Redefining productivity

We are truly productive if there is more forest next year than today, if there is more fish and if the soil is more fertile by the years instead of exhausted and eroded. 

It is a bit puzzling why most agronomists and institutions to such large extent focus on yield of crops per hectare as the main measure of agriculture productivity, when in reality that is not a driving force for farmers who look more into productivity per labor unit, or if they are modern agri-business operations, productivity of capital invested. If we compare farms globally the farms with the highest yield per hectare are rarely the most competitive. European farmers have mostly much higher yields per hectare of wheat than their Argentinean, American or Australian colleagues, still they can’t compete and are dependent on support programs of the European Union, because their general cost level is higher. Similarly in the dairy sector, the world market is dominated by a country with low milk yield per cow. The dairy industry in New Zealand is still primarily built on grazing cows and the production per cow is low in an international perspective. The average production per cow in Israel was 12,500 kg in 2007, while it was less than 4,000 kg in New Zealand , but New Zealanders produce milk a lot cheaper than Israelis.

If we compare efficiency in various systems, e.g. in farming or food processing, it will in most cases show that the bigger and more technological advanced system is more competitive. But are they more efficient and productive? Often, small farms have higher yield per hectare than large farms, still large farms gradually squeeze smaller farms out of the market because of market access, possibilities for rational specialization, economies of scale, better access to credits or simply governmental policy distortions . Larger crop farms perform better financially, on average, than smaller farms. The larger farms don’t have higher revenue or yields per area unit, but they have lower costs. As expressed by the report Farm Size and the Organization of U.S. Crop Farming from USDA: “larger farms appear to be able to realize more production per unit of labor and capital. These financial advantages have persisted over time, which suggests that shifts of production to larger crop farms will likely continue in the future.” Their yield per hectare is mostly the same as on smaller farms but the research shows that farms with more than 2,000 acres spend 2.7 hours of work per acre of corn and have cost for equipment of $432, while a farmer with 100-249 acres will spend more than four times as much labor and double the amount for equipment per acre. In that limited sense the larger farms are more “efficient” or “productive”.

There are many different ways to look at farm productivity and, depending on what we measure and how we measure, we may draw different conclusions. In principle, it is the factor of which there is a shortage that will, and should, determine which factor is the most important. Farms in high-income countries are shaped by high input of energy and low input of human labor (energy). In high-income countries, there is no shortage of labor but it has been costly and therefore productivity per work-hour has been the strongest driver of change. Close to cities, or in very densely populated areas, land is scarce and farms are shaped differently by high land prices. At a certain land price, grain farming is no longer possible and farming will orient itself to higher value crops, or will become playground for the rich, golf courses or paddocks for race horses.

Economists today talk about “total factor productivity” a rather opaque measure which has a scientific air. It does sound like a good idea to combine all the factors of production in one measure. But as this is measured in monetary terms it will just value things by their market value. So if labor is 200 times more expensive in one country than in another you have to produce 200 times more per hour for the same productivity. And if water is for free, the water productivity will not be reflected at all. In this way, productivity comes to mean more or less the same as profitability and is like a circular reasoning and of little value in a big picture discussion, even if it reflects quite well what guides a modern commercial farmer.

We need to redefine productivity. But it is not enough the redefine productivity in our minds, we also need to redesign the economic system which has created this distorted view of what is productive and what is not.  Today, productivity is measured by how many trees one person can cut down with her chainsaw or how much fish a fisherman can scoop up from the sea. But as nature resources dwindle, the real productivity is how these resources re-generate. We are productive if there is more forest next year than today, if there is more fish and if the soil is more fertile by the years instead of exhausted and eroded. 

(extract from Global Eating Disorder, forthcoming)

How increased labour efficiency drives resource consumption

If we compare efficiency on various systems, e.g. in farming or food processing, it will in most cases show that the bigger and more technological advanced system is more efficient. Larger crop farms perform better financially, on average, than smaller farms. The larger farms don’t have higher revenue or yields per acre, but they simply have lower costs. As expressed by the report (Farm Size and the Organization of U.S. Crop Farming) from USDA: “larger farms appear to be able to realize more production per unit of labor and capital. These financial advantages have persisted over time, which suggests that shifts of production to larger crop farms will likely continue in the future.” Their yield per acres is mostly the same as on smaller farms but the research shows that farms with more than 2,000 acres spend 2.7 hours of work per acre of corn and have cost for equipment of $432, while a farmer with 100-249 acres will spend more than four times as much labor and double the amount for equipment per acre. In that sense the larger farms are more “efficient” or “productive”

The same goes for a farmer who drives his pickup to the farmer market compared to the lorries supplying the supermarkets; she will use more fuel and more machine capital per kg of goods. And embedded in the machine capital are many other resources, metals, more energy and other peoples’ work. But despite all this efficiency our society neither reduce the number of hours worked nor the resources used, not in total and not per capita. This is not even the case for societies that have moved towards more services, as agriculture and manufacturing declines. How come? 

