Document(s) 11 of 17

Agronomic and Livestock Aspects

In their struggle to sustain themselves and their families from the land, farmers have had to find out for themselves what works under widely varying rainfall and other conditions. The results have been the patterns of farming systems that have developed throughout the savanna, some of which I have described in Part II. Because these systems have to be adapted to the natural ecosystems in each particular area and, at the same time, provide the needs of the farmers and their families, they can be described as farmer-managed ecosystems.

Although these farming systems can be classified in many different ways (see, for example, Ruthenberg 1980), in view of the fundamental importance of natural environmental factors, particularly climate and soils, that give rise to the natural vegetation, I have used a bioclimatic classification here (Fig. 15). In this way, the savanna is divided into a number of zones based mainly on annual rainfall amount and distribution.

Although the divisions between the zones (see Table 4) are arbitrary and difficult to define in places, they do seem to fit reasonably closely to Phillips' original bioclimatic classification (Phillips 1959), the FAO classification based on length of growing seasons (FAO 1978), as well as the regional classifications developed for the various regions. They also appear to reflect real differences in the patterns of farming systems between the various zones, although inevitably the zones blend into one another. On the other hand, because the zones cover enormous areas, they obviously include considerable variations in the farming systems within the zones. These systems require further research both on a national and a regional basis.

As rural populations and livestock numbers increase, the whole question of intensification of agriculture becomes of critical importance. At some level of population density, the old shifting cultivation systems break down. In the Katsina area of northern Nigeria, Grove (1961) estimated that this breakdown took place at a density of about 58–77 people/km², but it will obviously vary greatly with the carrying capacity of the land, rainfall, and other factors in different areas. Allan and his colleagues (1965) made an important contribution to the methodology of measurement of this and other parameters, and Fresco (1986) has suggested an ecological approach. It is difficult to find research that follows up either of these approaches in detail in other locations.

Mixed Farming Systems

Crops

Increasing pressure of both population and livestock throughout these zones are causing severe stresses to the cropping systems. In some areas that have long been heavily populated, such as northern Nigeria, the permanent cultivation systems that enable continuous cropping have been described. Cash crops in the form of groundnuts (mainly in West Africa) and cotton are also grown in the subarid and subhumid zones, maize is replacing some of the sorghum, and rice is becoming more widely grown in swamps and irrigation schemes. Hungry rice and bambara groundnuts are still grown on some of the poorer soils. In the subhumid zone, a wide range of other crops, including sweet potato, cassava, sesame, pigeonpea, and many fruits and vegetables, are also cultivated, usually in mixtures. There is evidence that mixed cropping can increase both the net value of the production and the net return to labour.

In the humid zone, a much wider range of crops has become important, including rootcrops such as yam and cocoyam as well as sweet potato and cassava, and perennial crops including banana and plantain, cocoa, coffee, and at the higher altitudes in East Africa, tea and pyrethrum.

Livestock

Even in the more humid areas, there is little sign of more productive livestock systems developing except in some densely populated areas such as the Kenyan highlands where intensive dairying, often from stall-fed cows, is highly profitable and fits well into the system. There are also some larger fenced dairy farms in Kenya and Uganda that show the potential of these methods. As populations increase and communal grazing becomes scarce, it appears that there is a huge potential for more-intensive livestock production systems to develop, but these may require land tenure and other changes.

Manure

In Mali, Toulmin (1983) reported the traditional system of digging wells to reward the nomads for corralling their cattle on the stubbles by watering the cattle, and it appears that this and similar systems may be widespread in the arid zone. Further south in Mali, farmers were originally encouraged to apply both manure and fertilizer on cotton, but this seemed to have almost died out earlier this century. However, some farmers in Gladie village have adopted this system and adapted it to their needs by applying manure and fertilizer to cotton followed by maize intercropped with millet, followed by sorghum and groundnuts, with very productive results.

Research in Sakoro village showed that although soil fertility had declined seriously so that 80% of households were not self-sufficient for food, a similar program of manure and fertilizer use on maize could have similar results, and this seems to be spreading. By breaking the poverty cycle, this gave them a wider range of choices and allowed the peoples' own creativity to emerge in tackling their own problems. This village had probably fairly recently reached the critical level of population density at which the shifting cultivation system broke down.

In Kenya, an already intensive farming system was found to be declining in soil fertility despite heavy fertilizer use; therefore increasing quantities of manure from stall-fed dairy animals and compost from crop residues and other materials were applied to the land. This resulted in higher production.

In Tanzania, farmers on Ukara Island had long ago established their own intensive systems with manure from stall-fed animals applied to intensively grown crops. However, when these farmers migrated to less heavily populated Sukumaland, they usually abandoned their intensive methods.

