One cannot overstate the issue of food security in Africa. A full 40 percent of children under the age of five are stunted due to poor nutrition, and Africa’s share of global child mortality has increased from 30 to 50 percent since 1990. 

For a continent on which the majority of people are farmers, how is this possible? 

In its 2014 progress report, the Africa Progress Panel (APP) describes Africa as “dangerously dependent on imports.” Part of the problem lies with low productivity, terrible advice, and a lack of investment. Smallholder farmers are, according to the APP, a rather long-suffering and heroic group:  

“Operating with no fertilizer, pesticide or irrigation on fragile soil in rain-fed areas, usually with little more than a hoe, they have suffered from a combination of neglect and disastrously misplaced development strategies,” APP described the state of Africa’s agriculture situation in the report.

“The results are reflected in low levels of productivity: cereals yield are well under half the world average.”

Tackling issues of financial inclusion, social safety nets, and access to markets requires a great deal of effort and participation from governments. From that perspective, it’s little wonder that there’s an incentive for politicians to simply ignore small farmers and contract out land to international companies, which bring their own know-how and can even build their own roads and infrastructure. 

This could be especially tempting if one’s own people have little to no recourse in resolving mistakes, injustices, or outright corruption. 

Unfortunately, the consequences could also be dire. It’s hard to see how relying on the production of food and commodities for export will improve wealth or health outcomes or help a nation’s long-term development plans. 

Where things go wrong

A report in Foreign Policy details several such examples — family farmers being displaced while land is transferred to foreign companies for soy and corn production in Mozambique, farmers and herders forcibly removed from villages in Ethiopia to make way palm-oil and rice projects for India, and the list goes on. 

Aside from ethical issue of moving existing farmers and the environmental impact of clearing “unused” wildlife areas for large-scale projects, one cannot help but ask how such investments actually contribute to the continent itself. 

How do people, who are presumably shifted from being individual farmers to laborers, visibly benefit, and how do these projects help the food problem in Africa? Especially when, as happened in Ethiopia, the result is a four-fold increase in the price of a food staple (not to mention reports of physical violence, rape, and intimidation in carrying out eviction orders). 

Unfortunately, strong governmental institutions don’t appear to be optional when it comes to resolving, or avoiding, these types of situations. Dr. John Mbaku, a professor of economics at Weber State University, emphasizes rule of law and institutional strength as a critical part of ensuring stable development. 

“You see, the thing is that most African countries, when they became independent, one of the things they were supposed to do was look at the nature of the laws and institutions they inherited from the colonial government and ask this fundamental question: Would these institutions be able to provide mechanisms to resolve conflicts peacefully?” 

He continues, “Most of these countries didn’t do that, so they ended up with institutions that are incapable of handling even simple conflicts.” 

It makes sense: If, for example, you’re a smallholder farmer in rural Cameroon and want to oppose a large-scale palm-oil operation, what avenues of recourse do you realistically have? How can you ensure that your losses aren’t permanent? According to an in-depth Foreign Policy investigation into the subject, you can’t.  

Serving smallholder farmers 

To be fair, not all cases are bleak — Africa is a large continent with many different stories, after all. 

Rwanda, while still poor, meets 90 percent of its national food needs through agriculture, which also accounts for 80 percent of employment and 63 percent of foreign exchange earnings. A major project in conjunction with the World Bank was able to improve productivity, modernize farming methods, provide access to financial services, and elevate employment levels for smallholder operations and their support industries.  

The APP echoes that it is precisely this type of investment that could help fuel growth, productivity, and economic enrichment for individuals. Agriculture is already a mainstay of Sub-Saharan African economies in particular, and taking steps to develop the sector organically, as it were, could unlock a major path to growth.

“African farmers must be at the center of the transformation that we envisage. Most of Africa’s poor live and work in rural areas as agricultural producers. Their ability to contribute to growth and participate in the benefits is determined by capacity to raise productivity, build skills through education, and withstand the shocks and uncertainties that come with an unpredictable climate.” 

The APP emphasizes that there is a place for large-scale commercial farming as a complement to smallholder agriculture, while reiterating the importance of stronger regulation.

How to balance these issues in practice, however, is no simple matter. As with eminent domain in the U.S., the idea of dislocating millions of people to make way for commercial farming operations can seem very hard to justify, especially in situations when there is no official process to complain or seek recourse.

Governance and institutional reliability remains at the heart of the matter — both politically and among companies, as small agribusinesses can grapple with governance issues as much as their political leaders.

Roman Zyla, senior corporate governance officer with the International Finance Corporation, points out that family companies (most agricultural businesses are family-owned) sometimes have more trouble than their professionally-managed peers in adopting sound governance practices. 

Part of this is due to the tricky balance between “benefits for the business and benefits for a family…. Family businesses struggle with the need for family governance versus business governance.” This reflects, on a smaller scale, the same struggle that politicians probably face — what is good for politics today versus what is good for the nation’s future. 

African governments have an immense responsibility on their hands to guide their nations into the future, and much of their success or failure, it seems, will hinge on finding the right long-term solution.