Try this discussion: If we compare the resource use of big, highly mechanized farmer with a small scale farmer, we have ascertained that per kg harvested yield, the labor efficiency of the bigger farm is higher. This is also the case for use of most other resources for area unit. But what happens if we look at resource use per labor-hour? Then it is clear that the big farmer in his 400 hp tractor use an awful lot more resources than the farmer with a small tractor, or oxen, not to speak about the half a billion farmers still working with their own labor as the main resource. The same goes for the driver of the delivery truck to Walmart, he uses a lot more resources per hour than the farmer loading her pickup to drive to the market. 

Now, you could say that nature doesn’t care about this discussion, if we are efficient per hour, per kg or per acre; nature only cares about the absolute use of resources or the total emissions. That is correct. But almost all people have a job of some kind, and in each job the same logic applies, i.e. that the more efficient each person is, he or she uses less resources per produced unit but more resources per hour of labor[1]. The total resource use in society is thus bound to increase despite of, or perhaps because of, increased labor efficiency. After all, as long as we all continue to work so much, our total resource use is determined by how much resources we use at work and how much we use as consumers together. 

This is a summary of a longer article I published a while ago, and which I now revised. Read the full article here: Jevons paradox - why efficiency is a liar word 

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[1] It is likely that there are some exceptions to this, but I believe that they are just that, exceptions.

Why the GMO promises are hollow

Resistant weeds in a soybean field, Pana, Ill 2012

Many promote GMOs as a main solution for future food production. However, among those engaged in actual farming you rarely hear such bold statements. For sure, the uptake of GMO crops in the United States and a few other countries is great. But we are not talking about any break-through technologies here; we are talking about technologies that can save farmers a few dollars per acre, in the same way as pesticides. The reality in the field is, so far, very far from the discussion about feeding the world that is used by GMO proponents.

There is a growing problem with weeds that have become resistant to glyphosate, the most common herbicide used by American corn, soybean and cotton farmers. New strategies are needed to combat them, according to David Mortensen, professor of weed ecology at Penn State. During the period since the introduction of glyphosate-resistant crops, the number of weedy plant species that have evolved resistance to glyphosate has increased dramatically, from zero in 1995 to 21 in 2013. The reported acreage infested with glyphosate-resistant weeds has risen from 32.6 million acres in 2010 to 40.7 million acres in 2011 and 61.2 million acres in 2012, according to Mortensen[i].

When I visited farmers in Illinois and Mato Grosso in Brazil 2012, I realized that the “new strategies” is to combine roundup with nastier herbicides such as paraquat in Brazil or atrazine in Illinois. Paraquat was banned in the European Union since 2007. The ingestion of small to medium amounts of paraquat may lead to heart failure, kidney failure, liver failure or lung scarring within several days to several weeks. If a person survives the toxic effects of paraquat poisoning, long-term lung damage is highly likely. People with large ingestions of paraquat are not likely to survive according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention[ii]. It is exported from Switzerland where its use also is forbidden. More than 3 million liters of paraquat is used in Brazil, mainly in GMO soy plantations. According to the rhetoric for GMO proponents, use of herbicides would be lower when herbicide resistance crops are grown, but this is clearly not the case. In Brazil, the use of herbicides has increased from 7 kg per hectare to 10 kg and a survey in the state of Paraná show that farmers growing GMO soy use more pesticides than farmer that don’t grow GMO soy[iii]. Atrazine, which is commonly used in United States to deal with glyphosate resistant weeds in corn is also prohibited in the European Union. It is an estrogen disruptor and is suspected of causing birth defects. Atrazine was found in 80 percent of drinking water samples taken in 153 public water systems in United States[iv].

As a rule, GMO technology has a limited potential to radically increase yields; there is simply no “high-yield” gene that can simply be put in place in the various crops, if there were such simple traits, they certainly would already have been developed through the normal process of evolution[v]. High yields are a result of many synergetic factors of which the genetic factors are only a small proportion and the genes involved are many. The same is the case for many other GMO promises. Frost tolerant potatoes have been talked about for decades, but are still far away. There is apparently some progress in draught tolerant corn, but the size of the challenge is perhaps best understood when realizing that ag-tech giant Monsanto has to team up with competitor BASF in order to have the muscles to realize this, and again, there will be trade-offs. Draught tolerance will come at some kind of “cost” for the plant, or for the farmer[vi]. “One can never change only one thing” as Garret Hardin says. And in few areas is that as apparent as in our food and farm system. 