In Chibi, Zimbabwe, when increasing population pressure led to reductions in fallow and grazing areas, some farmers' cattle numbers and manure production were also limited, undermining these farmers' strategies to maintain soil fertility. As a result, the maize yields of cattle owners were double those of nonowners. Most farmers considered that the unreliability of the rains in this area made the use of chemical fertilizers too risky.

Although these examples indicate that the value of manure is widely known, its use is comparatively rare in Africa. Only in those areas where the shifting cultivation system has broken down because of population pressure will farmers normally start using manure systematically, and even then there may be a long lag time, and they may be forced to give up if they cannot keep sufficient livestock.

Chemical Fertilizers

Fertilizer alone is generally little used throughout Africa, although there are exceptions, usually where a high-value crop is grown for sale at a fixed and often subsidized price, for example, maize in Kenya or Zimbabwe or groundnuts in Senegal. In general, farmers who are near subsistence level cannot afford to buy much fertilizer, and many of them may have never learned to use it.

Animal Traction

In most of these countries, however, the spread of animal traction seemed to be linked to the introduction of a new cash crop, usually cotton or groundnuts, or maize in southern Africa. Elsewhere, farmers often seemed to be slow to adopt it. There is evidence from the Mali project, from Norman et al. (1981), and from Zimbabwe that the larger, wealthier families that own more cattle are more likely to be able to afford animal traction, which contributes considerably to their wealth, than smaller poorer families, who often have a tremendous struggle to obtain a plow and oxen. In Zimbabwe, some farmers who could not afford to keep both cows and oxen resorted to using the cows for plowing. Starkey (1986) suggested that some Senegalese and Gambian farmers used donkeys and light cultivators for the same reason.

However, there were indications from the Mali farming systems project that farmers who were unable to achieve food self-sufficiency because of low crop yields on overcropped infertile soils did not consider it worthwhile to use animal traction until a new package of maize, manure, and fertilizer was introduced, even though they already owned cattle and a few plows.

I think this supports the principle that mechanization is only valued by farmers in so far as they perceive that it reduces their constraints, including drudgery, and increases their land or labour productivity, or both, and profit margins. Wanders (1994, p. 242) has also stressed the importance of the development of a local infrastructure to support animal traction. For example, in southern Mali, there are no fewer than 2500 rural blacksmiths who can keep animal traction equipment in repair and even make equipment.

If the weeding bottleneck mentioned above is a serious constraint, it is interesting to speculate why farmers in East Africa seem to have been slow to adopt ox-weeders, even when incentives in the form of loans and subsidies were offered to them. In other parts of Africa, farmers often use plows or ridgers or weeders for weeding, and in Senegal they use the sine houe toolbar.

Part of the reason may have been the lack of a satisfactory seeder for row planting, but even where crops were accurately planted in rows, little interrow weeding with oxen was done. Possibly farmers found too many difficulties in training their oxen properly or considered that possible damage to their crops outweighed any reduction in the weeding bottleneck. Farmers' reluctance to adopt wheeled tool-carriers, even when they were heavily subsidized (well documented by Starkey 1988), is also of considerable interest.

Tractors and Other Mechanization

In most countries, the first parts of the agricultural production system that are successfully mechanized are usually various aspects of crop processing, particularly grain milling. The spread of small village grain mills, mainly hammer-mills powered by small gasoline or diesel engines or, if electricity is available, by electric motors, throughout Africa is impressive. This new technology seems to have spread with little government or external support.

There appears to be increasing interest in the small-scale mechanization of other aspects of crop processing, particularly threshing and dehulling (Bassey and Schmidt 1989). Pumps for small-scale irrigation also appear to be becoming popular in some areas such as northern Nigeria, where crop prices can justify their capital and running costs.

Social Aspects

Modernization

Motivation

Risk Aversion

Incentives

Analyzing experience in northeast Uganda in terms of its implications for future development, both in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa, Carr (1982, p. 72) points out that

There are two striking facts which come out of a study of the experience of the annual cropping zone of Uganda for the period that has been reviewed. The first is the rapid positive impact on the productivity of small farmers of a stable political situation combined with good infrastructure which encouraged efficient marketing and competitive pricing. The second is the underestimation by government over many years of the farmers' sensitivity of response to real price incentives. As a result of its apparent lack of understanding of the underlying forces which motivate farmers, successive governments took initiatives which reduced both the quality of marketing and the level of economic incentives to farmers. This was basically a result of the government's dichotomy of policy in which claims were made that it was concerned to encourage and protect farmers, whilst in fact its main objective was to protect other interests, increase its own revenue and engender foreign exchange earnings which were largely used by the non-peasant farming sector of the community.

