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Juma: “No silver bullets” for African agriculture

By peterguest | Published: 26 January, 2011

Advances in biotechnology and communications offer hope for the development of African agriculture, but there will be no “silver bullet” for the continent’s food insecurity until the basic foundations of infrastructure and policy are put in place, according to Harvard professor and development expert Calestous Juma.

Mr Juma’s latest book, “The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa” links mobile telephones, political engagement, renewable energy, regional integration and infrastructure and emerges with an optimistic assessment of Africa’s agricultural potential.

“I think the difference is that a lot of previous optimism was guided more by expectations and less by evidence,” he says. “What we did was we abandoned theory and ideology and said, ‘let’s go and see what’s happening in Africa’.”

The two examples that Mr Juma highlights – Rwanda and Malawi – both challenge accepted ideologies in agricultural and economic development.

“Malawi, for two or three decades, was a laboratory for studying malnutrition. People kept datasets on Malawi’s households. If you wanted to study malnutrition, you went to Malawi. And in comes a president [Bingu wa Mutharika] and makes some really radical decisions, in terms of governance and in terms of redirecting resources, saying instead of subsidising consumers, let’s try subsidising producers. Basically, going against ideology,” Mr Juma says.

“That process exposed the importance of high level coordination. He had to appoint himself the minister for agriculture to actually do it. And it was actually for very practical reasons, because to get fertilisers to some areas they needed to build roads, and the minister responsible for roads was not interested in connecting rural areas, he was interested in connecting urban areas. So by appointing himself minister for agriculture, he was actually able to provide that coordination that was needed to get other ministries to play along … and then the turnaround was really very rapid. It was a couple of years and Malawi became a net exporter of food.”

Rwanda, which itself saw a remarkable turnaround in its agricultural sector in the early years of its recovery from the 1994 genocide, provides another lesson for policymakers. While its economic growth story has been held up as one of modernisation, and its future plans revolve around becoming an information technology hub for East Africa, its development was underpinned by agriculture.

As per the Rwandan example, Mr Juma advocates: “getting back to common sense, getting away from the philosophy that we transition from agriculture to industry to services. But actually the reason we are able to move from agriculture to industry is because we’ve done agriculture. Not because we are bypassing agriculture.”

The “innovation” in the book’s subtitle includes a broad range of technologies, from existing mobile money transfer systems, such as M-pesa, through to genetically modified organisms.

The spread of telecommunications across the continent introduces new efficiencies to the sector, Mr Juma says. Access to financial services and information allow farmers to better plan and manage their crops, and telecom-based solutions could replace traditional extension services. Advances in renewable energy could allow decentralised generation, which in turn could power small scale rural storage facilities for meat and crops, enabling the more efficient use of land and resources.

The potential adoption of GMO crops in Africa remains a politically controversial one, on one hand offering drought and pest resistance and higher yields, but on the other reducing the export potential to markets still suspicious of their long term effects. Mr Juma is cool on their potential to have systemic effects on agricultural development, noting that none of their advantages overcome the basic deficiencies that currently encumber African farmers.

“Without foundation investments in infrastructure and higher technical training, the debate on GMOs is totally irrelevant,” he says.

Infrastructure remains the most significant bottleneck for agricultural development on the continent. Road networks, particularly those which link rural producing areas with urban markets are sorely deficient across the continent. Equally, transport links between regional economies are weak. Irrigation, a cornerstone of the Asian green revolution, is lacking. “Only about 3 percent of African agriculture is irrigated, compared to roughly 45 percent in South Asia. The potential for that is huge.”

Fixing these is the basepoint for agricultural development, Mr Juma notes. However, put off by accountability and corruption issues that have often dogged big projects, international donors have pulled back from their commitments to infrastructure in recent years. This is where they could have the greatest systemic impact, Mr Juma says, but in their absence he proposes a potentially radical solution – military intervention.

“We are looking at how these countries can leverage surplus capacity in engineering to extend infrastructure and we are exploring the possibility of bringing in the military,” he says. There is excess manpower, engineering expertise and equipment in both domestic and foreign militaries on the continent. “I’ve had conversations even with the foreign militaries that are involved in Africa, saying ‘you have all this equipment, you are dealing with issues like terrorism, but there is an area where you could have a very serious and significant presence, which is to engage with Africans in the area of infrastructure. How about leveraging your equipment?’”