Why Africa needs African Solutions to its Problems

---

---

---

---

---

By convention, access to safe and nutritious food is a fundamental and inalienable human right. However, there is ample evidence that Africa has yet to extend this right to most of her population. The 2018 World Hunger Index shows that Africa remains the hungriest continent. Africa also has the lowest agricultural productivity in the world. Although the continent possesses an estimated 60 per cent of the world’s available arable land and an estimated 70% of Africans engaged in agriculture, it produces a meagre 10 of world´s agricultural output which is inadequate to feed her ever growing population. The need to improve agricultural productivity is thus priority and a shared global ambition. The second of the global Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs) is to “End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture”. The third target within this goal is to “double the productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers”. Sustainable agricultural mechanisation (SAM), the use of agricultural machinery to increase farm outputs as well as provide environmental services, is one of the pathways to improve agricultural productivity.

In 2014, African leaders under the Malabo Declaration committed to double agricultural productivity on the continent.

They identified increasing investments in agricultural mechanisation as a pillar for attaining this. This strategy resonates with earlier attempts to revolutionise agriculture in Africa. However, there is ample evidence that past SAM investments in Africa were largely unsuccessful. The thrust of this article, therefore, is to identify the barriers that led to limited success of previous attempts at SAM and propose options for overcoming the identified barriers to increase the chances of success in the next phase of SAM investments in Africa.

In what follows, first, the article attempts to point to the source of African leaders’ inspiration for agricultural mechanisation as a solution to low agricultural productivity. Second, a case study of the failed tractor revolution in Ghana is used to highlight red flags that we must guard against and afterwards, some concluding thoughts are provided.

The history of agricultural mechanisation cannot be written without the West and much space has been devoted to the subject elsewhere. As a quick recap, mechanised agriculture started off in the early 1830s with simple farm implements like the reaper. The reaper improved farmers grain harvest by more than 200%. It was not until 1890 that the first fuel powered tractor was introduced by John Froelich. Following decades of experimentation and readjustments by John Deere and a host of others, tractors evolved from simple to complex models, including the self-driving ones that were endorsed by experts of the tractor industry in 2014. The evolution of the technology is, however, only one side of the coin that revolutionised agriculture in the US.

In a recent discussion with a famous economic and agricultural historian, Alan Olmstead, I found that social movements and investments in technical agricultural education were also very instrumental in the successful scale-out of the tractor as an innovation. According to him, this was achieved through various forms of awareness raising, capacity development and strategic investments by government and private sector alike in technical agricultural education. Similar pathways are true for Europe which did not only rely on the US for tractors but harnessed their capacity to develop tractors as well as the technical capacity needed to make it suitable for their systems. Nations of the East, including India, China and Japan have towed similar paths. So, agricultural mechanisation as we see in other regions of the world did not occur by some miracle. It took decades of hard work and strategic investments.

Smallholder agriculture, involving simple farm implements such as hoes and machetes, remains the most prevalent form of agriculture in Africa. Draught animal power is sparingly used in some regions where farm implements are attached to oxen or donkeys to conduct activities like ploughing. It is, therefore, safe to state that Africa´s inspiration to mechanise its agriculture stems from its associations with other parts of the world, and rightly so because there is nothing wrong with drawing inspiration from forebearers. As Sir Isaac Newton puts it, “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants”. These shoulders should, however, not restrict one´s ability to innovate solutions worthy of his/her peculiar needs. Sadly, however, this seems to have become the case of Africa, and I will use Ghana to illustrate this.

The tale of Ghana´s failed mechanised agricultural revolution, I am convinced, would warrant at least three volumes of a book.  I will, however, strive to keep it to the essentials. It is really a tale of unrealised potential, riddled with realities of incompetence, corruption, misplaced priorities and utter resource waste.

Since the last five decades, several Ghanaian leaders, dictators and constitutionalists alike, in an attempt to propel an agricultural revolution in Ghana, imported several tractors and other agricultural machinery under various schemes and programmes. These initiatives targeted several parts of Ghanaian agriculture and ranged from grain to biofuel, (largely Jatropha curcas) production. However, on a visit to a typical community – such as Ejura or Kpachaa– where these interventions were meant to be you are bound to meet three things:  an old building, malfunctioning agricultural machinery, and an old security man. What is the link? You might be wondering.

With deep enthusiasm, the old security man will welcome you to the old facility and without much questioning, he will give you a rich history of how the machinery you see came to be. His narration which starts on a very lively note reaches a crescendo within minutes and then fades as he begins to highlight what he believes, led to the appalling state of things. From one such interaction in Ejura, a maize growing hub in Ghana, the narrative is summarised as follows:

“New government inaugurated. Agricultural mechanisation project initiated. Lots of employment, high productivity and everyone is excited. Corruption pops up. The project officially ends. Production declines. Machinery develop faults. Inadequate resources for maintenance. Machinery breaks down. Staff are retrenched. Change in government. Project abandoned”. Hmmm.

