Africa as seen by others

Maps of Africa posted by Chris Blattman

AGRA on African agriculture

In Geneva this week, Akinwumi Adesina, the head of AGRA, the Rockefellar and Gates backed organization with a mission to bring a new "green revolution" to Africa was speaking. He described how the green revolution that had success in India did not get a foothold in Africa because of it was unsuitable for rainfed farming and diverse agro ecosystems.

He went on to describe how agriculture failed in Africa due to structural adjustment programmes combined with a downturn in assistance. SAPs removed some of the distortions and biases against agriculture (e.g. overvalued exchange rate) but they also led to an abandonment of support. The private sector was too weak to fill gaps. Farmers were abandoned.

This echoes similar finding of work by Andrew Dorward at SOAS who says that missing markets and high transaction costs characterize rural economies in Africa due for example to the removal of state marketing boards and withdrawal of extension services.

Internet and farming in Africa

Africa has an online community of 50 million people and growing, most of these in urban Egypt and Nigeria. Internet access in the countryside is still barely accessible. Most Africans still live in rural areas and derive their income from farming. Two projects from Uganda and West Africa attempt to bridge the digital divide.

via Global Advances

Organic farming and food security in Africa

The UN Conference on Trade and Development issued a statement last week saying the organic agriculture is a promising food security option for Africa.

Organic agriculture which uses local resources, improves soil fertility and is environmentally friendly - is "equal or better than most conventional systems and more likely to be sustainable in the longer term". Demand for organic produce is also increasing worldwide, holding out "significant income possibilities for African organic farmers" and helping to speed progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. But the continent will have to overcome formidable challenges if it is to seize these opportunities, UNCTAD warns, including limited productive capacity, market access, government support, and certification.

Marking up on fair trade

Is Fair Trade delivering as much as it could to farmers?

In my local supermarket today I bought some very tasty dried mangos. They help offset my chocolate urges.

They cost 3 swiss francs for 150g (20 francs per kg). Their texture is perfect and the colour a nice bright orange. They come from South Africa.

On the shelf above sits a smaller pack of fair trade dried mango from Burkina Faso costing 2 swiss francs from 100g (30 francs per kg). The fair traded product is thus 10 francs per kilo (50%) more expensive that an equivalent product. Given its lower quality (dark colour of the dried fruit), the mark up is arguably higher.

Is the higher price due to higher production and processing costs in the fair traded product or simply Coop exploiting the ethical shopper's insensitivity to price.

According to the fair trade standard, dried mango from West Africa gets an fair trade premium of 0.70 euro/kg. So all things being equal, the producer gets around 10% of the higher price that fair trade commands. Even less, if you take into account the lower quality of the fair trade product.

Books on Africa

Over Christmas I zipped through The Reader by Bernard Schink, Northern Lights by Philip Pullman and JG Ballard's autobiography, Miracles of Life.

Next on my list is Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuscinski.

On the subject of Africa, the 100 best books on Africa has been announced, via Chris Blattman. See also the Africa reading challenges on Siphoning off a Few Thoughts.

Maps illustrating development issues

World Mapper does a good job illustrating development issues through the use of maps. Territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest.

This one shows the paucity of doctors working in Africa - The most concentrated 50% of doctors live in territories with less than a fifth of the world population. The worst off fifth are served by only 2% of the world’s doctors.

Who is causing the most global warming per capita - the West of course, plus Qatar equivalent to 86 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, around 160 greater than the average for African countries.

Hand painted signs

Home made or artisanal shop signs have disappeared from European and US towns. Businesses in developing countries hire local artisans to brighten their shop fronts and advertises their wares. There is therefore alot more diversity between how shops look than in a US shopping mall or UK high street. From Uganda, here is a shop selling milk. In Mexico, these sign paintings are called rotulos. The artisans are called rotulistas and there is concern that this art is dying out. I guess as economies develop and businesses consolidate and become more capital intensive, firms will no longer need hand painted signs.

From southern Chile where fishings is still small scale, a sailor has livened up his fishing boat with dreams of New York.

Carbon labels - impact on African exporters

There a many labels to choose from when shopping for food. Organic and fair trade are most prominent but there are others particularly for coffee (utz kapeh, rainforest alliance, bird friendly etc.). Another one emerging on the horizon is carbon labels. These will inform the consumer about how much carbon is "embedded" in a product, i.e. how was used in making the product from production (running a tractor, seeds, fertilzers, heating a greenhouse) through processing, transport and delivering to the supermarket. Measuring all this is very complicated and expensive but a couple of big retailers, principally Tesco in the UK are having a go and even have a dozen or so products with the label. One sticking point might be how consumers react to this. Will they know what the label means? How can they compare with other labeling scheme or products without labels?

There is also a development dimension. Will exporters of fruits and veg from Africa lose market share? A new paper from Gareth Edward Jones and his team at Bangor University examine this question in more detail. It is entitled "Vulnerability of exporting nations to the development of a carbon label in the UK". To be printed later this year in Environmental Science and Policy, it highlights how countries like Kenya are highly vulnerable to loss of fruit and veg export markets to the UK as they have high export value in proportion to their GDP. Spain by contrast has a small proportion of its GDP derived from horticulture. Furthermore, their products like oranges can not be substituted by the northern European producer. Another interesting point raised by the paper is that it is unclear how consumers will trade off their preferences between different attributes of food, e.g, organic (no pesticides), fair trade (social benefits) and now climate impact.
For exporters carbon labels are likely to mean they have to think more about investment in climate mitigation technologies and measuring their emissions and so satisfy buyers in the north using carbon labels on these imported products - more costs for exporters, potentially driving out more small and medium enterprises from the export market - just as what happened with the food safety supermarket standard Eurepgap (now called Global Gap).