Make agriculture attractive to the youth for growth

Six out of every 10 highly qualified agricultural professionals in Africa will retire from service in the next five to 10 years, different studies reveal.

Losers of the best brains are Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya, which have had the most expensive personnel to train and also house ministries seen as role models for agricultural reforms.

The personnel — including researchers, lab technicians and trainers — are leaving when three factors: Peaking urban and rural population growth; reducing food production and ageing farmers are putting Africa in need of revamping the way it manages its soils.

However, the “pipe is leaking”, according to soil scientist Marie Rarieya.

Need has arisen “to make up for the neglect of the 1980s and 1990s by training soil researchers, technicians and extension officers and building infrastructure to help the small-scale farmer,” according to Dr Rarieya, the head of training and education at the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra).

But that target of young farmers embodying the hope of food self-sufficiency is a disappointment posing existential threat to the household due to alcoholism, laziness and don’t-care attitude among men in their 20s in sub-Saharan Africa.

As a result, small-scale farming is falling in the hands of rural poor women, other studies by F. Kariuki, P. Okemwa and Grace Wamue of Kenyatta University show.

LIABILITIES INTO ASSETS

Dean of School of Agriculture at Kenyatta University Waceke Wanjohi warns that unless Africa’s young are converted from liabilities into assets of technologically-versatile, agriculture professionals, farming will be plunged into a pathetic crisis of inefficient farmers who will not know how to tackle basics like determining the right measurements of fertiliser or choosing the right seeds for their soils.

Experience of 1990s where small holder farmer, often illiterate, was left to work alone showed its result in the embarrassing cyclical food crisis, which still stalks Africa every prolonged dry season.

But beneath the loud cry for food to save the lives of those in dry areas associated with alms like Wajir, Mandera, Marsabit or the Horn of Africa, lurks “hidden hunger”, which does not raise as much public indignation, but which Dr Bashir Jama, a soil health scientist, says has become a way of life even in high rainfall areas like Embu, Nyeri and western Kenya.

Silent decline in food production is consigning over 80 per cent of previously well-fed families to “the poverty of one meal a day”, Jama says. He adds that when this happens to families that Kenya relied on for food, it is worrying.

“Even that one meal a day,” he observes, “is just potatoes or chips in urban areas or ugali with tea in rural areas with no intake of vitamins, proteins and minerals because vegetables or milk or fruits are rare and out of reach of the majority. “Yet they starve while working on the same soils that fed the continent. Now they are ailing,” he says.

“Poor diet alone,” says Jama, “betrays the painful struggle of Africa to feed itself and defines the alacrity with which we must address the ailing soils.”

UNSKILLED FARMERS

This is caused by depletion of nutrients, leaving the soil bare because unskilled farmers plant crops that take away from the soil more than they give back in terms of benefits. Yet the African small-holder farmer is lagging behind in usage of fertilisers, which is less than 30kg/ha per year compared to Europe, which uses 500kg per hectare. As a result, Africa harvests a tonne per hectare compared to US and Asia with nine and three tonnes, respectively.

Devastating soil use practices are widespread among 70 per cent of Africa’s population, who are small holders producing over 80 per cent of the food.

But it is this neglected farmer, who cannot afford the fertiliser; has to walk to the shops to carry it a long distance home on the back or bicycle; is too illiterate to read instructions for the use of fertilisers or chemicals and is likely to use the wrong dosage, apply it late or find it bothersome and do without it altogether.

His inability to balance fertilisers destroys the soils by raising its acidity, killing a host of bacteria, fungi, and other micro organisms.

These are the concerns that brought together soil scientists in the first ever students soil conference in Africa dubbed “Bridging Society Science and Industry” at Kenyatta University last week ahead of the UN World Soils Day.

STEER AFRICA

Some 11 universities from Anglophone and Francophone Africa in collaboration with Agra, the Ministry of Agriculture and the University of Nairobi discussed how young soil scientists can “love to soil their hands” to take their critical role to steer Africa to food self-sufficiency.

Dr Vincent Logah of Ghana said soil losses compounded by erratic rainfall patterns threaten food security with Africa losing over 8 million metric tons of nutrients worth US$4 billion per year due to poor soil management.

Intercropping, crop rotation, and combination of fertilisers and chemicals among other interventions must be intensified, the participants noted.

They expressed concern over the fact that neither the 65-year-old farmer nor the youth will help in the absence of political reforms such as fighting alcoholism and massive investment in agriculture.

With agriculture, for instance, contributing to 62 per cent of employment and has 3.7 million small enterprises in Kenya, J.N. Aguyoh, W.M. Masila, and J.M. Ombati, researchers from Rongo and Egerton universities, said there cannot be any other place to invest if the aim is to turn round the economy.
Africa’s population is projected to hit 1 billion by 2025 and the world 9 billion by 2050. The big question is where food for this humanity will come from.

Africa has the most expansive unoccupied land and young population.