Ghana, however, is not the only case. Similar incidences have been reported elsewhere: Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya. Sparingly do mechanisation projects achieve scale. The challenges for this can be summarised into three main elements: political ineptitude, limited technical capacity, incompatibility of technologies with local conditions.

Political ineptitude is highlighted by lack of foresight, inadequate political will and corruption. A lot of governments in Sub-Saharan Africa seem to relish satisfying piecemeal party manifestos over holistic national interests. Often ruling parties take pride in establishing their own legacy to improve their chances during subsequent elections. This obtuse position means that political interests are valued and placed ahead of national development. As a result, and as is the case of Ghana, promising agricultural mechanisation initiatives are often not funded when there is a change in government.

The next dimension of this challenge is corruption and elite capture. This is not only pervasive in mechanisation but a general canker within every initiative of most African governments. A special issue on tackling corruption in Africa is forthcoming on Breakout Africa. Nonetheless, political ineptitude can be addressed if we institutionalise agricultural mechanisation instead of developing them under short-term interventions. By focusing on mechanisation as an institution that needs to be built and developing a comprehensive strategy for investing it, we reduce the chances of neglect when there is a change in government.

Limited availability of the technical skills required adequately use and repair tractors (and other agricultural machinery) is the next major challenge to SAM in Africa. Tractors are not part of the production culture of Ghana and most African countries. Almost all tractors are imported. This means that the bundle of knowledge and skills required to effectively use and maintain them need to be acquired elsewhere. Same for spare parts needed to maintain the machinery. However, technical education has yet to gain strong roots in  African countries. A lot of artisans and technicians primarily work based on trial and error which cannot be relied upon given the huge costs involved in acquiring heavy-duty agricultural machinery. This capacity needs to be built: a point which reinforces the need to envision mechanisation as an institution.

The third challenge raised here is that adopted agricultural mechanisation technologies are often incompatible with our local environment. Most farmers in Ghana (the situation is similar in other African countries) are smallholders who do not have the means to adopt the technologies that were introduced under previous SAM interventions. In some cases, the technologies did not adequately fit within their production systems. Smallholders in Africa sparingly produce under monocultures. Inter-cropping is used by African smallholder farmers as insurance against crop failure and a means for avoiding and bequeathing poverty.  It is also a way of addressing diverse household nutrition needs. Moreover, through inter-cropping, smallholders protect biodiversity, especially with trees that are often left on farms. Beyond this, tropical tuber crops, notably yam, cassava, and cocoyam which are a key part of African diets are structurally different from the cereals that inspired mechanisation elsewhere. They require their own form of mechanisation which may not be readily available at present. Again the cost of running tractors is in most cases deterring for smallholders. For most farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, therefore, watching governments demonstrate mechanised agriculture is like watching the stars on a moonlit night and envisioning oneself walking on them. It is invariably nice, motivating and deeply satisfying, but it is simply beyond their means. These point to the fact that our current orientation towards agricultural mechanisation may not lead to the agricultural revolution sought in Africa. Rather, the solution may lie with revolutionising the African´s mind so that he does not merely focus on adopting but adapting and building for himself the institution of SAM. One that sits well with our culture and is within our means.

The way forward for mechanised agriculture in Africa –like many of our other aspirations– is for us to be eager to find African solutions to our problems. First, we need to strive to meet our farmers at the point of their needs. This means accepting that we will need to learn to walk before we start to run. We do not have to go to the 19^th century to start off like Froelich and John Deere et al. Rather, we should stand on their shoulders and benefit from their insights. Where applicable, we need to build partnerships with them to develop the competencies needed to make agricultural mechanisation work for our contexts and people. Secondly, we need respect and invest relentlessly in technical education. This has to be linked up with investment in emerging local inventors –such as Kantanka– who are working to develop local solutions that work for our production systems.  As Africans, our medium to long-term aspiration should be to build centres of excellence for SAM. We could start this in metal-rich countries like Guinea, Ghana, Congo and Zambia so that they will produce and supply the rest of the continent with the machinery needed to revolutionise our agriculture. Should we attain this, we have the added value of retaining capital on the continent, and this can be used to fund other development challenges. Finally, we need to declare corruption an enemy of progress and deal ruthlessly with its perpetrators at all levels. This means renewing our sense of patriotism and making government business our business. After all who is the government if not us.

---

Sustainable Development Goals addressed in this article