Because of this basic dichotomy, government for many years attempted to replace price and market incentives by increased agricultural services as a means of stimulating production. This often had the effect of presenting farmers with two conflicting signals. On the one hand the extension staff were pressing farmers to increase their labour input into the cotton crop through earlier planting (involving increased weeding) and higher plant populations, whilst the pricing policy was decreasing real returns per labour unit for cotton production. This remains a common feature of governments in Sub-Saharan Africa today [1982]. Political exhortation or extension pressure is applied to farmers to produce one crop whilst pricing signals encourage them to produce another. Alternatively campaigns are mounted to encourage the use of purchased inputs whilst pricing policies are reducing the benefit to cost ratio of the proposed innovation.

Whilst the experience in north and east Uganda in the middle years of this century makes it quite clear that agricultural services are not an alternative to price incentives and cannot function effectively in the face of contradictory economic signals, this does not mean that there is no potential role for such services ....

Food Security

Security within the community was built up by small reciprocal gifts of food and by fulfilling other traditional obligations. Where pressure on the land was low, these measures appear to have been sufficient to allow survival, although competition between tribes for resources, particularly land, appears to have caused conflict from early times, as it has elsewhere in the world. Also, in the drier areas, runs of unusually dry years are remembered in most communities as having caused famine. The response often seems to have been for the whole community to move to another location where food was thought to be more readily available. Famine was also sometimes caused by the depredations of locusts, rodents, and other plant or animal pests and diseases.

FAO estimated that, in 1985, there were 100 million people (about one-quarter of the population) not receiving a calory-adequate diet in sub-Saharan Africa. Although the accuracy of this figure is not known, the exploding population and the low rates of increase in food production mean that the dangers of food insecurity are constantly increasing.

Rukuni and Eicher (1987) reviewed the food-security situation in southern Africa. They recommended that the Southern African Development Coordination Committee (SADCC) and the southern African countries should adopt the World Bank definition of food security as "Access by all people at all times to enough food for an active and healthy life." The two essential elements in this definition are, first, the availability of food and, second, the ability to acquire it (World Bank 1986, p. 1).

Food security was not to be defined as being the same as food self-sufficiency or agricultural development, because these were narrower concepts than food security. Although food self-sufficiency might be a valid policy objective in some situations, the challenge to food-security researchers was to measure the real costs and reduction of risks associated with increasing the self-sufficiency index of a particular crop in a particular country. Similarly, agricultural development, if successful, could make a contribution to food supplies, and was essential for raising the average standard of living in the region, but should not be confused with food security.

Rukuni and Eicher (1987, p. 19) make the important point that even if a country is self-sufficient in food, this does not imply that all (or even a large proportion) of its people may have access to sufficient food at all times. Urban or landless people may not have sufficient money to buy food, and the rural poor who have land may suffer from lack of food during times of drought or during the "hungry gap" before the harvest. Therefore, access to food is as important as food availability, and research and policy action should be directed to both these aspects. They suggest six challenges for food-security researchers in the region:

• Food and agricultural production;
• Marketing, rural infrastructure, and storage;
• Raising rural per-capita incomes and generating employment in rural areas;
• Food access and nutrition;
• National food-security policy analysis; and
• Regional food-security policy analysis.

Land Tenure

As pressure on the land and "modernization" increase, and land becomes a scarce resource, land-use tends to become more individualistic, and borrowing or renting the use of land become widespread. Eventually, land is bought or sold like any other commodity, and many governments have started granting legal land titles to the owners. In parts of Uganda, particularly Buganda, land titles were granted to certain chiefs by the colonial government in the early years of the 19th century, on the basis of multiples of square miles (1 mile² = 2.59 km²). Fortunately, the traditional tenure systems continued as far as the tenants occupying these mailo lands were concerned, and rents were held at a low level, so that there was not too much disruption of the traditional society (Richards et al. 1973). In those countries where large areas of land were alienated to foreigners, considerable hardship and friction were caused as pressure on the land increased.

In some societies with heavy population pressure, fragmentation became widespread and severe — fragmentation is the term used to describe farms that consist of several small, widely separated pieces of land. For example, fragmentation was a serious problem in parts of the Kenyan highlands, in south-west Uganda, and in the Sine–Saloum area of Senegal. Although it may be argued that some farmers could gain certain advantages from a degree of fragmentation if it enabled them to have the use of a variety of different land types suitable for various crops, in general, farming efficiency seems to decline on severely fragmented farms. The willingness of farmers in parts of Kenya to consolidate and replan their holdings appears to support this view. In particular, fencing for small-scale dairying would probably be uneconomic on severely fragmented farms. Also consolidated farms should be easier to work (see, for example, de Wilde 1967; Faye and Niang 1977).

