Black Diasporic Essentials For "Liberation"

[MajorVitaman]

I'm going to force myself to write the next post this weekend

Do it for the people

Uganda

I don't want to take the thread off topic, but what was the process of buying land in Uganda like? Are you AA? How many acres? If you don't mind me asking

 

[yardman]

Does bartering have a slot in the essentials for liberation?

 

[BigMan]

I'm going to force myself to write the next post this weekend

We waiting breh

 

[Bawon Samedi]

@Poitier

When you write your next posts I'll feature this thread.

 

[Axum Ezana]

good shyt keep it coming.

 

[Poitier]

FOOD PRODUCTION
Thomas Sankara: “he who feeds you, controls you”

The Problem:

Stagnation in African Agriculture
Decades ago the green revolution increased crop yields in India and other developing countries using fertilizer, irrigation, and improved seeds. But it never took root in Africa, where yields have barely risen since the 1960s. Less than 5 percent of arable land in sub-Saharan Africa is currently irrigated.

The High Cost of Fertilizer
What African farmers pay for fertilizer can be more than 82 percent higher than the cost to farmers in Thailand. Factors raising the price include poor infrastructure, especially roads, and weak or corrupt governments.

Boosting the Harvest
More than 24 percent of the population in sub-Saharan Africa is malnourished. Bringing production of just 16 key crops up to their potential could yield more than 205 million additional metric tons of food.

Farming
Africa
Poverty, civil unrest, and lack of access to credit or markets all contribute to low yields on fertile ground. No region of the world is growing faster than sub-Saharan Africa. Today's population of 926 million may hit 2.2 billion by 2050. Colors on the map show where harvests meet their potential—or fail to. Africa's gap between potential and yield is the world’s largest.

ALL MAPS AND GRAPHICS: VIRGINIA W. MASON AND JASON TREAT, NGM STAFF SOURCES: JOINT RESEARCH CENTRE, EUROPEAN COMMISSION; GLOBAL LANDSCAPES INITIATIVE, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA; D. I. GREGORY, INTERNATIONAL FERTILIZER DEVELOPMENT CENTER; POPULATION REFERENCE BUREAU; FAOSTAT
Land Grab


These issues leads to the sum African nations importing more food than they export which is not ideal:

Like everything else, colonialism is a key cog in the lack of cultivation of arable land in various African nations. While industrialism should be the aim of any nation, it should never come at the cost of the ability to grow food, but service sector jobs are/were all the rage under World Bank/IMF policy:

ACT 1: Banks Loan Money to Third World Countries

Lots and lots of it. The pitch is this: we know how to develop countries. You’ll borrow this money, invest in development and have more than enough money to pay off the loans. Except that they didn’t know how to develop countries and even those countries in which the leaders didn’t steal the money, the loans grew faster than the tax base, leaving governments less and less able to administer their own countries.

ACT II: Money, Money, Money and Cash Crops

So, you need $. Foreign dollars. How do you get them? You could do what Japan, Korea, the United States and Britain all did, and develop real industry behind trade barriers, of course, but that’s not what the experts are telling you to do. What they’re saying is “you have a competitive advantage in certain commodities: cash crops and maybe minerals. You should work on that.”

Most cash crops are best grown on plantations, so if you want to move your economy to cash crops, you have to move the subsistence farmers off their land. That means they will go to the cities and need food that you no longer grow (since you’re growing cash crops to sell to Westerners.) But hey, that’s ok, because with all the foreign currency you’ll be getting from bananas, coffee and so on, you’ll be able to buy that food from Europe and America and Canada. Right? Right!

Except that everyone is getting this advice, and everyone is growing more cash crops, and the price drops through the floor and you have a thirty year commodities depression. You can’t feed the people you’ve shoved off the land without taking more loans; there are no jobs for those people, so now instead of self-supporting peasants you’ve got a huge amount of people in slums. But, on the bright side, while not enough hard currency has been created to develop, or even stay ahead of your loans, enough exists so that the leaders can get rich; the West can sell grain to you; and you can buy overpriced military gear from the West. Win! For everyone except about 90% of your population.

ACT III: The IMF

The above was standard IMF and World Bank advice, of course. Don’t let anyone tell you that the World Bank or IMF want a country to develop; their actions say otherwise. What they do need to do is push neo-liberal doctrine. So, now that your country is vastly in debt and can’t feed itself without foreign food which must be bought in hard currency, the IMF says “well, we could give you more money, BUT”.

