Helping Africans Feed Themselves

          There have been an increasing number of reports and much discussion on the hunger in Africa impact of the Russia-Ukraine conflict since I wrote my blog on it (Ukraine War Causes Hardships for Africa – April 21).  It is becoming increasingly clear that this conflict is worsening hunger issues on the continent the longer it persists and will eventually threaten stability in many places not now touched by conflict.

According to the World Food Programme (WFP), as many as 811 million people worldwide go to bed hungry every night, and the number of those facing acute food insecurity has more than doubled - from 135 million to 276 million - since 2019. A total of 48.9 million people are facing “emergency levels of hunger.” 

The WFP attributes this “seismic hunger crisis” to a deadly combination of four factors:

• Conflict is still the biggest driver of hunger, with 60 percent of the world's hungry living in areas afflicted by war and violence. Events unfolding in Ukraine are further proof of how conflict feeds hunger, forcing people out of their homes and wiping out their sources of income.
• Climate shocks destroy lives, crops and livelihoods; undermine people’s ability to feed themselves, and have displaced 30 million from their homes globally in 2020.
• The economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are driving hunger to unprecedented levels.
• And, last but not least, the cost of reaching people in need is rising: the price WFP is paying for food is up 30 percent compared to 2019, an additional US$42 million a month.

For example, In Nigeria, a chronic lack of funding means WFP has been forced to cut rations and limit the number of people it can assist – more than half a million people who previously received WFP food are now without this vital assistance. In South Sudan, 8.3 million people – or 70 percent of the population – face extreme hunger as the 2022 lean season peaks.

"Currently, 22.5 million tons of grain are blocked by Russia," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told host Rob Schmitt in an exclusive Newsmax television interview in the capital city of Kyiv this week. "In order to de-block this territory with an exit to the sea, with an exit to water, with an exit to our people, we need to fight, and we need to have weapons with effective range as far as 120-140 kilometers."

Increasingly, the deprivations caused by the war are being highlighted as reasons to support Ukraine’s resistance.  Efforts made to sway African leaders to the West’s cause in opposing the Russian invasion have been largely unsuccessful thus far.  This begs the question of what will African governments do in this situation.

The Economist reported on March 12^th that after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and the West imposed sanctions, it boosted efforts to sell arms, extract resources and prop up shaky African regimes, becoming the continent’s largest supplier of arms. Now that Russia is suffering far more sweeping sanctions, The Economist questioned whether African governments thought Russia still had enough to offer.

The vote on March 2^nd  at the UN General Assembly to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine suggests many are hedging their bets. Of the 54 African countries, 28 backed the motion but 17 abstained and eight were no-shows. Eritrea, which the magazine described as a gulag state, joined Russia, Belarus, North Korea and Syria in voting against.  Whether these votes reflect ordinary Africans’ views was unclear. Mobile-phone surveys carried out in early May in six African states for The Economist by Premise, an American research firm, suggested that governments’ ambivalence was reflected in public attitudes. In Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Uganda pluralities held Russia most responsible for the war. But in Mali and the Ivory Coast, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was most often cited as the guilty party.

But in light of the increasing upheavals anticipated due to current and impending food shortages, as well as the impact of secondary sanctions on those willing to violate restrictions on commerce with Russia, will the pro- or neutral attitudes toward Russia prevail, and if not, what could these countries do to improve their situations?

As important, if not more so, what can be done and what will be done to mitigate the damage to Africa done by the current conflict in Eastern Europe?  The first impulse of developed countries is to provide humanitarian assistance to those in need, especially those who support Western policy toward Russia.  According to a recent U.N. report, 25 of the 69 countries that are currently seeing an increase in hunger due to disruptions in food, energy and finance systems are in Africa. Domestic inflation compounds the effects of global price hikes for basic food supplies like wheat, sorghum, rice, millet and yams, significantly reducing Africans' purchasing power.  Even if donors wanted to provide such food to suffering citizens in these countries, to what extent and how long could they fill the gaps?

Africa’s true size is vastly underestimated, as has been its agricultural potential.  In 2011, the World Bank estimated that the region had 200 million hectares of suitable land that was not being used for crops – almost half of the world’s total – and more than the cultivated area of the United States. That potential excites many. “Africa is the future breadbasket of the world,” said Ephraim Nkonya of the International Food Policy Research Institute, a think-tank in Washington, D.C., in a 2018 article in The Economist (Africa has plenty of land. Why is it so hard to make a living from it?).

The magazine makes the point that most of Africa’s spare land lies in just a few big countries, such as Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In densely populated places (with more than 100 people per square kilometer of farmland), average farm sizes have shrunk by a third since the 1970s.  A large reason is that conflict on the continent and the overwhelming refugee and migration trends have left many farms untended.  In hotspots like central Nigeria, clashes between crop-growing farmers and herders have killed thousands. Doomsayers predict a larger crisis brewing.  These phenomena have been widely studied, but relatively little progress has been made in returning farmers and farmlands to a productive status.  Time is running out to actually tackle such challenges and devise and implement a sustainable solution to the problem of feeding Africa’s hungry people.

The continent is currently a net importer of food, and by 2050, populations are predicted to swell to twice their current size.  Real solutions are urgently needed.  It can no longer be acceptable for governments to apportion productive land to cronies who use the land as collateral for loans rather than as a foundation for agricultural progress.  Nearly two decades ago, I witnessed the results of Zimbabwe’s government providing land to so-called “war veterans” who had little interest in becoming productive farmers.  In the name of ending the monopoly of land owned by white farmers, the then-Government of Zimbabwe took their land and gave it to people who actually treated black farmworkers worse than their white bosses, according to black farm labor groups.  You could see with your own eyes the difference in the level of crop growth on farms still owned by whites and those run by the new black owners.  Redressing the unlawful seizure of black-owned land in Zimbabwe by white settlers was a widely agreed beneficial goal, but the means of redressing old injustices bypassed the very black farmworkers who could have made that policy a success.

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include the eradication of hunger by 2030.  It is firmly believed that this goal – SDG2 – is genuinely attainable since the world already produces enough food to meet the basic nutritional requirements of everyone on the planet, although its distribution is faulty.

Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, believes policymakers have misdiagnosed the problem. Instead of emphasizing sustainable (and more local and diversified) food production and equitable distribution, they have focused on increasing agricultural productivity and making supply chains more “efficient” by reducing costs. That has led, she wrote, to an overemphasis on yields, insufficient attention to agro-ecological contexts and local nutritional requirements and strong incentives for chemical-based agriculture.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize to the WFP, which said it wanted “to turn the eyes of the world toward the millions of people who suffer from or face the threat of hunger.”  For the reasons cited earlier, African countries continue to be in need of outside food assistance.  Isn’t it time to create sustainable solutions for African countries to meet their own food needs without remaining overly dependent on foreign aid assistance?

Many African countries were once able to not only provide for the food needs of their own citizens, but were net exporters of food products.  Since it happened before, why can’t that happen again?