Trade Negotiations Insights • Volume 7 • Number 8 • October 2008
Responding to Africaʼs agricultural challenges: the need for new paradigms in aid, trade and science
by Kato Lambrechts (1)
The doubling of international food prices in the past fi ve years has hit African economies and societies harder than most. Even before price hikes made headline news, several high-level initiatives and reports were issued on the need to reverse 25 years of neglect of agriculture by both donors and African governments.(2)
The ‘global food crisis’ has prompted a flurry of actions amongbilateral and multilateral donors. Many interpret the nonaffordability of imported food as an ‘emergency’ and want to respond primarily with short-term ‘safety-net’ assistance such as subsidising food aid and distributing seeds and fertiliser tolocal farmers. While these measures may stave off hunger forone growing season, they fail to address long-term systemic problems.
Farmers across Africa complain about eroding and infertile soil, insufficient water for crops (beyond what falls from the sky in increasingly erratic patterns) and inadequate agricultural services, research, technology, marketing channels, transport, storage and credit facilities. When farmers do manage to produce surplus stocks against all odds, they often fi nd that their local or national markets are swamped by cheap imports.
The World Bank’s Growth Commission recently predicted that the global food system is likely to remain vulnerable to price shocks, while food prices will remain significantly above 2004 levels for some time to come.
The UN Comprehensive Framework of Action (CFA) has acknowledged the complexity of the challenge ahead, and has urged the international development community to address the short, medium and long-term causes of the global food crisis. The CFA emphasises that at least two-thirds of all new money and research needs to address the structural and longterm barriers to agricultural and food system development in African countries. (3)
As such, existing and new aid and policy interventions should aim to bring about local economically and socially sustainable food systems that can adapt to climate change by simultaneously pursuing the following three courses of action:
1) Support small scale farming systems
First, national and international interventions need to support small scale farming systems that are resilient to climate change and economic shocks. The 2007 World Development Report has collected a large body of evidence showing that small plots of land – worked appropriately - produce more food and other crops than large industrial farms. Given that most Africans of working age earn part of their living from growing crops on small plots of land, interventions to support this neglected economic activity will contribute to future food security, pro-poor economic growth, and resilient local food systems.
But this cannot happen unless governments and donors develop coherent and integrated rural development, agricultural and food security strategies that are adequately financed. Activities and interventions that flow from such strategies need to:
- develop ecologically sustainable and farmer-led technology soil management techniques;
- provide appropriate services to help farmers increase production and productivity, not only using chemical fertilizers, but using a mix of technologies to boost soil fertility;
- develop local market and transport infrastructure, allowing farmers to organise cooperatives to sell surplus stocks and buy affordable materials;
- develop transparent price stabilisation mechanisms for staple foods;
- provide affordable credit to small farmers;
- provide innovative technologies to access water;
- develop off-grid and decentralised energy solutions;
- develop local, national and regional grain reserves.
2) Support sustainable agriculture practices
Second, aid and policy interventions need to encourage sustainable agricultural practices. The benefits and successes of non-conventional agricultural technologies have largely been ignored. Most are under-used - particularly those that have evolved from local or traditional knowledge. These include rainwater harvesting and other small-scale irrigation technologies as well as the use of organic biomass and nitratefixing plants to fertilise the soil and improve yields.
The mentality of the formal research community has to change. The joint challenges of adapting farming techniques to climate change and developing resilient national food systems mean that ‘business as usual’ is no longer an option. While existing technologies can be transferred and developed at relatively low cost, major political and institutional innovations would be necessary to scale up their adoption across the entire food system.
To date, the practical experience of many African small scale farmers has shown that they can double yields using technology that is known and available. Technologies that use mainly local resources rather than relying on chemical inputs to restore soil fertility can also maintain biodiversity, help small farmers manage erratic water supply and reduce their dependence (and that of the national food system) on chemically produced fertilisers that are becoming increasingly expensive – fertiliser prices have doubled in 2007 alone.
The old ‘Washington Consensus’ paradigm of private-sector led science and technology development has failed to deliver innovative technologies to grow crops that are of high social value, particularly staple foods. The public sector in African countries, therefore, needs to scale up public research capacity and institutions in a way that encourages formal scientifi c research to integrate the knowledge and experience of marginal farmers who grow staple crops for subsistence or local markets.
Those who support the massive roll-out of a new ‘Green Revolution in Africa’ (4) believe that increased availability, affordability and distribution of hybrid seeds and chemical fertilisers will bring about similar increases in crop yields as happened in Asia a few decades earlier.
Pouring new aid into such initiatives may be attractive to donors who want quick fixes to the food crisis. But in so doing they will ignore the many unintended impacts, especially on the environment, such as increasingly chemically-dependent food systems. These include saline soils that leach nutrients, proliferation of dead zones, groundwater and river pollution. African farmers and scientists can learn from experience in Asia and avoid farming practices that damage the very resources which will sustain their livelihoods.
New agricultural research in Africa should focus on enhancing the multiple functions played by the agricultural sector. These include providing food, employment, and maintaining biodiversity and cultural heritage while sequestering carbon.