The but is that they want you to stop subsidies of food and let food prices float. That they want you to reduce tariffs on goods, even though tariffs a huge source of tax revenue for you, because your government is crippled and your people have tiny incomes, so you really don’t have the ability to tax them. Then they want you to open up your economy to foreigners buying it up, so foreigners can own every part of your economy worth having (anything that generates hard currency, basically.)

FINIS

After all this your country is a basket case, and when something like Ebola (or terrorism) happens, you do not have the administrative or fiscal capacity to deal with it.

Win, Win, Lose.

Why Africa Can’t Handle Ebola: the Destruction of the 3rd World | Ian Welsh

A report published last month by the Montpellier Panel – an eminent group of agriculture, ecology and trade experts from Africa and Europe – says about 65 percent of Africa’s arable land is too damaged to sustain viable food production.

The report, “No Ordinary Matter: conserving, restoring and enhancing Africa’s soil“, notes that Africa suffers from the triple threat of land degradation, poor yields and a growing population.

According to the Montpellier Panel report, an estimated 180 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa are affected by land degradation, which costs about 68 billion dollars in economic losses as a result of damaged soils that prevent crop yields.

“The burdens caused by Africa’s damaged soils are disproportionately carried by the continent’s resource-poor farmers,” says the chair of the Montpellier Panel, Professor Sir Gordon Conway.

“Problems such as fragile land security and limited access to financial resources prompt these farmers to forgo better land management practices that would lead to long-term gains for soil health on the continent, in favour of more affordable or less labour-intensive uses of resources which inevitably exacerbate the issue.”

More Than Half of Africa’s Arable Land ‘Too Damaged’ for Food Production | Inter Press Service


Problematic foreign interactions are not just tied to banking institutions. As former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo notes, land grabs by foreign entities often move farmers off their land to then sap resources for monetary gain.

Images of starving children, epitomised in news coverage from Ethiopia in the 1980s, have given Africa a reputation for famine that does an injustice to the continent’s potential.

It’s true that a recent report by three U.N. agencies said nearly 239 million in Africa are hungry, a figure some 20 million higher than four years ago. And recent crises in the Horn of Africa and Sahel certainly highlight the desperate uncertainties of food supply for millions – malnutrition still cuts deep scars into progress on health and education.

And on the land that is being used, outdated technologies and techniques mean productivity is low. African cereal yields, for example, are just over one-third of the developing world average and have barely increased in 30 years. One major issue is that as much as 80 percent of Africa’s agriculture still depends on rain not irrigation.

Second, African governments must deal with the land grab issue, as mentioned in an earlier article for this series by my fellow Panel member Michel Camdessus.

Population growth, a burgeoning global middle class, and the search for low-carbon energy sources mean that demand for food and biofuels has shot through the roof. Spotting profit opportunity, foreign investors are scrambling for a piece of the action. They rent land, use the latest agricultural methods (plus precious water from nearby sources), export the food, and make a fortune.

Africa has been at the epicentre of global land deals. Between 2000 and 2011, for example, Africa saw an estimated 948 land deals, covering 124 million hectares – an area larger than France, Germany, and the United Kingdom combined. Many of these transactions involve countries along the Nile and Niger rivers, whose water will be used to irrigate thirsty agricultural schemes. Typically, foreign investors win concessions at low rent and with extensive tax exemptions.

Contracts are often negotiated behind closed doors without consulting affected communities. Indeed, many of these schemes have seen local communities forcibly removed from their land.

How Africa could feed the world[/QUOTE]

 

[Poitier]

Like our African brothers, land grabs/gentrification also keeps would-be African American farmers from starting and/or expanding their enterprises:

Lorenzo Herron is a 26-year-old Detroit native and urban farmer. His degree in agribusiness from Michigan State University brought him back to Detroit in 2012, where he began growing cherries, raspberries, strawberries and mulberries on the city's east side.

"Growing fruit is the least amount of work," he says. "You don't have to baby fruit; most crops need a lot of pampering and are super-needy."

Herron grows fruit to share with his community. He says he can't farm full-time because farming doesn't pay the bills.

"People are not used to not paying the real price of food," he says. "Industrial agriculture is subsidized and competes with everyone. It makes our jobs as small urban farmers almost impossible to live off of."