GMOs have the potential to solve certain technical problems, problems that in most cases have also other solutions. And those other solution compete with GMOs for research funds and attention. The biggest danger with GMO in my view is perhaps not health effects or super-weeds bringing havoc to nature. Bigger dangers with GMO are the increased reliance of farmers on purchased proprietary technology and that because of very high development costs, GMOs will lead to fewer varieties and even more monoculture. In addition, the outcrowding effect of GMO research is massive. BASF is investing around EUR188 million annually in plant biotechnology research[vii] and Monsanto invested more than US$1.5 billion in 2012 on research of which a very large proportion is for biotech[viii]. It is a field that can much more easily attract funds than solutions based on local resources and on-farm solutions, as there is no money to be made from such solutions, while the GMO solutions are based on proprietary technologies. It may also make people complacent in facing the problems we actually have. If the knee-jerk response to any agriculture challenge is that we will fix it with GMOs we are in serious problems.

Lately the strategy of GMO proponents is to promote them as a solution for poor farmers in developing countries. In this way they use moral arguments against the opponents, making it look like that those that are against GMOs are to blame for that people are starving or that some are blind because of vitamin A deficiency. As explained above, I think they have no basis for their claims. I have worked long enough in developing countries to know that the problems poor smallholders face are of a different nature and more often rooted in economic and social conditions than in agronomy. In any case, existing technologies can very well solve the problems which GMOs are supposed to fix. 

Some proponents of GMOs dismiss the objections with that they are not really rooted in fear that GMOs would be harmful for environment or for human health but that the resistance is a protest against capitalism, privatization and globalization. I tend to agree with that. I don’t exclude that GM technologies could produce some useful traits in the future. I am not convinced that it can justify the risks and the enormous investments. And in general I believe that the patenting of genetic materials, GMOs or not GMOs, is fundamentally wrong, unjust and yet another step towards full privatization of nature. GMOs or not GMOs is essentially a political and ethical choice and not a choice of technology.

This is an draft extract from my upcoming book.

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[i] Brown, Diane, 2,4-D and dicamba-resistant crops and their implications for susceptible non-target crops, Posted on November 7, 2013 Michigan State University Extension, http://msue.anr.msu.edu/news/24_d_and_dicamba_resistant_crops_and_their_implications_for_susceptible_non accessed 13 December 2013.

[ii] http://emergency.cdc.gov/agent/paraquat/basics/facts.asp

[iii] GM crops push up pesticide sales in Brazil, AgroNews, 13 Augusti 2012

[iv] Still poisoning the well, Wu, Mae, Mayra Quirindongo, Jennifer Sass, and Andrew Wetzler, NRDC, April 2010

[v] Bengtson, Jan, In which ways could modern biotechnlogy be part of sustainable agriculture, , Sveriges Utsädesförenings Tidskrift 1-2013

[vi] Bengtson, Jan, In which ways could modern biotechnlogy be part of sustainable agriculture, , Sveriges Utsädesförenings Tidskrift 1-2013

[vii] May 23, 2013, 7:11 a.m. EDT, BASF, Monsanto to launch new GM corn in U.S. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/basf-monsanto-to-launch-new-gm-corn-in-us-2013-05-23

[viii] Monsanto Corporate Profile 6 September 2013, http://www.monsanto.com/investors/Pages/corporate-profile.aspx

The art of supporting agriculture

A few countries stand out with different food and agriculture policies. The Swiss constitution was amended in 1996 to explicitly include a reference to the multifunctional nature of agriculture – that agriculture contributes to food security, resource conservation, landscape and rural settlements.
As of today various support and remuneration from the government constitute more than half of the farmers’ income. This gives you an idea of how strong the forces of competition are on farms. Certainly this level of support comes at a price. First, much tax money is spent and secondly, there are high tariffs to protect Swiss farm produce. Meat had an average tariff of 126 percent and milk of 102 percent in 2012, which is reflected in very high consumer prices – but also in that Switzerland is almost self-sufficient in these produce. The self-sufficiency rate for animal products was 95 percent in 2009 while it was just 48 percent for the less protected plant products (some if which are imported as feed to the animals) [i].

A negative effect of the high support levels is that it can trigger surplus production which has to be dumped in global markets, thereby suppressing the world market prices. While there are some such effects of the Swiss agriculture support there are small and shrinking. It shall be noted, however, that the forces of competition also works inside the country and that ultimately, Swiss farmers quit, farms get bigger also through these internal forces. There were 90,000 farmers in 1990 while in 2011 there were 58,000 farms of which 41,000 could be considered full-time operations. Still, small farms persist, or as expressed ina 2013 report from the OECD, “Switzerland’s heavy support sustains inefficient farming structures”. Almost one third of the considerable Swiss agriculture support is explicitly for ensuring domestic food supplies. Switzerland, contrary to most other countries, still maintains emergency food reserves for several months for a variety of food stuffs[ii].

