The War on Africa’s Family Farmers
Economics, Food Shortages, Global Warming/Climate Change, People Systems, Society, Village Development — by Joan Baxter April 20, 2011
Proposing ‘grandiose solutions without first diagnosing the causes of what ails Africa and her people has never stopped the World Bank, corporations and the odd billionaire from prescribing the wrong medicine for the continent,’ writes Joan Baxter, as the Bank makes plans to ‘unlock’ the future of African agriculture.
by Joan Baxter, originally published on Pambazuka News
A vivid image of rural poverty?
Photo: ILRI
The opening line in the World Bank’s ‘World Development Report 2008 — Agriculture for Development’ goes like this: ‘An African woman bent under the sun, weeding sorghum in an arid field with a hoe, a child strapped on her back—a vivid image of rural poverty.’[1]
With all due respect to the team of World Bank experts who put together this extensive (and no doubt very expensive) 365-page report, there are problems with this picture. Conspicuously absent are the woman’s family members and other women with whom she may be chatting and laughing as she weeds. And she may be quite happy to have her baby snuggled against her back – where better for both mother and child?
But its lack of context and narrow focus are not the only problems with this World Bank ‘vivid image of rural poverty’. It’s a one-dimensional stereotype concocted to arouse pity rather than inspire the respect that Africa’s farmers deserve. It ignores their intricate knowledge of local resources, the crop varieties they have developed to cope with a wide range of soil and climatic conditions, their complex and resilient agro-ecological family farming systems. It misses the bigger picture, the myriad other crops that the woman undoubtedly cultivates on a very agro-biodiverse family farm, the valuable trees that she and her family depend on for income, food, fibre, medicine, wood and that the soils depend on for fertility and protection. It perpetuates the false notion that Africa’s family farms are inefficient and non-productive.
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