After more than three years of trying to purchase plots of land in Detroit, he's been unsuccessful. He's not alone; there are dozens of cases of people attempting to buy land without success. Herron says that the property he was interested in buying, for example, belongs to a holding company in Florida.

The frenzy of speculators, outside and foreign investors to purchase Detroit land has shut people out of buying in their own neighborhoods.

One of the most controversial land sales involved investment banker John Hantz. In 2012, Hantz and his company, Hantz Farms, were allowed to purchase 140 acres of what many consider prime real estate for far below market rate. Despite strong opposition from a coalition of urban farmers, community activists and local residents, Detroit's city council approved the contested land deal in a 5-4 vote. According to Crain's Detroit Business, Hantz acquired "slightly more than 1,500 non-contiguous city-owned lots for $520,000, or about $300 per lot."

Last year, Herron and a group of east side farmers met with mayor Mike Duggan about creating a land trust, a private agreement where the city would agree to hold the title to the property for the benefit of community. But the farmers haven't made headway in purchasing land, says Herron.

"To become a land holder in effect is out of reach for black farmers," he says.

Detroit has enough territory to comfortably fit all of Manhattan, Boston and San Francisco. The population of the city has fallen from a peak of nearly 2 million in the 1950s to around 680,000 today. It should be easy to procure land for farming in a city with so much available acreage. But it's not.

Black farmers in Detroit are growing their own food. But they're having trouble owning the land.

The inability to gain land to grow the food has far more serious consequences for poor Blacks than poor Whites:

"Food deserts"—areas in which residents are hard-pressed to find affordable, healthy food—are part of the landscape of poor, urban neighborhoods across the United States. With few supermarkets or farmers markets, it's easier to find a Slurpee than a smoothie, cheaper to get the Big Mac meal than grab dinner at a salad bar.

The link between poverty and food availability has been well-documented since the mid-1990s, but according to new research by Kelly Bower, an assistant professor at the School of Nursing, a neighborhood's income isn't the only barrier to obtaining healthy food. W

hen comparing communities with similar poverty rates, she discovered that black and Hispanic neighborhoods have fewer large supermarkets and more small grocery stores than their white counterparts. Bursting with junk-food options, these smaller establishments rarely offer the healthy whole-grain foods, dairy products, or fresh fruits and veggies that a supermarket would provide. When it comes to having healthy food options, says Bower, "the poverty level of a neighborhood certainly matters, but even beyond poverty, the racial composition matters."

Research shows food deserts more abundant in minority neighborhoods

And has been going on for ages:

Boyd can’t forget the incidents in which white loan officers at the USDA tossed his loan application in the trash, spat on him and even slept during the loan-application interview process. One loan officer threatened him after Boyd responded to questions with “yes” instead of “yes, sir.” If Boyd didn’t address him “appropriately,” the officer said, he’d never see a nickel of loan funds, despite his eligibility. “I sit on all the boards,” the officer warned. “In this county, I’m the next thing to God.”

When blacks did manage to get a loan from the USDA, they often received a fraction of the amount they needed and got it too late for the planting season. Boyd says this put many farms in jeopardy of foreclosure. “That’s how they got a lot of black farmers’ land … a lot of the farms were sold for peanuts.”

Number of Black Farmers in U.S. Is Growing, Thanks in Part to the New Policies at the USDA

 

[Poitier]

In the Caribbean, the issues seem also to stem from the land grab by the wealthy going back to Colonialism, an emphasis on service sector jobs, and less than ideal terrain for many of its nations:

The diverse environments are often constraining as seen in the opposition between mainland-space and island-space with various national histories influencing directions in agricultural policy, differences becoming more evident as the inherent problems persist. Shortage of land, management of water resources, protection of the forest cover, so crucial in a region subject to regular cyclonic storms, and maintaining an adequate agricultural population, are all part of a list of issues requiring investigation in order to determine the future stakes facing an agricultural sector so essential to the Caribbean region.

Globalisation has revealed its limits, especially where it concerns small ‘extravert' economies. Blockages whether social (an island economy is easily paralysed as seen in Guadeloupe and Martinique in February 2009), climate-linked or economic (a slow-down in the market), all demonstrate that producing enough to feed one's own population remains an imperious necessity.

In such changing contexts, the emergence of a regional market becomes the real challenge in years to come.

