DR MAZI MATSANGA;AFRICA SHOULD BALANCE CASH CROPS & FOOD CROPS TO TACKLE FOOD INSECURITY.

DR  MAZI MATSANGA;AFRICA SHOULD BALANCE CASH CROPS & FOOD CROPS TO TACKLE FOOD INSECURITY.

Dear Africa 

🔴✍️Today being a Saturday my students of Political economics and international food markets will enjoy from this post. I write to serve Africa. Africa is my concen because I am African . In 1884 I was not cinsulted where the boundaries should pass . So as a Pan Africanist I have no divided passion about Africa .  

🔴✍️The current food insecurity scourge ravaging across several African countries calls for re-evaluation of our Agricultural system to bring on board radical mechanisms that will solve our current food crisis at hand. 

🔴✍️Just like in the Agrarian Revolution which happened in Mesopotamia centuries ago and shaped the modern agriculture, it's time for Africa to overhaul its agricultural system to increase efficiency and produce surplus for its growing population.

🔴✍️In a bid to solve the current crisis, we need to interrogate why Africans have abandoned their subsistence way of farming and deserted their food crops for European cash crops and foods that are of inferior nutritional value to our indigenous foods? 

🔴✍️Has the predominant cash crop farming paid off to our farmers? That's where we ought to kickstart this conversation. I will start it and those policy makers must listen to other views why we have a good weather and bad weather but we have never married the two to avoid hunger and starvation . 

🔴✍️Just like colonialism, the European system of farming wasn't meant to benefit the local African communities in the hinterland, but Europe and the West. The railway that snakes through the remotest hamlets of Africa personify my research ,there was no any other reason for its construction beyond what it served in those early days after partitioning of Africa .

🔴✍️The colonial railway served as a conveyor belt between Africa and Europe, a conduit that takes free farm produce and minerals to Europe, and brings back finished products to Africans at a fee. 

🔴✍️For Africa to continue living and glorifying this cruel system of oppression to farmers and indigenous communities is akin to living in neocolonial servitude. Africa needs to shed off the colonial tag and think afresh .

🔴✍️The lopsided system is the reason why despite Sub-Saharan Africa being a net agricultural exporter, food insecurity has persisted and is increasing. The foundation was wrong and the aims of our agriculture were also wrong . 

🔴✍️Africans practically give up their arable fertile land and scratch the sun-scorched ground to farm cash crops to feed the interests of the West. Yes we earn from exchange from it, but is it enough to even solve food problems back at home?

🔴✍️Take for example coffee farmers from Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda who toil in their farms to export this cash crop only to earn peanuts, yet these farmers themselves can't afford to have a cup of the same product in the eateries across the world.

🔴✍️The current cash crop farming has enslaved our people into a vicious cycle of poverty, soon after they receive their meagre payment for the produce, most of these farmers always revert to living from from hand to mouth. 

🔴✍️I can state that without better prices for farmers and local value addition before export, the system remains exploitative and untanable. This is what African Governments must embark on . 

🔴✍️It's even more paradoxical that in Ghana, many have given up their fertile lands to coffee farming, yet the price of a bar of chocolate is far beyond the reach of the dreams of many farmers. 

🔴✍️It's only in Africa where we farm cotton, yet we can only afford second hand clothes from Europe, the same place we export our cotton. What a sardonic irony! If Africa cannot see this with their eyes, at least they can smell the coffee and realize everything is not right.

🔴✍️The colonial cash crop system remains to be a bad system if it can't pay us enough money to afford the products of the raw materials that we supply to them, it's fundamentally modern day mercantilism. 

🔴✍️Until such a time, it's only good that we start to re-embrace food crop farming and fill up our silos and sell the surplus to the world. Countries like Uganda have already embraced the idea, so far the results speak for themselves.Credit goes to President Museveni on this matter.

🔴✍️My final recommendations on this subject would anchor on the fact that colonialism undermined the social contract between traditional leaders and communities by setting exploitative structures for cash crop farming, this new system further smothered subsistence farming which had been instrumental in managing food scarcity in earlier times. 

🔴✍️It's evident that absolute cash crop farming has deprived households lands to farm and feed themselves, whereas the returns have only been so lean to support them through food crises. 

🔴✍️I have studied the history of Africa and and a good case study from the past is the infamous "Sava Lulala" hunger that ravaged Western Kenya in 1980s whereas their sugarcane and cotton industries flourished. 

🔴✍️Going by its name in Luhya dialect, which means "only washing hands once a day", families could only afford one meal back then. This has now returned in the entire Sub-Saharan Africa and it is goingbto be worse unless we change tactics . 

SOLUTIONS FOR AFRICA 

🔴✍️The only way out for Africa is to either build up structures to process and add value to our cash crops, and export them to the global market or retain full returns on income so that they pay farmers better dues.

🔴✍️We must also balance cash-crop farming with food crop farming to tackle the problems of food insecurity locally as we export cash-crops for foreign income.

🔴✍️Otherwise, to continue running our agriculture on the stilts of the outdated colonial structures and neglecting food crop farming will only leave our populations with devastating pangs of hanger in the unforeseeable future.

🔴✍️Just like in business, Africa has to find out what's the economic opportunity cost of concentrating on cash crop farming as we neglect food crops. That way, we shall be able to find the dynamic balance and tackle food insecurity with success. 

🔴✍️In stead of putting high premium on cash crops like tea, coffee, cotton and cocoa, we should educate and encourage our farmers to also balance it with maize, millet, cassava, yams and wheat for home consumption. 

🔴✍️Land subdivisions today might have caused severe scarcity for arable lands for farming, but it's 21st century and we can even do this through smart farms.

🔴✍️We should not only focus on farming to export at the expense of our own food security at home. If these had been put to practice early enough, the Russia- Ukraine war would have little or no implications at all on Africa as we speak

 🔴I hope the African governments will consider my paper as they look forward to tackle this menace. I have done my vest to add value to the debate of Agriculture and time will vindicate me .

Thanks 

By Dr.David Matsanga 

Pan African Forum (UK) Ltd 

This is part of my thesis in my Masters Degree in STRATEGY MANAGEMENT where I will graduate in December 2022  

This will be my second MA degree the first one being in Political Science & International Relations. 

Passsing by Waterloo 

8.10.2022

I dedicate this Article to the people of Uganda@60 on 9th October 1962 . I wish good celebrations