Labour

• Working longer hours during the busy season;
• Expecting children to help with certain types of farm work;
• Hiring or otherwise obtaining extra labour — although this is often difficult because of cash shortages at bottleneck periods, and because labour may be in short supply when people are busy on their own farms;
• Growing crops in mixtures, which can help to smother weeds, and planting cash crops after food crops are well established;
• Using mechanization — in Nigeria, mechanization mainly consisted of the introduction of ox-plows or ridgers that allowed larger areas of land to be cultivated, but were not used for weeding, so they may have actually increased the weeding bottleneck; in the francophone countries, however, the rapid spread of light multiculture weeders appears to be a response to this constraint; and
• Using herbicides — in general, herbicides appear to have made rather slow progress in the region, probably mainly because the economic incentive for their use often seems doubtful, but also because they can be difficult to use in mixed crops. They may also tend to reduce soil OM. In recent years, use of herbicides has become more widespread on certain crops in some francophone countries, such as on cotton and maize in southern Mali and on rice in the Côte d'Ivoire.

Capital

With increasing modernization and production for the market, gradually more inputs such as fertilizers, crop-protection chemicals, and machinery may be purchased, but capital investments in the form of fencing, water supplies, and so forth tend to remain minimal for all but the wealthiest farmers. In many areas, the poorer farmers may be so short of money that they are forced to sell a substantial proportion of crops such as groundnuts soon after harvest, when prices are often low, to obtain cash, and then to buy food or seed when they become short later in the season at much higher prices. In general, it appears that farmers are more willing to apply inputs such as fertilizers or insecticides if they are provided on credit, the cost being deducted when the crop is sold, but Eicher and Baker (1982) have questioned the real need for credit in many situations.

In recent years, the International Agricultural Research Centers (IARCs), donors, and others appear to have become more conscious of the extreme poverty of many small farmers, so that the "low-input strategy" has been widely promoted. Although this strategy may be appropriate for subsistence production, it may be counterproductive where profitable marketing opportunities exist. For example, if a high-value crop is introduced that has an assured market and that will give a high gross margin with few risks if substantial purchased inputs are provided, usually even the poorest farmers will wish to maximize their profit by applying the optimum inputs, usually with credit. In such cases, it makes no sense to try to implement a low-input strategy across the board.

On the other hand, any workable credit policy clearly requires that applicants be carefully assessed to determine whether the credit will really help increase their production and income by more than the amount loaned plus interest, and whether they are likely to be able and willing to repay the credit.

Management Levels

However, although most smallholders probably try to optimize their use of the limited resources available to them, within the limitations of their environment and background, poverty, risk, and other severe constraints do appear to slow down smallholders' adoption of some new technologies. For example, simple soil- and water-conservation practices would provide long-term benefits in farm productivity, but because the short-term costs may appear to outweigh the short-term returns, their adoption rate is often very slow. Similarly, the control of livestock numbers and the management of grazing in communal grazing areas could be expected to give substantial long-term returns to the livestock-owning community, but because the short-term gain to the individual may be reduced such control is seldom practiced.

Markets, Prices, and Inputs

In the case of surplus food crops, governments have often been unsuccessful in administering fixed or minimum prices. Difficulties sometimes appear to be caused by attempting to fix prices at unrealistic levels. Also, in a mainly subsistence economy, where only a small proportion of total production comes onto the market, small changes in production can lead to large changes in quantities coming onto the market.

For example, in Mali, there were deficiencies in food grains up to 1984, so the government set the minimum grain price at a fairly high level to stimulate production. The good rains in 1985, together with food aid, made up the deficit and the government's marketing agency quickly filled the available storage space. A second good season in 1986 together with a continued high price led to a substantial production surplus. Private traders lowered their prices to about half the government's price, but the government's storage space was soon filled, and the governmental agency was unable to continue buying, so that the price dropped to the market rate. Farmers who had invested in fertilizers and other inputs in the expectation of receiving the government's minimum price experienced considerable difficulties in repaying their loans. At the same time, food aid was still coming into the country, and this contributed to the fall in market prices. It seems likely that the farmers reduced their production the following season.

This problem of surpluses seems one of the most difficult to handle, particularly for land-locked countries such as Mali. It appears that the development of efficient, low-cost transport facilities should assist in the disposal of surpluses either within the region or possibly on the world market. At the same time, improved transport would allow inputs to enter at competitive prices. On the other hand, dumping of surplus production from rich countries at low prices can be disastrous. Jones (1992, p. 3) has commented on the effects of the disposal of surplus wheat stocks by the European Community at heavily subsidized prices under their Common Agricultural Policy.

In Burkina Faso in West Africa, for example, wheat was being sold in 1988 for the equivalent of [US] $60 a ton. Nobody on earth can grow wheat for as little as $60 a ton. Locally produced grains — sorghum and millet — were normally sold for around $100. In situations like this, the urban populations develop dependence on a crop that cannot be grown at the price it is selling for, and which cannot be grown at all in that locality. Then the rural population cease to produce more than they will eat, and find themselves without money for school fees, health or anything else. The workless rural young become semi-employed or unemployed urban young.

Document(s) 11 of 17