Too little usable agricultural land
Even if a few countries can boast significant of significant percentages, as in the case of Cuba with over 60% of its land area usable agriculturally or El Salvador (75%), others are less well endowed, like Antigua and Barbuda with less than 10% or even Belize which is able to devote only 6% of its land area to agriculture. However, potential does not signify that the agricultural usage in question is productive. The United States with barely 45% of land in agricultural use are a proven major global producer.

Accordingly, some caveats need to be introduced. Within the region are found countries that face major handicaps: insufficient land area like Anguilla, a physical environment not conducive to cultivation as on the corallian expanses of the Bahamas, where only a few islands are inhabited, or the mountainous relief of Dominica long unusable for major export crops like sugar cane and the banana, yet today attractive to tree crops on the steep mountainous slopes of the Cordillera, which would be re-landscaped into terraces so as to facilitate more efficient production.

Finally, in this environment it must be remembered that water remains the key element to the development of a competitive agricultural system. The regions located around the Tropic of Cancer, both in the Caribbean and elsewhere along the same latitudes, suffer from drought. Whilst the example of Mexico may be well known, with its arid, stony mountains capes, Cuba on a lesser scale announces a similar deficit of rainwater. The centre of the island has seen the multiplication of water retaining barrages, dams which in turn serve both for the needs of irrigation and the production of electricity. The flatter islands, like Barbados, are in a similar situation even though their latitude location is more propitious in respect of abundant precipitation.

Here again is a sad and thorny problem throughout the Caribbean. The system of land attribution and tenure dating from the 16th century, with the plundering of nature property and goods, or the bondage of the autochthonal population, the introduction and development of slavery particularly in the archipelago and a few areas of the isthmus (along the low plains of the Caribbean coast), and in what today is Colombia, all would prove traumatic. In effect, huge estates of several hundred thousand hectares would be created based on the “encomiendas,” like the fiefdoms awarded to the conquistadors and to the great Iberian families who arrived to install themselves in the newly conquered territories. Thus in Mexico, at the beginning of the 20th century, 9 000 great estates covered two-thirds of the cultivated farmland, created out of the labour of the mass of agricultural workers – the “peones” –. Analogous developments were also found in the territories of Venezuela and Colombia.

Relationship with the land for the rural population has often alternated between a thirst for possession and a rejection of the very employment that recalled the yoke of servility on the mainland or slavery in the archipelago. Today, the possession of land remains a problem which few governments been able (known how) to resolve. Through agrarian reforms, from the oldest in Mexico under the aegis of presidents from Porfirio Diaz to Lazaro Cardenas, and their attempts with the “ejidos,” or communal lands, to satisfy the Indian small peasantry to the state control of land imposed by the Castrist Revolution, there have been endless attempts to bring out the redistribution of land. Few would succeed and everywhere one noted a fierce opposition between the great estates or large farms – “latifundios” –, notwithstanding their variation in size and form across the Caribbean1 and the micro-holdings of the peasantry of less than one hectare. The statistics however are far from precise, but by calculating the average size of holdings in each country it is possible to establish degrees of disparity. It confirms the classic opposition between the mainland, with its huge estates boasting the largest averages, and the archipelago where the smallest holdings of less than 5 hectares are the norm.

By contrast, the states of the isthmus offer a veritable kaleidoscope, a mixture of situations: the average size of the large estates are comparable to those of the North American continent in the case of Mexico, and much nearer to those in the Greater Antilles in the case of Colombia, Nicaragua, and Honduras, with average sizes between 300 and 400 hectares.

To the above observations on size should be added a second inequity. Everywhere, the tiny peasant holdings have squeezed themselves into common land left vacant by the “latifundia” estates, thus often lying across the steep hillsides of the sierras or the bleak stretches of the archipelago, or simply valley bottoms difficult of access.

Such claims over land remain a burning issue in the Lesser Antilles. In several islands, the competition for land is ferocious, and it is no longer the divide between large and small holdings which is the centre of debate, but the varying uses to which land is being put. The very high population densities (over 600 inhabitants per km2 in Barbados, 400 in Martinique, for example), the expanding tourist activities along the coasts, industrial-commercial zones that colonise the flatter areas of the islands, and an urbanisation based on defiscalisation as found in the French American Departments, dramatically gnawing away at agricultural space and even threatening the very livelihood of farmers. Land speculation continues at the expense of agriculture.

Each year, between 800 and 900 hectares of arable land disappears.2 In such circumstances farmers, particularly the young and the unprovided, have great difficulty establishing themselves. The situation is becoming all the more challenging in the face of increasing demands, indeed exasperation as unemployment reaches 26% of the active population (and nearly 60% for young people under 25 years).

