Tsilahara Monja pulls a spindly sweet potato out of the dry earth of his field. “If there was more rain, these crops would grow better,” he says. He has even less hope for his maize, due to be harvested in weeks but showing few signs of life. Like nearly all smallholder farmers in Africa, Monja relies on rain, rather than irrigation, to water his crops.
His is an extreme situation. He lives with his young family — a wife and two children — in southern Madagascar, a region that has suffered extreme drought for three years. In that time, many of the people around him teetered on the brink of starvation. To survive, his own family ate cactus leaves normally fed to cattle.
Most of the tens of millions of African farmers who work on smallholder plots of up to two hectares are in less precarious straits than Monja, although there have been severe food shortages in other parts of Africa, too — including the Horn and the Sahel region. But even farmers producing decent harvests struggle to rise above basic subsistence. Knowledge of seeds, fertilizer or techniques to increase yield is often lacking.
Even where it exists, the incentive to produce surpluses is often absent. Many farmers like Monja have little direct access to urban markets at home — let alone abroad — via dependable roads or transparent pricing. Smallholder Tsilahara Monja and family in southern Madagascar, where farming has been hit by extreme drought © Charlie Bibby Soanavorie Tognemare at home near Ambovombe © Charlie Bibby Small plots make it uneconomic to mechanize or to consider installing anything as capital-intensive as irrigation, even if credit were available.
That leaves almost all farmers dependent on rainfall in a continent where, agronomists say, rain patterns are becoming more unpredictable. As a result, productivity is stuck in a rut. Yields of everything from rice to cassava are generally low. Despite the fact that Africa has more farmers per capita than any other continent, it is a net importer of food, spending some $43bn in 2019 according to the Brookings Institution — a bill that is likely to increase with spiraling food inflation.
Farmers are able produce surpluses that can be consumed in the cities and perhaps exported abroad, saving foreign exchange. And, just as crucially, farmers put savings in domestic banks, which can recycle it in the form of credit to domestic industry. But, if that virtuous cycle is how economic “miracles” are born, it has stalled in most of Africa. Akihiko Tanaka, president of the Japan International Cooperation Agency, notes that Japan’s agriculture, too, is based on smallholder farms. He says this is why JICA has a technical co-operation project in Kenya to help raise the yields of farmers engaged in “survival agriculture”. Encouraged by its results, which Tanaka says have helped farmers, especially women, see their farms as a moneymaking business, JICA is now extending the scheme to several other countries.
