Agriculture transformation: Which way for East Africa?

Matsiko Kahunga over the weekend of February 21-22, I met an old college friend, who now works as a business development manager at Birezi Manor Farm, a modern agricultural enterprise in Uganda. As we read the lead headline in an old copy of The East African, he looked puzzled. The headline announced the East African Community (EAC) Heads of State Summit directing uniform call tariffs across the bloc. On reading further, he wondered whether there had been two summits. I asked him how this was possible, and by way of an answer, he invited me to his office. And after what he showed me, I also ended up wondering whether they had been two EAC Summits. The evidence he showed me is a documentary titled Agricultural Transformation: Which Way East Africa? This, he told me, is what had been the theme of the Summit where his company was invited as the keynote speaker to share their experience of a nouveau model of agribusiness that is transforming smallholder farmers in their neighbourhood into rich, modern commercial famers with reliable, regular income and food security. The Summit sought to gauge the feasibility of replicating this model across the EAC. The documentary opens with the farm’s CEO contextualising the bane of East African agriculture. According to him, East African agriculture is similar to the story of the blind men and the elephant, which we read in upper primary school. Each stakeholder in the sector understands it from their own perspective and interest: to the large-scale foreign investor, all that we need is unfettered ‘ease of doing business’ (access to square miles of free land, tax holidays, cheap labour, uncontrolled use of chemicals, ‘improved’ seeds, ‘improved’ breeds, repatriation of profits, et al). This is the ‘get-big-or-get-out’ school that transformed agriculture in Europe and America. To the food security activist, smallholder farmers in Africa should be left alone with their age-old farming practices, since they are an integral part of their culture, values and norms. In-between these extremes, there are several other schools and models, thus the current situation, where the EAC needs food aid, in the midst of rich soils and the largest water bodies in Africa. The IIPA model: Secret to prosperity The secret and solution, this commercial farmer argues in his presentation, is the IIPA model. He pauses and scans the hall, as everybody, including the Heads of State stare at him blankly. Unraveling what each letter stands for and translates into, he drives his argument thus: IIPA is an acronym for Integrated, Intensive, Profitable Agriculture. Integrated means that all enterprises on the farm are mutually supportive, with nothing going to waste; intensive in that farmers obtain maximum yields from a small piece of land or fewer animals; profitable in the sense that all activities are profit-oriented, with standard business practices. No activity is undertaken as an ‘instinct’, the way age-old farming is done, or as a hobby, which is the practice among the elite: a few birds and a decorative orchard passing for a farm, where the family spends the weekend from their city life. How the IIPDA model works The first strange thing about this IIPA model is that it defies the conventional behaviour of market forces: the more the farmers produce, the higher the price of their unit of harvest. The case of maize in this season is very instructive. To save farmers the post-harvest losses, Birezi conducted a market survey which discovered a high demand for corn cooking oil. They concluded a contract farmer agreement with an edible oil mill in Kenya, and the rest is literally history. Birezi produces only 30 per cent of what the oil mill requires, with 70 per cent coming from smallholder farmers, who are supported by Birezi extension staff in all aspects of production. The maize is harvested while still green and fresh, with stalks fed to animals. Each farmer retains 10 per cent of the crop for domestic harvesting and consumption, with the difference in income covered by a premium paid above the market price. Organic corn oil attracts a premium price, and this is shared with all stakeholders along the value chain, including the smallholder farmer. Farmers have established a fund into which they pool the premium earnings, for such community goods as nursery schools. As he concludes his presentation, the Birezi CEO poses the central policy question of the sector to the EAC leaders and planners: the ‘computer chip versus cabbages’ dichotomy. Every parent advises their child to aspire to become computer wizards, not cabbage-growers. But after a long arduous day in an IT-incubation lab, the young wizard returns home to enjoy a refreshing bowl of vegetable salads. ‘Who should grow the cabbages’? Nobody answered. Only endless applauding and a standing ovation masked the timid faces. Were there two EAC Summits? The author is a partner at Peers Consult Kampala and CET Consulting, Kigali. Email: bukanga@yahoo.com

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Agriculture transformation: Which way for East Africa?