Whilst for three centuries in the Caribbean basin has been a zone of immigration, today it is the exodus of the young that appears to offer solutions, moving to the cities, or to other promised lands like Canada or the USA, and in smaller measure Europe.

The structure of the land market
As a preamble, it should be noted that statistics in this domain are notoriously incomplete. For countries like Colombia or Guatemala, and again Costa Rica, there is no data. For Cuba, the situation is different in as much as the total means of production, in other words the land, is in public ownership, which is being developed more and more in agricultural cooperatives.

Across most of the region, it is the system of privately owned farms that dominates: with few exceptions owner-farmers account for between 60% and 90% of the total. However, some nuances need to be introduced: in the case of Mexico, official statistics recognise the members of the “ejidos” (rural communities) as proprietors. Being now in common ownership, no parcel of land can be sold by a peasant but each member of the “ejidos” is entitled to one or more parcels for individual use, the land in question returning to common pasture after harvesting. In other countries owner-farmers and also tenant-farmers co-habit, the ratio between the two varying from one island to the next. Tenant farming, for example, wholly dominates in the Bahamas whilst remaining in the minority across the rest of the archipelago.

The demographic expansion of the 20th century created a conflict-fuelled situation which often translated itself into civil wars, where land possession was at stake, even when the latter was openly acknowledged. It proved to be the case in Guatemala, as also in El Salvador, which in encouraging emigration to Honduras found an outlet for part of its overpopulation, and more recently in Mexico (the province of Chiapas).

At the beginning of the 21st century, particular situations had been somewhat alleviated, but with the underlying problems not yet resolved. This alleviation appears to be related essentially to economic development which has favoured new activities other than agriculture.

Indeed, over the last 15 years, everywhere across the Caribbean there has been a significant drop in the active population employed in agriculture. Occasionally, the figures appear spectacular: Guatemala, so deeply affected by civil war saw its employed agricultural population drop from 57% to less than 20%. The records would indicate the same for the Dominican Republic which through its free port zones was able to attract an over-abundant rural population and, building on its stable political situation, solicit foreign investment for developing employment opportunities in the industrial or tertiary sectors. As a result, pressures on agricultural land were lessened.

But new problems would emerge as in many other world regions, with the ageing of the agricultural workforce, especially in areas which saw the greatest development of their secondary and tertiary sectors (e.g. Martinique, Guadeloupe but also Barbados), whilst at the same time having to cope with the problems of (re-)building family lives.

Other surveys beyond this article will without doubt be able to develop further some of these observations relating to the peasantry in the Caribbean, notwithstanding that the available international statistics leave much to be desired.

For a long time to come, the land and the structures of ownership will remain a major stake in the Caribbean's future development. Insularity, physical constraints in the isthmus, political, social, and economic crises, will necessitate a reinforcement of a strong agricultural vocation, representing both an essential element in the survival of these societies and of their identities. It is in this context that the collective efforts of all Caribbean countries needs to be engaged in order to diversify agriculture and develop both vegetables and fruit farming.

Caribbean Atlas

 

[Poitier]

Obviously, protecting farmers from land-grabs and proliferating modern farming techniques and technologies should be of the highest priority. Additionally, governments need to invest in and incentivize farming as a way to create jobs for the ensuing population boom:

Rattan Lal, soil scientist: “Political stability, environmental quality, hunger, and poverty all have the same root. In the long run, the solution to each is restoring the most basic of all resources, the soil.”


The Montpellier Panel has recommended, among others, that African governments and donors invest in land and soil management, and create incentives particularly on secure land rights to encourage the care and adequate management of farm land. In addition, the report recommends increasing financial support for investment on sustainable land management.


Soil expert and professor of agriculture at the Makerere University, Moses Tenywa tells IPS that African governments should do more to promote soil and water conservation, which is costly for farmers in terms of resources, labour, finances and inputs.


“Smallholder farmers usually lack the resources to effectively do soil and water conservation yet it is very important. Therefore, for small holder farmers to do it they must be motivated or incentivized and this can come through linkages to markets that bring in income or credit that enables them access inputs,” Tenywa says.


“Practicing climate smart agriculture in climate watersheds promotes soil health. This includes conservation agriculture, agro-forestry, diversification, mulching, and use of fertilizers in combination with rainwater harvesting.”


