Religious leaders say they are exploring short and long term strategies for communities to end reliance on food aid in Africa, as relief organizations continue to minister to thousands suffering from drought and famine in the Horn of Africa.
The worst drought in 60 years is affecting more than 12 million people in Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia. Its epicentre is Somalia, where tens of thousands are fleeing to refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia.
“We would not only want to work on the immediate needs, but we are thinking, because this is becoming a chronic problem, we have got to see the root causes and fight it,” Archbishop Ian Ernest of the Indian Ocean Province and the chairman of the Council of Anglican Province of Africa told a news conference on Aug. 10 in Nairobi after a meeting of Anglican archbishops.
One significant component of persistent hunger in Africa is western food aid. Local farmers, when they have a crop (even if diminished) cannot compete with free food. It forces them out of business, so they head to Nairobi or wherever. More eaters. Fewer farmers. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
An additional problem, common to both Africa and Latin America — where I’ve done all my ag development work — is “land reform.” Left-wing ideology decrees that land should be in the hands of “the people.” As a direct consequence of that misguided belief, the most productive land is divided into ever-smaller parcels, and almost without exception it reaches a point at which [i]none[/i] of the producers can grow enough to make a living. Same result as above.
As but one vignette, I have attempted to assist Bolivian campesinos in an area where two or three generations ago their ancestors lived on a large farm, often owned by someone of more “spanish” lineage. In this particular case the farm had abundant water on-site, significant bottom-land soils, some sloping ground, and a great deal of higher pasture areas. Before WW2 is was a productive dairy farm, also growing grains, potatoes and other vegetables. The peasants lived well, received a modest cash wage, and could feed their families from the large commercial production. Non-farmers in Cochabamba, too, were well-fed, to the extent that hunger in Bolivia was almost unknown.
When I got there, nobody had a piece of ground larger than an acre, and most were smaller. Those along the river were doing okay, but those stuck with old pasture ground faced a hopeless task. Some of the kids were clearly hungry. The dairy was in ruins, and there was nothing available to ship into Cocha. Thanks to “land reform”.
It’s obvious why liberals prefer to be judged by their intentions rather than their consistently poor results. Unfortunately real people’s lives are involved, and it is vastly more difficult to develop a productive farm — or farm system — than it is to destroy one.
Bart,
I can appreciate the negative consequences of land reform (one has but to look to Zimbabwe to see the dire results), but is there a happy – or, at any rate, tolerable – medium between the extremes?
At different times, both capitalism and Communism have embraced the principle of large-scale farming. The former approach has generally proved economically more successful, but not without social costs. Contemporary land reform has at least has moved in the direction of the individual rather than the [i]kolkhoz[/i]; it just has not proved very efficient because, as you point out, the quality of land is not uniform.
A well-fed populace is a vital necessity, but hardly the terminal point. If the state administers the land it seems to do it badly; if the large private landowner administers the land, the yields are better but the workforce remains locked into quasi-feudal state. Is there a way to break this political Gordian knot, perhaps by some form of collective participation that doesn’t make the farm a simple democracy but prevents the emergence of the gulf between the rulers and the ruled that has poisoned much of Central and South America in the last 150 years?
The happy middle ground is the yoeman farmer, Jefferson’s ideal. Not sue how viable a model is is everywhere though. Frankly, I see nothing inherently wrong with the “quasi-feudal” state of farm laborers. When I was growing up, my father and mother, sisters and I all worked our farm. We also had a tenant family with seven children who lived and worked on the farm for a share of the profits (assuming there were any!). Demographics have changed since then, and we now lease out the crop land to a young farmer who has his own equipment, but no land, and the pasture land to a neighbour who is a full-time farmer with only 19 acres of his own, who farms hundreds, to run cattle. I agree completely with Bart. There is a minimum acreage any land can be divided into that will feed and clothe a family, much less feed others. “Land reform” is almost always done for political and ideological reasons that have nothing to do with agricultural or economic efficiency.
Ironically, probably the best land reform in history was that in Russia about a century ago. For those unfamiliar with Russian history, formal feudal serfdom lasted until 1861 (!), at which points peasants were given their own land, but had to pay the tsar for it until 1910. It did not work terribly well and was one of the factors in the 1905 revolt.
The land reforms of 1906-’14 actually made a lot of sense, and included such things as secure private ownership of land, including the right to consolidate holdings. Included in the reforms were a structure for agricultural co-ops quite similar to those in Canada and the USA, a decent ag information extension service, and affordable farm credit guaranteed by the government.
Within a few years these reforms brought forth a growing class of rather successful peasants, the kulak (кулаÌк, which actually means “fist” because they were so “tight-fisted” with their money).
Unfortunately, the communists (=socialists, in a hurry, with guns) took over the country for largely urban reasons and within a generation had intentionally exterminated the entire kulak class. Widespread starvation ensued, and in Ukraine was intentionally fostered. Millions died.
Marxists in both Africa and the Americas employed every possible measure to ensure that no kulak-type class of farmers would ever emerge. Under British colonial rule there were growing numbers of kulak-type farmers: black, white, and (in eastern Africa) east Indian. Ghana was a particular success story, and in 1960 was far wealthier than Hong Kong. Ditto the Rhodesias, British East Africa, and even South Africa. The largest farms, usually in white hands, supported an agricultural infrastructure (machinery parts, fertilisers, pesticides, etc) that allowed African kulaks to do reasonably well until it was all swept away by the tides of marxist nationalism.
To this day I am convinced that the well-managed, medium-sized, family farm is the most efficient productive unit, and in a truly free market (no subsidies, regulatory advantages etc for the big guys) it is by farm the most competitive, successful, and sustainable way to produce food.
To this
[i]Included in the reforms were a structure for agricultural co-ops quite similar to those in Canada and the USA, a decent ag information extension service, and affordable farm credit guaranteed by the government.[/i]
All of which were goals of both North Dakota’s Nonpartisan League in the late 1910s and Canada’s Cooperative Commonwealth Federation.
It’s also worth noting that the real winners of the 1917 Constituent Assembly elections were Chernov’s Socialist Revolutionaries. With overwhelming support from Russia’s Black Earth region, which had produced many of the Kulaks to whom Bart refers, it’s doubtful that they would have embarked upon the sort of collectivization that would later doom the Ukraine to famine for political ends.
[i]Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.â€[/i] Robert Heinlein (TOTH, Reynolds)
Of course many of the white farmers who reached an accommodation with Mugabe after independence to make Zimbabwe the breadbasket of southern Africa in return for economic autonomy were also willing to look the other way when the Sixth Brigade was unleashed in Matebeleland. Prosperity comes with a price tag.
Jeremy,
Are you implying that the farmers could have had the slightest influence of Mugabe’s reign of terror in Matabeleland? As we have seen, they were themselves living on borrowed time. Their objections (and I’m not prepared to believe that they didn’t oppose his excesses through their tiny parlimentary presence), would have changed nothing.
Evan,
I don’t know, but given that it was the white farmers who largely contributed to the post-independence economic miracle, one can’t help wondering what influence they might have wielded behind the scenes had they so chosen. Parliament – dominated by ZANU-PF after 1980 – might not have been the appropriate venue, but a threat to curtail of agricultural production while Zimbabwe was still a front-line state might have held back the regime from such excesses.
It’s obvious that today’s white commitment to the MDC has revealed a singular order of courage (Roy Bennett’s example comes to mind), but it’s a transformation that followed the failure of the referendum on constitutional change in 2000 and the establishment of the MDC.