Poverty in Africa is more likely to be defeated through agricultural development rather than by trying to emulate the West's route to prosperity through manufacturing, according to new thinking among academics and aid agencies.
In a report Reaching the Poor: A Call to Action, they call for a switch in strategy by aid donors and governments to help the continent's farming communities to help themselves through the development of agriculture. One of the report's authors, Christie Peacock, the chief executive of the aid agency FARM-Africa, spoke of the the change in mood which had led to the call for aid to be refocused on small-scale farmers.
"Smallholder farmers are the very people who are in need of support and have the potential to generate and sustain economic growth and employment for the long-term future," Peacock said. "With 75 percent of the African population living in rural areas, this offers nothing less than a pathway out of poverty."
Over the past few decades governments in many sub-Saharan countries have switched spending away from agriculture -- where most of their people earn a living -- and into manufacturing and other sectors of the economy, on the basis that this was how the developed world had become rich.
In the 1990s, spending on agriculture by sub-Saharan African governments declined from 7 percent of their total spending to 4.2 percent. But, with only a few exceptions, the strategy has not met with success. Roughly 40 million people in Africa receive food aid, and the number of "absolute poor" living on less than US$1 a day in sub-Saharan Africa is set to rise from 315 million to 404 million between now and 2015.
"Poverty in Africa is more extensive and severe than elsewhere, and is worsening," says Andrew Dorward, director of the Centre for Development and Poverty Reduction at Imperial College in London. "But the opportunities for manufacturing are limited. It will only work in certain places."
In Mauritius and South Africa, manufacturing has made a substantial contribution to the economy. In most sub-Saharan African countries however, manufactured goods produced are not competitive, a situation that was not helped, in the eyes of many, by World Bank/IMF structural adjustment programs in the 1980s which obliged African countries to loosen import barriers.
The changing emphasis from manufacture to agriculture was reflected in a recent recommendation from a meeting in Botswana of agriculture ministers of eight countries belonging to the Southern African Development Community that spending on agriculture should rise to at least 10 percent of national budgets.
The Reaching the Poor: A Call to Action report calls for rural people and small farmers to be in the vanguard of change with the aim of "kick starting" the African economy and achieving food security. More aid would also be part of the project, for just as government spending on agriculture has declined, so also has development aid from Western countries.
And while some donors have accepted the importance of agriculture in fighting poverty, Dorward says there are only a few credible sector development or investment strategies to turn this into progress on the ground.
To begin with, reform is required if sub-Saharan African countries are to respond to the needs of their farmers. Ministries of agriculture, commonly under-resourced and ineffective, will have to be overhauled and the report proposes new types of farm organizations. Only by operating in small groups, says the report, are farmers likely to be able to deliver reliability, quality and quantity.
Farmers will need to make their voices heard and take part in policy decisions -- policies that should be based on "aspirations and knowledge of local people," with local ownership, management and accountability. "Failure to recognize this," it says, "is one of the major reasons for past failures."
The report is not completely bleak, however. It points out that the subcontinent does have its agricultural success stories and that farmers in a number of countries are increasing food output, often using inexpensive technologies.
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