The Bright Continent

Foreign Policy’s current issue, on food, is a good one. The conversation on feeding the world is worth improving. Both because food prices are a basic cause of social and political instability—across time and geography—and because there is plenty of food to feed everyone, it is just poorly priced and distributed. One essay in the package, by Raj Patel, imagines the 10-billion person planet of the future—and how to nourish it. While doing so he thoughtfully debunks the myth of mono-mega-culture as a solution to developing world food sourcing difficulties. To boil down the debate: Folks like Paul Collier see subsistence agriculture as dehumanizing and pitiable work (I’m generalizing); others see a more traditional, more decentralized approach to farming as a solution to both food and income generation problems across Africa.

This is a fair argument to have. Hand-tilling and harvesting a half-acre plot of less than fertile soil as a basis for income is the lot of too many African farmers. Yet it’s clear that Africa has all the potential to feed the world, and that appropriate labor-saving technological interventions (paired with fairer trade practices) will allow the region to contribute to a global problem. But agree with the author that turning African smallholder farmers toward the beacon light of Monsanto and American agribusiness is a bad call.

The meat of the story is what models for intervention in agricultural economies (the sector touches 2/3 Africans) work. I liked this story just a bit more because it references the unusual farming culture I saw firsthand in Malawi.

Because of its colonial legacy, Malawi had long been following conventional economic wisdom: exporting things in which the country had a comparative advantage (in Malawi’s case, tobacco) and using the funds to buy goods on the international market in which it didn’t have an advantage. But when tobacco prices fall, as they have of late, there’s less foreign exchange with which to venture into international markets. And being landlocked, Malawi also faces higher prices for grain than its four neighbors — Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia, and Tanzania — simply because it costs more to transport into the country. According to one estimate, the marginal cost of importing a ton of food-aid maize is $400, versus $200 a ton to import it commercially, and only $50 to source it domestically using fertilizers. Particularly at a time when food and fertilizer prices are predicted to rise, Malawi is wise to consider how vulnerable to the caprices of international markets it wants to be.

This partly explains why, in the late 1990s, almost a decade before it became fashionable, Malawi bucked the advice of its international donors and decided to spend the majority its agriculture budget on fertilizer, the first and perhaps most necessary ingredient in prepping the soil for producing viable crops. The government gave farmers a “starter pack,” with enough beans, improved seeds, and fertilizer to cover about a fifth of an acre. International donors weren’t pleased. A USAID official decried the program as consigning farmers to a “poverty treadmill” in which farmers would be stuck growing just enough maize to survive, but never enough to get rich. Although the program had modest success, it took off when Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika expanded the program over the 2005-2006 growing season, quadrupling the amount of fertilizer available. Although driven by domestic political promises, his international timing was perfect — he was embarking on a policy whose time had come. And this is why what happens in Malawi’s fields today matter so much beyond its borders.

Read the whole thing.

(Photo: Teenaged farmer in Kasungu who grows tobacco)