3) Address new thinking on agricultural trade
Third, the UN Framework for Action pushes all parties to urgently revise current positions in trade negotiations that impact agriculture.This is where most donor countries, particularly the EU, display the greatest incoherence in their response to the food crisis.
Growing evidence from past experience of indiscriminate market opening in Africa and elsewhere – mostly as part of structural adjustment programmes – has prompted near consensus among experts that opening national agricultural markets to international competition in developing countries can lead to negative effects on poverty alleviation, food security and the environment. The focus on trade liberalisation over developing local productive capacity and mature markets has contributed to the stagnation and decline of local food systems in Africa.
There has been some recognition during the Doha Round trade negotiations of the special status of trade in agricultural (especially food) (5) products. While this offers some respite to African governments keen to develop local agricultural markets as part of broader food security and rural development strategies, the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) negotiations between the ACP and the EU could counter this. The EPAs could reduce the policy space required to build up local food systems and markets, while contributing little or nothing towards sustainable increases in production.
First, EU-conceived EPAs are not meant to respond to Africa’s first developmental priority, namely assistance to build sustainable increases in agricultural production. There are already a number of international and EU aid instruments that can deliver this aid.
Second, EPAs could be positively detrimental to building local, national and regional food markets. Most African countries will be able to exclude all currently traded agricultural products from future tariff elimination commitments under flexible bilateral EPAs. While this may assist them in building up local food markets, EU insistence on introducing a standstill clause in EPAs will undermine any future plans to build up national food systems. This clause stipulates that all tariff levels currently applied on EU imports are to be frozen. Thus, a government cannot decide in the future to raise tariffs or non-tariff barriers to EU imports of either fresh or processed food items to encourage local production or processing of similar foods.
Furthermore, if the EU continues to insist on regional EPAs, individual African countries will be forced to agree to open up a far greater share of their local food market to EU imports, given the need to have a common external tariff across the entire region. The process of designing a common external tariff has taken years in ECOWAS and is still not complete, given the impact this would have on future agricultural development. African groupings such as SADC and ESA, which have not even established their own customs unions, are now forced to come up with common liberalisation schedules by December 2008 or mid-2009 at the latest.
It is often difficult for trade negotiators and politicians on both sides of the EPA negotiations to see the forest through the trees. But they would do well to reflect on the history of these negotiations. The original push for an agreement that requires both parties to liberalise ‘substantially all’ trade comes from a narrow legal interpretation of the rules on regional trade agreements and from the European Commission’s interpretation of the Latin American challenge of its banana regime in the WTO. (6)
The EU could have decided, like the US did with the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), to continue providing quota and duty-free access to all ACP countries, and work with the ACP to renegotiate appropriate rules in the WTO for trade agreements between developed and developing countries. Instead, it chose to continue with ‘business as usual’.
A compromised development agenda
Sustainable development cannot be achieved through a bilateral trade agreement. The EU’s pretence that EPAs are about development, instead of recognising a lack of political will to fi ght for changes to anti-developmental WTO rules, has already undermined the legitimacy of the EU’s development agenda amongst citizens in Africa and in Europe.
The EU is planning to pour a billion euros into emergency food aid and input supplies, while at the same time negotiating trade agreements that will at best achieve nothing and at worst undermine the development of local food systems. This is at odds with the growing international consensus on the need for a change in the dominant consumption, food and trade models if African countries are to develop resilient and sustainable food and agricultural systems.
1. Kato Lambrechts is Senior Policy Offi cer in the Africa Division for Christian Aid UK.
2. These include the publication in 2007 of the fi rst World Development Report focusing on agriculture in 25 years, the establishment of a high level donor platform on rural development, and the adoption of targets by African governments to increase agricultural expenditure from the current average of around 3-5 per cent to 10 per cent of budget expenditure. UNCTAD has also focused more attention on the need to invest in agricultural productivity in its 2007 LDC Report and in its 2008 report on Economic Development in Africa.
3. The Framework recommendations provide a charter for systematic, coherent and long-term action by the international development community. The CFA draws extensively from the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology (IAASTD), which represents a near consensus view of over 400 scientists and 50 governments on agricultural knowledge, science and technology for sustainable development.
4. A number of US foundations (Rockefeller, Bill and Melinda Gates), donor governments (UK, Norway), large fertiliser companies and the UN (Kofi Annan is the chair) have formed an Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa. This Alliance aims to reproduce the successes of the Asian Green Revolution in Africa. While they do not exclusively focus on high cost external input techniques and acknowledge complexity of Africa’s agro-ecology and the importance of small farmers, they are spending millions of dollars not on promoting sustainable agriculture, but on subsidising fertiliser and seed packages.
5. Developing countries can exempt ‘special products’ important to rural livelihoods and food security from any trade liberalisation commitments during the WTO Doha Round of negotiations. More controversially, all countries can design special safeguard mechanisms to protect their agricultural sectors from import surges. Disagreement on the modalities of this mechanism has contributed to the current breakdown in the negotiations.
6. Article 24 of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.