Africa south of the Sahara is producing more than six times as much food as it did in 1961. That’s a much bigger increase than that of the world as a whole, which has merely quadrupled agricultural output, as this chart shows. From this data alone, sub-Saharan Africa seems to be an agricultural success story.
The next chart, though, gives a much darker picture. It shows sub-Saharan Africa badly trailing the world as a whole in improvements in total factor productivity of agriculture. Total factor productivity measures how much output increases over and above what one would expect from increased inputs of land, labor and machinery.
What these two charts tell us is that while Africa is increasing its output of crops, livestock and so on, it’s managing to do so only by massively increasing its inputs. That means many more farmers and much more land under cultivation or pasture. It’s better than if farm output hadn’t increased at all, but it’s not what the subcontinent needs to get ahead economically.
The classic story of economic development is that farmers become more efficient, which frees up their children to work in factories. The increase in factory output enriches the population, generating more demand for food. And the factories produce farm machinery that makes farmers even more efficient. Improvements in agriculture and industry reinforce each other in an upward spiral.
That’s not happening in sub-Saharan Africa. To understand why, I interviewed Enock Chikava, who grew up with 10 siblings on a small farm in Zimbabwe. “As a boy, I would spend long summers, from May to October, gathering crop debris and leaves from the nearby forest to mix into the soil as fertilizer,” he recalled in a 2021 article for the Gates Foundation, where he is the interim director of agricultural development.
Chikava, who went on to get an education in agricultural economics and business strategy, says economic growth in the agricultural sector is more than twice as effective at reducing poverty as is growth in other sectors.
Improving African farmers’ productivity requires three things, Chikava told me: innovation, extension (which means introducing innovations to farmers) and market incentives.
There’s progress on all three fronts. Cassava, for example, is a staple food in much of Africa and is hardy against drought. New varieties, called Baba 70 and Game Changer, can more than quadruple yields per hectare on small farms in Nigeria when cultivated with good agronomic practices and weed control, Chikava said. As for extension, countries are informing farmers digitally because they can’t afford to put enough extension officers in the field. On market incentives, sub-Saharan nations are using a mixture of price supports and subsidies for inputs such as fertilizer. That may offend pure free-marketers, and isn’t the best permanent solution, but often it’s the only way to keep farmers from quitting because they can’t make a living, Chikava said.
Tech companies are springing up to help. One example is Releaf, an agricultural technology company based in Lagos, Nigeria, that supplies palm oil to food companies. It’s using geospatial mapping and other technologies to locate small processing facilities closer to palm nut farmers, who can’t afford to ship the nuts long distances.
There’s a long way to go, though. Another reason for low productivity is that under the land tenure system that’s common in much of Africa, people keep the land only if they keep using it. So some farmers are doing just enough to maintain their claims, Kate Schecter, the president of World Neighbors, a U.S.-based charity that operates in 14 countries, including six in Africa, told me. In Burkina Faso, for example, World Neighbors’ country director told her that landowners “don’t necessarily learn very much about how to use the farm,” Schecter said. “It’s underexploited.”
Christopher Udry, an economics professor at Northwestern University, taught secondary school in Ghana while serving in the Peace Corps in the 1980s. He was struck by the missed economic opportunities. Children who spoke four languages dropped out after elementary school because they couldn’t make it to the nearest junior secondary school. “Once you meet people like that, it’s hard to think of anything else,” he said in a recent interview with Yale University, where he earned his doctorate.
Confirming what Chikava and Schecter told me, Udry said that agricultural yields are declining the most in the places where farmers have the most opportunities to do something else with their time. The more that opportunities in cities multiply, the more farmers are drawn away from the land.
The farmers are better off than if they didn’t have those outside options. “But it’s not the great productivity spiral that we did see in, say, American history,” Udry said. For sub-Saharan Africa to advance economically, fixing its farming must be a top priority.
Outlook: Deutsche Bank
There will be “a fire hose of Fedspeak and a deluge of important data” this week, economists at Deutsche Bank wrote in a client note last week. They pointed to speeches by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and other Fed officials as well as to major economic releases, including the March jobs report. The economists predict that Powell will continue to say on Wednesday that there’s no hurry about cutting rates, and that the Bureau of Labor Statistics will report on Friday that the U.S. economy added 200,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in March, down from the 275,000 that was reported for February.
Quote of the Day
“What other people label or might try to call failure I have learned is just God’s way of pointing you in a new direction.”
— Oprah Winfrey, in a commencement speech at Howard University (May 12, 2007)
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