The challenges of agriculture in Africa

Today, Kenya has a population of approximately 46m people. However, this is set to almost double over the next 30 years to reach 80m by 2050. As a result, the demand on the country’s natural resources is under increasing pressure.

From an agricultural perspective, the soil in the parts of Kenya that I visited certainly has the potential to grow good crops suitable to the climate. However, challenges such as climate change, over-grazing and the erosion of soil structure as well as the lack of technical knowledge around best farming practices have all combined to limit the development of Kenyan agriculture.

As you might expect, water, or rather the lack of water, is a major issue for agriculture in Kenya. Despite the challenges, I saw many examples of innovative water management initiatives that are providing opportunities for African farmers to make a living from farming.

Labour-intensive farming

While in Kenya I visited the Yoani dairy farm, which is located just south of Nairobi. The farm has a herd of 280 dairy cows, with all cows milked by hand every day out in the field. There are over 50 people employed to manage the dairy herd.

In the developed world, milking cows by hand is seen as quite labour intensive, almost to the point of hardship. But for the local villagers, this is their way of life and provides a living for themselves and their families.

While there is a lack of automation and mechanisation in Kenyan agriculture, farmers have an incentive to employ a large workforce as wage costs are low in a country that has a huge population that is willing to work.

This is a fantastic example of the differences in culture and attitude to employment between countries in Africa and those in Europe or North America.

Western influence

One of the highlights of my visit was meeting an Australian farmer who had sold up his farm in Australia to move to Kenya, where he has since built up a cropping operation comprising 1,000 acres.

On the drive to this farm the land looked as if it was infertile and arid. However, when we reached the farm it was like an oasis in the desert. It really demonstrated the potential for agriculture in Kenya if the right investment, knowledge and technical expertise are combined.

From Kenya, I moved on to visit South Africa, where the legacy of the apartheid regime that ended over 20 years ago can still be seen. Driving through Johannesburg, you see modern roads, flash cars and high-rise buildings just like any other city in the developed world.

It has all the trappings of wealth yet unemployment in the country is running at over 25%, while many very poor black communities are living in townships on the edge of the city. In rural communities, roads are disintegrating from lack of investment and small towns are empty shells of the past.

End of apartheid regime

Once apartheid ended in 1994, much of the land that was previously owned by white South Africans and farmed relatively intensively, was bought by the new post-apartheid government. This land was subsequently offered to black communities in South Africa as restitution for what had happened under apartheid.

However, the government offered no support in terms of agriculture skills, access to markets, technical information or financial support to these people who had never farmed land before. As a result, many people who were given land struggled to make economic use of it and in some instances left the land idle.

Importer

Over the last few years, South Africa has gone from being a net exporter of food to a net importer, which can be attributed to the stagnation and deterioration of the country’s agriculture industry over the last two decades.

The lack of vision for the industry or understanding of farmers’ needs from the government has set the South African industry back by several generations.