Before farmers received training on soil management methods, they applied fertilisers, for instance, without having their soils tested. Tenywa said now many smallholder farmers have been trained to diagnose their soils using a soil test kit and also to take their soils to laboratories for testing.


Soil health is critical to enhancing the productivity of Africa’s agriculture, a major source of employment and a huge contributor to GDP, says development expert and acting divisional manager in charge of Visioning & Knowledge management at the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), Wole Fatunbi.


“The use of simple and appropriate tools that suits the smallholders system and pocket should be explored while there is need for policy interventions including strict regulation on land use for agricultural purposes to reduce the spate of land degradation,” Fatunbi told IPS


He explained that 15 years ago he developed a set of technologies using vegetative material as green manure to substitute for fertiliser use in the Savannah of West Africa. The technology did not last because of the laborious process of collecting the material and burying it to make compost.


“If technologies do not immediately lead to more income or more food, farmers do not want them because no one will eat good soil,” said Fatunbi. “Soil fertility measures need to be wrapped in a user friendly packet. Compost can be packed as pellets with fortified mineral fertilisers for easy application.”


Fatunbi cites the land terrace system to manage soil erosion in the highlands of Uganda and Rwanda as a success story that made an impact because the systems were backed legislation. Also, the use of organic manure in the Savannah region through an agriculture system integrating livestock and crops has become a model for farmers to protect and promote soil health.


“We still continue to harvest more nutrients than we replace in soil,” he says. If a country is extracting oil, people worry about what will happen if the oil runs out. But they don’t seem to worry about what will happen if we run out of soil.

More Than Half of Africa’s Arable Land ‘Too Damaged’ for Food Production | Inter Press Service

Information and communication technologies can help reverse the youth’s negative perceptions towards agriculture and increase its attractiveness. These are used for record-keeping (Excel spreadsheets), for providing price information (through SMS) and for creating virtual markets that help link farmers to markets so they can get better prices.


They are also used for developing applications for livestock management and crop production and for promoting agriculture among the youth via social platforms. As one female youth explains:


ICTs make agriculture interesting and easier; they make getting things done more cost-effective and provide access to needed information.

Africa's youth and abundant arable land are a potential winning combination

Between 2005 and 2010, Uganda lost 8,000 square kilometres of farmland due to droughts and soil erosion from over-farming. Small food-producing operations are thus struggling to survive, a situation all the more problematic given that agriculture represents one fifth of the country's economy. According to World Bank reports, small farms make up 80 percent of Ugandan agricultural operations.


The question was asked, if there's nowhere to grow on the ground, why not grow upwards? It all started with volunteers from the NGO Ideas for Uganda, who brought "Vertical and Micro-Gardening" (VMG) to Uganda's suburban areas.


As a result, in the space of just one square metre, one can grow what would take three square metres of ground soil, or about 100 plants, according to the project's managers. (Tests have already been conducted with tomatoes and cucumbers.) Such operations use 70 percent less water than standard farms, according to reports from Columbia University.


The first tests show that it's possible to cultivate the production equivalent of 225 euros worth of tomatoes per month, or 180 euros of cucumbers, or about four times more than by using traditional methods.

Ugandans try ‘stack farming’ as arable land disappears

At the Africa Progress Panel, we support the combination of foreign expertise with local knowledge to increase production, generate jobs, and transfer technical know-how. But what Africa does not need, and cannot afford, is the use of African land and water by foreign investors who use Africa’s scarce resources to supply food and biofuels to other countries. And for Africans, the benefits of large-scale land acquisitions have been questionable.


Africa’s smallholder farmers need protection in such deals. The African Union should develop a framework for managing foreign investment in agriculture, and governments should assess large-scale land deals and consider a moratorium pending legislation to protect smallholder farmers.


Third, governments and others must help smallholder farmers manage risk more effectively. Crises in the Horn of Africa and Sahel have highlighted the risks faced by smallholder farmers, who are barely able to feed themselves and their families as it is.


Governments and donors should provide cash or food that enables rural producers to get through the difficult periods of drought, for example, without compromising long-term productivity or withdrawing their children from school. Governments and donors should help household enterprises reduce their dependence on agriculture.


Fourth, we want to see the international community devote more money and more effort to improving food security and nutrition in Africa, an issue that goes to the heart of so many other development challenges. By weakening a child’s resistance to disease, malnutrition is a major contributor to child mortality. A global study in 2008 found that an average one third of all child deaths were related to malnutrition.