It is hard to assess how good the Swiss support is and how it plays out in reality. Also, Switzerland is a very wealthy country and many countries would find it hard to extend this level of support. It is still interesting to compare the developments in Switzerland and in other countries. For example, in my native Sweden, which through the EU already has some support and protection, but not at all on the level of Switzerland, we import half of our meat, despite the fact that the farming conditions are quite good.

In the 1980s, the World Bank investigated agriculture policies in eighteen developing countries and found that in most of them, Brazil being an exception, governments extracted more resources from their agriculture sector than they supported them with, a striking difference to OECD countries[iii]. To make matters worse, the money that does get spent is often spent on in­efficient and/or harmful subsidies, especially subsidies for chemical fertilizers. Of the farm budget in Zambia 80% is used for fertilizers and price support to maize. In 2012 Zambia had a surplus of maize it couldn’tsell for the price they ask, and mountains of maize were rotting. In India, subsidies reached new record heights in 2009. The Food Corporation of India used US$ 10 billion for food subsidies and the Ministry of Fertilizers used US$ 20 billion dollars for subsidies of chemical fertilizers. To this one can add federal support for food security and crop insurance as well as state programs for energy, seeds, seed­lings, livestock, tractors, pumps, irrigation, etc. Despite all support measures, Indian farmers are under huge stress. Just in 2007, 16,600 suicides were reported among Indian farmers (Tehelka 2009).

All in all, shaping agriculture policies is hard. Often citizens and politicians want to combine low cost policies with cheap food based on free trade with extensive care for environment. But sorry, it isn't working and we should stop fooling ourselves. Unlimited competition is simply not sustainable.

[i] The Agri-food Situation and Policies in Switzerland, Peter Jarrett, Charlotte Moeser, OECD 2013

[ii] The Agri-food Situation and Policies in Switzerland, Peter Jarrett, Charlotte Moeser, OECD 2013

[iii] Feeding the World, Giovanni Federico, Princeton 2005

Is farming efficient?

Farming means favoring a few species in the environment, giving them more space and nurturing them. And even for those plants that are selected, we favor the parts that are useful for us, i.e. we favor the grain over the straw and roots, we favor the meat of a chicken over its bones, which is the reason for why many broilers can’t even walk properly. In this way, we can use a higher proportion of the biological production from a farmed system than from a ‘wild’ system. Despite all the efforts in farming, and the tremendous progress in seed breeding, the advances in farming are all about the control of the factors and the favoring of a certain crop. The basic energy-transformation has not improved; the efficiency of the green leave to convert sunlight to calories has not improved.

In essence the primary biological production is more or less the same for a farmed system as for a wild system. Compare a pasture that is established in place of a rainforest or a field that forms when a swamp is drained. In both cases, the biological production is likely to be higher in the original, natural, system than in the farmed system. Biological production increases mainly when external resources are brought into the system; for example, when irrigation is introduced to drylands or when greenhouses are heated in cool climate or when nutrients are brought from outside the system, productivity can in­crease a lot.

In many ‘marginal’ areas, farmed systems are often not very com­petitive and in many cases directly harmful. Carl Linnaeus, the founder of modern classification in biology, noted more than two hundred and fifty years ago that the ‘Swedish’ settlers had a miserable life—and couldn’t pay any taxes—in the mountains whereas the non-farming, reindeer-keeping Sami people did well under the same conditions. Jarred Diamond observes a similar situation for the Viking settlers in Greenland. When the climate changed, their farming system was inferior to the economy of the Greenland Inuits that was based on extraction of wild resources (Diamond 2005). And this is not restricted only to cold areas. The livestock expert R. N. B. Kay says that humans over the centuries have made clumsy attempts to introduce domestic species of plants or animals into arid regions with catastrophic collapse of the ecosystem as a result. He finds that the East African acacia savannah and bushland can carry roughly a five times greater biomass of wild ungulates than of domestic animals (1970: 271–72).

‘Productivity’ can have a completely different meaning if one counted the impact on ecosystems and the external costs caused by farming. Studies of a wetland in Canada, forests in Cameroon and Mangrove forests in Thailand all showed the total value of these ecosystems hugely surpassed the value of the farming systems once they were converted. But, importantly, the benefits of the systems accrue to different people. Choices are made on the basis of the profitability for the person or entity that has managed to, with whatever means, control that piece of nature (MEA 2005).

So the answer to the question in the title is: Who asks?

(this blog post is part of the process of writing my new book, which still hasn't got a title
A new book is emerging).

Growing out of poverty or grow poverty?

