Jill Rees: Welcome Press

Recently I found myself embroiled in an argument with a businessman from Lagos about agriculture in Africa. Bizarrely, although the argument was very passionate, we both were arguing the same point of view, although not only did he know much more about it than me, he also had more ‘right’ to speak about it, as he is Nigerian, and himself personally involved. The argument was saying that Africa ought to be a major food producer in the world, and that many acres in Africa are just wasted when they could be made productive.

No way would I encourage any violent sabotage of oil pipes of course, although when polluters bribe the population with wealth and jobs, as they do in the UK, it is one thing; but when the jobs and wealth go to investors one can only term ‘imperialists’, while the crude oil leaks across the fields and streams of poor people’s countryside, disabling their ability to be self-sufficient, one can only feel sympathetic. But today we aren’t talking about the injustice surrounding Nigeria’s oil production for a change, we’re talking about land far from the Delta State.

‘Everywhere I go,’ said my friend, ‘I see fields that are lying fallow, nobody using them. All over Nigeria are these stretches of wilderness, waiting to feed us.’

One of the most surprising things about Africa when I first came was that Africans prefer to eat meat with every meal. In Europe, we like to have a bun or a small bowl of muesli for breakfast. When my host Yussouf saw this he was horrified, and, thinking he would be seen as a poor host (especially as his wife was largely invisible in the kitchen, but enough about his problems!), he rushed out to the market to get some meat for grill.  To this day, he fails to believe that we like vegetarian meals, and suspects that we are intimating that he is too poor to feed us properly. No, Africans like meat.

‘We can’t really get the food like in Africa,’ moped the waiter at the Africa Restaurant in Bristol, England, ‘Because we can’t get high enough quality meat here’. The quality of meat is much better in Africa, than our fatty gristly stuff.

We like all the other African stuff too, couscous, Atlantic fish, exotic fruit like Papaya and so on.  Though we clearly source it in Africa, the image of Africa that it is full of starving children and famine prevails. This is because northern white men are stupid.

‘Here is a papaya,’ I say patiently, ‘Where does it come from?’

‘Africa.’

‘Correct, so what do Africans eat?’

‘Rice from American aid packages.’

‘No, now I’m going to start again, let’s take it more slowly this time….’

During my childhood, another African state in chaos, Uganda, expelled its most successful citizens, the Sikhs of Indian origin, and we agreed to take them in the UK. Since then, Uganda has spent long decades in the doldrums and finally scratched its way back into relatively high functioning. It is now one of Africa’s agricultural miracles. With two seasons for growth, large rainfall and rich soils, millions of small farmers have worked hard to develop their production of cash crops.  Fish, rice, vanilla, sunflower seeds, roses and potatoes are all blooming.   Ugandan farm output has increased nearly 50 percent during the past decade. Having died off since the sixties, when Africa became isolationist after liberation of so many former colonies, exports are once again beginning to build.

West African countries, such as Liberia, have decided to limit exports because of increased costs to farmers, and this closing down of markets can only destabilise African trade. Having finally got an advantage, Africa needs to hold on to it. What could really help would be a strong African Union, a bit like the European Union. African countries doesn’t seem to keep in touch with each other as much as they should, if they want to ward off the twin evils of European monetary strength and American loathing of all that is not actually America.

As well as providing the cash incentives, as Uganda has done, for small local people to grow crops, the nations need to invest in distribution. This would have the dual benefit of dealing with rural poverty as well as increasing national exports.  Mali is an example of a country which is building roads, has an understanding of national infrastructure, and is concentrating on trucks and transport as much as production. President Toure denies his is a poor country - if it is well-run, and the people eat and are educated, a country is not poor, he claims. It is the producer of the world’s best cotton, for example. Mali and Niger have recently started a programme, helped out by the Islamic Development Bank, to build dams along the Niger to grow food in previously droughted and impoverished areas bordering on the Sahara desert.

This is when a government cares about its people, of course. Other countries not very far from here are more interested in using the Aid programmes to look after the people, such as they do, and pocketing any investment money whenever they can.

One thing you can trust African countries to do is to blow everything by the leaders’ love of gain and their self-interest. Africa, with its land, its rain, its sun, its oil, its seas, its population explosion, its fruit and vegetables, should always have been ‘paved with gold’ as Timbuktu once was. Ironically, the obstacle to exports at the moment is not the climate, nor is it Africa’s varied bugs, blown around unpredictably by the Saharan winds.  The problem is the increase in oil prices which farmers need for their farm vehicles and machinery. A simple way to maintain advances in agriculture would be for government to buffer the farmers from these price hikes, which Nigeria, as a major oil producer, should have no trouble in doing.

Of course we don’t really need government to be doing something positive. In Kibera, Uganda, former inmates of prisons who couldn’t get work started digging out old slum areas and turning it all into organic farmland. They enlisted the help of Green Dreams, a pioneer company who support organic farming. Casting aside the broken bottles, tin cans, abandoned tyres, animal bones and ‘flying toilets’ littering the grounds, the young men purified the soil of zinc by planting sunflowers, which absorb the poisonous metal. They quickly established a local customer base in the slums, and are now a teaching farm for other potential organic farmers. None of the lads intends returning to prison! For a family or group of families, a tiny plot of earth can be used to grow some favourite things, with just a little watering, getting the kids to learn about the beauty of growing things.

‘Who is going to change this thing?’ said the businessman. Who indeed?

1,160 words

©Jill Rees

23 September 2008

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Tags: agriculture, AID, farmers, Kibera Uganda, Leadershiip, Mali, Nigeria, President Toure