – if per capita farm areas are getting smaller and smaller, are implementing irrigation schemes really going to be cost effective? It may be cost-effective for the government to invest in an improved water source such as a water tap or well if there are many farmers concentrated nearby.  But for the farmers operating on the smallest scales, irrigation may not be an affordable option. Furthermore, if farmers are operating so close together, then using small-scale irrigation schemes like motor pumps would not be so effective as water collection waiting times would increase, and supplies may be used unsustainably. This is a catch 22 as many governments in Sub-Saharan Africa do not have the money to develop water sources in rural areas where population densities are low, however, rural water investment is probably needed the most so that farmers can disperse, have more land, and become more productive. The paper states that government spending in Africa has not tended to support the most rural farmers, which has been one of the reasons that Africa’s crop productivity has remained stagnant since 1961 whilst there have been improvements in productivity in the rest of the world. The paper concludes that most small farms in Africa are becoming more impractical and are becoming ‘increasingly unviable as sustainable economic and social units’ (Jayne et al.: 1394). The paper does not only give land distribution as the only reason for this, it also talks about crop market performance, crop prices, barriers to non-farm employment and the HIV/AIDS epidemic.  The paper suggests that the barriers that prevent the implementation of ‘productivity-enhancing inputs’ need to be removed by changing policies, increasing public spending on agriculture, and putting more research into the agricultural sciences of small farms rather than large-scale farming.

In my opinion, the paper was quite unoptimistic about the future of small-scale farming. Although the purpose of the paper was to examine the challenges of smallholder agriculture, I thought it was quite narrow-minded in the way it implied that the only influential actor that could address these challenges was the government and large international organisations such as the World Bank. It had limited scope on bottom-up approaches and ignored a crucial actor in development, which are non-governmental organisations (NGOs). NGOs have had a big role to play in all sectors of Africa’s development, and I believe that they have potential to influence the future of smallholder agriculture by investing in new technologies and training farmers.  One example of an NGO helping small-scale farmers in East Africa is ‘Farm Africa’.

A screenshot of the NGO Farm Africa’s webpage.

The NGO has carried out many projects that have empowered small-scale farmers. For example, Farm Africa have trained farmers in Ethiopia to use ‘climate-smart’ farming methods including irrigation. This could be an alternative to the dominant top-down approaches that were discussed in the paper.