The poorest farmers in the world are unlikely to farm themselves out of poverty. They simply lack resources to invest in agriculture, and paradoxically they often even lack the labor needed as they are busy earning money with other trades than farming. To try to ease their predicament by introduction of GMOs or chemical fertilizers is a counterproductive strategy. 

A recent doctoral thesis, From Betterment to Bt Maize: Agricultural Development and the Introduction of Genetically Modified Maize to South African Smallholders by Klara Jacobson, Uppsala reinforce this understanding through a study of the Massive Food Production Programme (MFPP), an agricultural development program aiming to reduce poverty by raising agricultural production in Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. Introduction of Bt maize (a GM crop) was a main component in this program. The Bt maize variety introduced was not adapted to smallholders' farming environments. It was input-demanding and sensitive to environmental dynamics, and it was promoted for planting in monoculture.

The results also reveal that the program was not properly designed to support the improvement of smallholders' livelihoods through agriculture. The program disregarded the long-term marginalisation of smallholders, and the associated need for substantial advisory, infrastructure and credit support to increase agricultural productivity.

The program also, like so many similar programs, failed to recognize the heterogeneity of poverty, resulting in a bias towards the better-off smallholders. Many may believe that poor farmers would have ample access to labor, from themselves and their families, but the study show that the poorer were more labor constrained than those better off. For example they had to do manual hand-hoeing of their fields instead of using oxen and they had to offer their labor to others for money or food. The wealthier, in contrast could use the labor of the poorer to increase their productivity. 

I have written a number of posts on this, and associated topics earlier, e.g.
The road to food security: What works and what doesn’t?
The hunger, the people and the land
If you don't have cash you don't get to eat
Rich people are not starving – can markets help?
Millennium Villages: the Great Experiment

Ultimately, this analysis can be drawn much further. There are similar issues to consider if we want to understand why commercialization of small holder farming may not work out as well as many believe.
Most farmers will simply not survive in this process. If they did, there would be enormous over-production of agriculture commodities. After the introduction of cross-Atlantic steamships, European farms had difficulties to cope with competition from North America. The response was to introduce protectionist measures. Still the pressure of competition was a lot lower for them than it is for poor farmers in developing countries today. To believe that they could compete with their manual labor, their muscles, with tractors driven by fossil fuel is simply not at all realistic, and the result of this is seen everywhere.

In addition, because of the productivity gains in developed countries, agricultural prices dropped with some 60 percent in the period 1960 to 2000 (Dorward et al 2002). As the productivity, and energy use, of the poorest farmers remained much the same, it is obvious that they lose out. At current prices, it would require one life of labor for a manual farmer to acquire a pair of oxen and small animal drawn equipment, and ten generations of labor to buy a small tractor (Mazoyer and Roudart 2006). The productivity gap has widened over the last decades, both relatively and in absolute numbers (see table below). 

Agricultural labour productivity, dollar per man-year

	1990-1992	2001-2003	Agriculture as share of GDP
Low income countries	315	363	20%
Middle income countries	530	708	9%
High income countries	14,997	24,438	2%
France	22,234	39,220	2%
United Kingdom	22,506	25,876	1%
USA	20,797	36,216	1%
Brazil	1,507	2,790	5%
India	332	381	4%
China	254	368	12%
Malawi	72	130	36%

Source: World Bank 2007

You can read more on this here: Agriculture: How cheap energy (and capitalism) increased the gaps between rich and poor

Brown: Full Planet & Empy Plates

“Food is the new oil, land is the new gold” 

writes Lester R. Brown in Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity (Earth Policy Institute).

The world food situation is deteriorating. Grain stocks have dropped to a dangerously low level. The World Food Price Index has doubled in a decade. The ranks of the hungry are expanding. Political unrest is spreading. On the demand side of the food equation we have a rapidly increasing population and people moving up the food chain, consuming grain-intensive livestock and poultry products. In addition, in some countries, notably the USA, huge quantities of grain is used for bio fuels. 

At the same time, water shortages, soil erosion and heat waves are making it more difficult for farmers to keep pace with demand. New technology can’t compensate for the increasing gap between supply and demand. In the worst case scenario, the whole civilization is threatened.

The book contains a lot of facts, some particularly noteworthy:
-In India and China more than 300 million people live on grain which is produced with unsustainable irrigation practices that pump water at a rate surpassing recharge

-A person in India consumes in average 170 kilograms grain while an American utilizes 640 kilogram. The difference is caused by the American using eighty percent of the grain for meat, milk and egg. 

-The grain used for ethanol in the USA 2011 equals the quantity that could support 400 million people on a global average consumption level.

-For sixty years, increase in grain yields has been impressive, but yield increases have slowed down. Between 1950 and 1990 yields per hectare increased in average 2.2 percent per year, while the last 20 years yields increased only 1.3 percent per year. In some countries with highly developed farming, e.g. in Western Europe, yields don’t increase at all.

