Five ways Kenya and Africa can consign famine to dustbin of history

What you need to know:

  • Actions: The activist is not the one that says the river is dirty. He cleans it. The activist is not the one that counts the number of the hungry, it is he that feeds them

Calestous Juma posted these two quotes by the American politician Ross Perot on his Facebook page. “The activist is not the one that says the river is dirty. He cleans it. And. The activist is not the one that counts the number of the hungry. It is he that feeds them.”

Calestous Juma is, of course, the eminent Kenyan academic at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

He is also the author of a new book, The New Harvest: Agricultural innovation in Africa, an exhaustively researched, relentlessly upbeat assessment of the capacity for Africa to feed itself in a generation. The book can be downloaded online for free.

The past few weeks have seen much finger pointing on who is to blame for the food emergency in the region with most pointing at the government, and officials dismissing private sector efforts to deal with the problem as mere tokenism.

It might be better to invest time and energy to devise ways to ensure the crisis never recurs. And there are few better places to start than Prof Juma’s book.

Here are just a few of the ones that jump off the pages:

Integration is key

Benjamin Mkapa has made the point in the past that it is one of the bitter ironies of post-colonial Africa that people will die of hunger in one corner of the continent, say the East, while Southern Africans are enjoying a bumper harvest.

Closer regional integration would help resolve this problem. Prof Juma points out that 40 per cent of Africans live in land-locked countries many of them so small that it is difficult to achieve scale economies to boost growth. It would make sense to pay less attention to colonial borders and more to the process of integration.

Should Kenya, for example, not be talking to the South Sudanese who have vast farmlands currently lying fallow to see how the two nations can craft a mutually beneficial food security strategy?

Leadership

The example of Bingu wa Mutharika of Malawi, who unfortunately has become rather tyrannical of late, has been told often but it bears repeating. In 2005, five million Malawians needed food aid.

President Mutharika declared that was an unacceptable state of affairs, moved the Agriculture ministry to the presidency, scaled up the agriculture budget to 16 per cent of the national budget and two years later the nation recorded its highest ever maize surplus.

Kenyans must put pressure on their next president to ensure citizens never again face death due to preventable famine.

Tell off the IMF

Prof Juma makes the point that the International Monetary Fund resisted the Malawi agriculture sector reforms, warning against giving farmers subsidies.

The government ignored them and achieved a happy outcome. We must aggressively examine possible reforms of the agricultural sector that can make a difference in people’s lives.

New Kenya Co-operative Creameries chairman Matu Wamae raised an interesting point recently that milk prices stabilised once New KCC, in which the government has a stake, was revived.

His view was that something similar needs to be done to the predatory maize millers that now monopolise the industry after buying the mills from the State in the 1980s.

Embrace technology and get the basics right

Prof Juma’s specialty is the field of innovation. His book brims with examples of innovations around the world that are making a difference to farmers. He points to the example of e-Choupal, an initiative in India that places computers with Internet access in villages to enable farmers access information on market conditions.

Despite these innovations, Prof Juma makes the point that Africans must do the basics well: extension, fertiliser supply and other such.

It is too much to expect food security when, on average, farmers use 13 kg of nutrients per hectare of cropland when the rate in Middle East and North Africa is 71 kg.

The statistics are similarly bad on irrigation.

These things must change and policy makers would do well to start by reading Prof Juma’s important new book.