The Panel welcome this year’s Camp David G-8 commitments to launch a New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. This New Alliance aims to lift 50 million people out of poverty over the next decade. And we will be watching eagerly when the United Kingdom assumes presidency of the G-8 next year.


Fifth, and finally, the international community should step up their support for climate change mitigation and adaptation.


Higher temperatures, increased water evaporation, less predictable rainfall, increased water stress and an expansion of drought zones is likely undermine production. Cassava and maize yields could fall by 15 percent and 30 percent respectively by 2050, for example. And research by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) suggests that climate change effects alone will push an additional 1 million children into malnutrition by 2030.


At the Africa Progress Panel, we hope these risks and the enormous opportunities of a growing global market will lead African governments to invest in agriculture and raise productivity. We fear that such risks could lead to a dramatic worsening of poverty and malnutrition among vulnerable communities.


But while rich countries have been spending billions of dollars on climate change adaptation, such as flood defenses, Africa has been receiving peanuts.


One recent study for Tanzania concluded that an annual investment of $100 million in adaptation for smallholders – encompassing support for small-scale irrigation, terracing, rural roads and research – would prevent annual losses of several hundreds of millions of dollars.


Consider that while the U.K. spends $1.2 billion annually on flood defenses, African nations receive just $100 million to $200 million for climate adaptation through the specialized multilateral funds created for this purpose. This amounts to what Desmond Tutu has aptly described as “adaptation apartheid.”


African leaders and their partners must all do more to shape the continent’s mighty farming potential. One day Africa could feed the world. But first it must feed itself.

How Africa could feed the world

Sub-Saharan Africa has two abundant resources: its youth and agricultural land. With the youngest population globally and the largest share of the world’s arable land, Africa stands to benefit greatly from getting and keeping the youth involved in agriculture.


Africa’s agricultural sector has the lowest productivity in the world. This contributes to food insecurity and malnutrition on the continent.


It is estimated that ten million African youth enter the labour market annually. There are questions on how to provide stable employment for them. These questions are of the utmost importance.


Young people aged 15 to 24 account for 20% (226 million) of the continent’s population. This age cohort is expected to increase by 42% by 2030 – faster than Latin America’s, Europe’s and Northern America’s.

And that is why the future of Africa is in the hands of the youth. They are one of the greatest assets and a force to reckon with for improving the productivity and growth of all sectors of Africa’s economy. They are dynamic, enthusiastic, resourceful, creative, innovative and adventurous. They come from different and highly varied social backgrounds, cultures and traditions. They are very heterogeneous and cannot be ignored if a renaissance of Africa is to be achieved in the 21st century.


The scope to get the youth involved

With proper planning and well-structured social and economic policy formulation and implementation, Africa’s youth can be mobilised to provide goods and services. Unemployed youth tend to turn to violence and crime. Youth idleness can threaten political stability, as the the Arab Spring and the recent popular uprising in Burkina Faso have demonstrated.


Agriculture is one avenue to consider for creating jobs, increasing production and raising productivity. These goals are crucial if the continent is to reduce food insecurity. Further opportunities exist along the value chain, from crop production to the processing of raw agricultural produce into food to the distribution of these to markets.


In addition to generating much-needed income and employment, agricultural growth benefits the poorest people the most.

Africa's youth and abundant arable land are a potential winning combination

 

[Poitier]

Black Americans, you should find the nearest Black farmer near you and network with them and buy from them whenever you can. A Black grocery store would be nice but don't sleep on going straight to the source. A simple and quick Google search will show you who is in your state. Not only can these farmers not survive without our support but if we were ever to get in a crisis where we needed those with green thumbs.....it would be ideal to know who is who:

A few years ago, while clearing dried broccoli stalks from the tired soil of our land at Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York, I received a cold call from Boston. On the other end was a Black woman, unknown to me, who wanted to share her story of trying to make it as a farmer.


After more than a century of decline, the number of Black farmers is on the rise.

Through tears, she explained the discrimination and obstacles she faced in a training program she’d joined, as well as in gaining access to land and credit. She wondered whether Black farming was destined for extinction. She said she wanted to hear the voice of another African-heritage farmer so that she could believe “it was possible” and sustain hope.