Use of US corn crop.

Brown is clearly no supporter of bio fuel. He worries that cars will literally take food from the poor. The fusion of food and fuel trade and production means we there will be competition for grain between the owners of 1 billion vehicles and the poor. And as the average owner of an automobile earns 30,000 dollars per year and the poor just a few hundred dollars per year, it is not hard to know who will have the upper hand. While I share some of his concerns about the effects of increased bio fuels, I do think that Brown simplifies the discussion a bit too much. He claims that other sustainable technologies are available to feed our transport sector, e.g. electrical cars. But not even in the USA which is blessed with abundant natural resources there is any chance to run the transport sector in a sustainable. The question should not be “what shall fuel our cars?”  but rather, how can we redesign our whole transport sector.  

In the last chapter, Brown talks about the solutions. They are largely to stabilise population (a constant theme of Brown’s), eradicate poverty, reduce meat consumption and trash those policies that push bio fuel expansion, notably the mandatory requirements to blend petrol with ethanol in the USA and the EU.
While not being anti-GMO, Brown doesn’t see any great potential for genetic modification to further increase grain yields. This is largely because seed breeders have already tapped most of the potential for increased yields. Similarly he doesn’t see many other technological advances as we are approaching limits set by the climate and the photosynthesis itself. Therefore, on the side of production, we have to stabilize the climate, use water more efficiently and protect the top soil.

By and large, most of the discourse is convincing, but Brown does underestimate the positive and negative effects of the markets on food production. In most parts of the world there is still a huge potential to increase yields – if prices motivate farmers to intensify production. I miss a discussion about the negative effects of unfettered global competition on local food production in many parts of the world. Without those economic and social perspectives we can’t fully understand farmers’ behaviors and choices (or lack of choice) and therefore we are bound to fail in addressing the underlying problems. I also think he largely ignores the enormous dependency of fossil fuel that our food system has in all its chains, from inputs such as fertilizers to the global distribution chains.

The book does drive across that we are moving towards increased competition for basic resources such as land and water. Competition between poor that are hungry and rich that want to drive cars, between multinationals that buy up land and local populations of smallholders. But also, as shown by Brown, between farmers and cities. Many farmers in the US has chosen to let their land revert to desserts when they sell water rights to cities. In this way, expansion of cities creates new desserts.

The web site for the book does contain a wealth of information, including the full data sets used for the research for the book. http://www.earth-policy.org/books/fpep

Millennium Villages: the Great Experiment

The Millennium Villages is one of the most prestigious humanitarian aid projects that have been launched in Africa in the past years, and a lot has actually happened. Yet, the project’s central question remains unanswered – how do you eradicate extreme poverty?

By Ann-Helen Meyer von Bremen & Gunnar Rundgren

-          I have learned a lot through this project, and I have become much more self-confident. I have a plan for the future that I am already working towards, says Mama Sarah, while showing us her well-kept fields. 

            We are in Inonelwa, one of the fifteen villages of Mbola, outside Tabora, in Tanzania. Mbola is one of Africa’s Millennium Villages*, a high-status, ten-year humanitarian aid project that was launched by Jeffrey Sachs, in order to show that it is possible to reach the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. 

            Seven years into the project, Mama Sarah is undoubtedly one of the winners. She emanates strength, energy and stability. A brand-new brick-house has been built next to her old, much simpler home, and a new storage shed for harvested corn and peanuts has also been set up in the courtyard, which enables her to sell her products when prices are at the highest. Mama Sarah earns an income from her farming practices, which is not a given in Tabora, or in Tanzania, for that matter. A brand-new bicycle is also leaning against the wall. It was given to Mama Sarah by Tanzania’s president when he came to visit.

            According to Eliezer Kigaya, who is responsible for agriculture in the Millennium Villages’ local office in Tabora, the secret behind the project’s success resides in its focus on financing chemical fertilizers and seeds, which increases the amount of corn harvested. This is one way to look at it. Another explanation is that Mama Sarah is not any farmer, but one of 67 agriculturists who have been chosen as good examples, to inspire the remaining approximately 6,000 households living in the villages. Prior to the implementation of this project in this particular village, she already belonged to a leading group of farmers. 

            Ruth Kirunda picked the shorter end of the stick.  We met her in the neighbouring village, carrying her young boy on her shoulder. Here, the harvest has been poor, and there are large gaps between the corn plants. She is one of many farmers who have not had the means to pay back her part of the financed package of chemical fertilizers and modern hybrid seeds.

-          We entered the project when it started in 2006, but in 2011, we were unable to pay back the loan. My brother, who I manage the farm with, and I had to leave to care for our aunt who got sick. We therefore could not properly care for the weeds, the harvest was poor, and we were unable to pay back the loan, says Ruth Kirunda.