The challenges she encountered are not new. For decades, the U.S. Department of Agriculture discriminated against Black farmers, excluding them from farm loans and assistance. Meanwhile, racist violence in the South targeted land-owning Black farmers, whose very existence threatened the sharecropping system. These factors led to the loss of about 14 million acres of Black-owned rural land—an area nearly the size of West Virginia.


In 1982, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights extrapolated the statistics on land loss and predicted the extinction of the Black farmer by the year 2000.


They were wrong. While the situation is still dire, with Black farmers comprising only about 1 percent of the industry, we have not disappeared. After more than a century of decline, the number of Black farmers is on the rise.


These farmers are not just growing food, either. The ones you’ll meet here rely on survival strategies inherited from their ancestors, such as collectivism and commitment to social change. They infuse popular education, activism, and collective ownership into their work.


And about that woman who called me from Boston? Years after we first spoke, I called her back. Turns out, Kafi Dixon went on to found Seeds of Change Solidarity Network and is still at it.

After a Century In Decline, Black Farmers Are Back And On the Rise

In 1920, the number of black-operated farms peaked at nearly a million, accounting for 15 million acres of farmland—the size of New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New Jersey combined. They made up 14 percent of the country’s farmers.


The height of black farming didn’t last. Faced with the economic and social barriers of the time and decades of racist and discriminatory policies, black farmers spent the next century in decline. By 1982, their numbers were down to about 30,000—just 2 percent of the nation’s total. That same year, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights predicted that no black farmers would remain by the year 2000.


But today, the number of black farmers in the United States is suddenly growing again. In 2012, there were more than 44,000 of them, up about 15 percent from 10 years earlier. Nationally, they were still less than 2 percent of the country’s farmers, but their growth is noteworthy after such an extensive decline. Oklahoma, Louisiana and Florida all show gains, while Texas takes the lead with a gain of more than 2,500 black farmers.

Number of Black Farmers in U.S. Is Growing, Thanks in Part to the New Policies at the USDA



ENERGY

PUBLIC GOODS/SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE

 

[Adalina]

I think another Black Diasporan essential is the book Black Athena.
We should know our history to a T to counter any narratives that go outside the African Paradigm.

 

[Entropy Fan]

@Poitier those foreign countries bought all that land in Africa or leased it???

 

[Bawon Samedi]

@Poitier

I'm going to reread this thread in chronological order to get a full in depth read. Anyways you should seriously considering writing a book on this if you have the time as discussions/info like this should be spread more instead of the usual hotep/smart dumb talk that plagues black "woke" thoughts.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

OP is on to something with a lot of this.


I agree strongly with most of your analysis of the problem.


The place I'd advise caution is in what you advocate as solutions. I'm really on board with about two-thirds of them and skeptical of the other third.


The Black community has to be careful not to make the same mistakes that others have made before them. All the stuff you say about improving local control is on point. When you get into globalizing that and creating new global financial structures based around African banks trying to make profits off the people they're supposedly trying to "help"....I get concerned that a lot of them will look for advice from their Wall Street predecessors quicker than they will from the communities they're loaning too. Remember, in the end Wall Street didn't mind screwing over the very White customers they'd been giving the loans too. For heavily profit-minded folk who are distanced from the communities they're loaning to, profits often come above community solidarity.

Same thing goes for agriculture. You might be on the same train of thought as me, but I'm worried you throw around the phrase "modern agricultural techniques" and "fertilizer" and "tractors" a bit too loosely. Modern agricultural techniques are exactly what destroyed Western farming communities, increased unemployment, ravaged the land, reduced efficiency by acre, and have resulted in foods far less nutritional than what used to be produced.

Improvements need to be made, but if we do it via GM crops and fertilizer and pesticides and tractors, will just get higher short-term yields while ruining the long-term productivity of the land and the quality of the food. Instead, we need to focus on putting land in control of small scale farmers' hands, improving long-term soil health, the promotion of local crops meant to thrive in local conditions, a strong balance of animal and plant production together on the same farms, and fighting against large interests to get sustainable irrigation in the hands of the communities that need it. We need to take measures that put short-term and long-term food security in the lands of the communities themselves, which means labor-intensive agriculture that maximizes local employment, acre-by-acre efficiency, soil health, and food quality while minimizing pollution and the reliance on outside products for support.

 

[Poitier]

@Poitier those foreign countries bought all that land in Africa or leased it???

Not all but enough of it to force large amount of people off their land and keep the land from benefiting the locals. Capitalism and White supremacy at work...like always.