            When the project was launched, all farmers were included. The reason was simple – for the first two years, chemical fertilizers and seeds were given out for free. After that, farmers were meant to pay for parts of the cost themselves, an investment that they could take out a loan for. Only one per cent of the farmers paid their loan back. Yet, the project persisted and farmers were still asked to pay a certain portion of the invested money back, and today, more farmers are able to do so. However, the majority still cannot pay back, and around two thirds of the farmers are thus not receiving the subsidies.

           

As opposed to many other humanitarian aid projects that tend to focus solely on one particular area, the idea behind the Millennium Villages is to implement solutions in various different fields, such as health, schools and income-generating activities (more specifically, agriculture). According to the Millennium Villages’ coloured publications, poverty is decreasing, as is hunger and the number of illiterates, while health, food production and economic welfare are increasing. The closer we come to reality in Mbola, the more nuanced this picture becomes. The reports claim that corn production has increased three to four times, but during our visit, the Tanzanian government is distributing food to the villages of Mbola. 

           

When we visited one of the cooperatives that process corn and peanuts, we discovered a tragic, and all too common, scene in the humanitarian aid world – the machines have been broken for about a month, and all activities have been put on hold. We did not see any signs of the remaining market investments that were mentioned in the reports. The school meals have not worked out as planned.

-          The idea was that each parent should contribute with two bags of corn (about 440 Pounds) per year, but this has never been the case, says Katherine Mbando, director of Madaha Primary School.

            At the same time, a lot has actually happened. Prior to the project launch, there was barely any clean water in Mbola, whereas today, 64% of the inhabitants have access to it. Three health centres have been built, and as many have been renovated. Sixty health workers have been employed, schools have been restored, mosquito nets that prevent malaria have been distributed, toilets have been built, and electricity has been installed in schools and in health centres. Amongst the positive results, fatality rates have decreased, and so has the rate of undernourished children and the cases of malaria. Moreover, the number of children including girls, attending school has dramatically increased. Maternity care has been expanded, but the rate of mothers dying from childbirth is still high. 

Girl cycling to school in Tabora

            And yet, the two most important questions remain unanswered – are the poorest being reached, and is the agriculture intervention successful? Since the idea is that monetary gains obtained from agriculture should enable households to invest money into public or community services, without a striving agriculture, development will never be sustainable. 

            It is highly likely that the Millennium Villages will not meet the expected Millennium Development Goals, at least Mbola will not. Jeffrey Sachs, founder of the Millennium Villages, and heading the work of establishing the Millennium Development Goals, observes from New York that so far – seven years into the project – not all efforts have reached out to the poorest.

-          You chose to focus on rather expensive investments in agriculture, such as chemical fertilizers and seeds. Was that the right path to take?

-          In order to increase production, you need costlier means of investment. Mbola was also shockingly poor; it was one of the poorest areas that we chose. When we started the project, there was no market, people were hungry during the months leading up to harvest, and there was barely any real housing. This has become better, but it is not the case for everybody, not for the small farmers, and not for those who do not own land.

Tobacco is grown without any subsidies and provides most of the income in Mbola

 

On our way back from Tabora to Mwansa, we saw a group of women and children of different ages sitting crushing stones by hand with sledge-hammers, while the youngest children were playing in the piles of stones. Later, we drove past a gravel pit where a stone-breaker was used for the construction of a new road. The question is whether this new road will be the beginning of economic development, and the end of a market for labour-intensive hand-crushed stone? Or is the new road going to be as meaningless as the more than a hundred-year-old railway? Will it mostly be used to transport the young people of Tabora into cities, where they will sell telephone cards, bananas and lighters? – Third World Network Features.

*The Millennium Villages

The Millennium Villages is a ten-year-project that will last until 2015, and its aim is to reach the Millennium Development Goals. The villages that have been selected exist in ten countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda. According to project data, it reaches out to half a million people. The initiative was launched by Jeffrey Sachs at Earth Institute, Colombia University, and he is also heading the project. 

Published as a TWN Feature in July 2013

Organic Agriculture: African Experiences in Resilience and Sustainability

 I am currently in Tanzania organizing an organic conference. It is also my pleasure to launch a new publication from FAO of which I have been a co-editor together with Nadia Scialabba, with Raymond Auerbach as the main editor.
Organic Agriculture: African Experiences in Resilience and
Sustainability.

It demonstrates that organic management can benefit people, the
economy and ecosystems and that this can be achieved in Africa, where hunger and degradation stubbornly persist, despite decades of development efforts.

You can see my presenting slides here and download the whole publication here

The Rise of Africa - a fairy tale?

During my recent trip in East Africa, I saw a frenzied building activity in Dar es Salaam, Nairobi and Kampala. I saw an industrial park outside Kampala, and even between Mwanza and remote Tabora in Tanzania a new road was built. Oil drilling is set to commence in Uganda and gas pipelines are built from gas fields off the coast of Kenya and Tanzania. It seems like a lot of money is spent and investments are high. So far you could say that I witnessed the Rise of Africa – an increasingly popular narrative. 

Africa is now sometimes referred to as the New China. Africa’s booming economic growth fuelled by a rigorous focus on government and citizen accountability will boost poverty reduction and prosperity, according to the World Bank’s latest Africa’s Pulse, the twice-yearly analysis of the economic trends and latest data on the continent.

“The broad picture emerging from the data is that Africa’s economies have been expanding robustly and that poverty is coming down,” says Shanta Devarajan, the World Bank’s Chief Economist for Africa, and lead author of Africa’s Pulse. Throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, the report found, economic growth remained strong at an estimated 4.7 percent. Excluding South Africa, the region’s largest economy, the remaining economies grew at a powerful 5.8 percent—higher than the developing country average of 4.9 percent.”

This "Africa Rising" narrative has been recently also been taken up by cover stories in Time Magazine and The Economist.

And as I said, there is building going on. But....

To compare Africa’s current development with China’s is nonsense in my view. China was always an industrial powerhouse – its GDP was much bigger than the whole of Europe before European imperialism. It has just undergone a temporary slump. In contrast Africa was never industrialized and it has been plundered for centuries, most importantly of its biggest resource – its people. Colonization certainly didn’t help.

For how long have you seen “made in China” on products you buy in the shop? And how often do you see “made in Nigeria/Kenya/Uganda/Zambia” on anything you buy? Even in African countries themselves, most industrial goods are imported from China, Thailand, India, USA or Europe. South African supermarkets are increasingly dominating the shopping scene in East Africa, and in their shelves most stuff is imported. And all those wonderful East African textiles – made in Bangladesh.

The industrial park I saw outside of Kampala seems to house mainly import/export companies. And looking in my own field of expertise, agriculture, it is still mainly dependent on manual labour with very low productivity.

Africa attracts a lot of investments  now. Part of it is from the African diaspora. Foreign remittances are said (of course data here is extremely fuzzy) to be bigger than total aid. Of course, all this money pouring in will have to be spent. Of course it will trigger economic growth, but there is no guarantee for a lasting development.

 “The idea of development as industrialization has been completely abandoned in the last few decades. Free market economics has come to advise poor countries to stick with their current primary agriculture and extractives industries and "integrate" into the global economy as they are. Today, for many champions of free markets, the mere presence of GDP growth and an increase in trade volumes are euphemisms for successful economic development. But increased growth and trade are not development”.

writes Dick Rowden in Foreign Policy.

The data behind the Rise of Africa narrative is also questioned. Morten Jerven’s research, Poor Numbers, in various Anglo-phone African nations suggests that the data supplied by national records and statistical offices are highly unreliable, with figures that substantially misstate the actual state of affairs.

Also, an economic growth rate of 5% per year is not so impressive when it is put in relation to the growth of the population. After all it is the growth per capita that counts when it comes to poverty reduction. Again, compare China with a 8% economic growth with almost no population growth with Sub-Saharan Africa with a population growth that is almost as big as economic growth. Between 1980 and 2010 GDP per capita in 2005 International dollars increased only from 1,800 per person to just above 2,000, albeit with a drop down below 1,500 in the early nineties (source).

Some are terrified by the growth of population in Africa, but by and large Africa is not much populated compared to Europe and Asia. Perhaps, this population growth also holds a promise for the future. The biggest shift in Africa’s demography resulting from the population boom is the increase of the working age population. In 2010, 34 per cent of Africans were aged between 25 and 59. They represent 34 per cent of the population or 353 million people. By 2050 this number is expected to reach 892 million people, representing 45 per cent of the population. This would represent a dramatic shift in the world’s labor force, with Africa likely to replace China as the biggest contributor to the global workforce.

Historically, a big work force has been one of the major drivers for economic development. But historical relations might no longer hold: in an industrial development with increasing automation the importance of the size of the workforce will perhaps be less pronounced. We already see that industries are to some extent coming back to the USA and Europe. In general, it seems like industries are going the same way as farming, a constant over-production as a result of that increase in productivity is quicker than growth of demand. This means that the industrialization path for development will be increasingly narrow and hard to go for newcomers.

Of course, there will be spots and pockets than can thrive without either industrial development or agriculture productivity growth; living on tourism or mining for instance. And there are countries which can – and have already – developed industries. After all Africa has 54 countries with varying conditions. But for a large scale development of Africa it needs both agriculture growth and industrialization. And both seem hard to get.