KANGULUMIRA, Uganda – Farmer Kizito Godfrey wants to make it clear from the outset that the high food prices receiving so much attention these days are not making him rich.
“How is a farmer in Africa going to benefit?” Godfrey asked as he stood on his 20-acre farm more than 100 kilometres southeast of Kampala, not far from the equator.
“I receive more, but I pay more. Other people benefit.”
In a nutshell, that sums up the problem facing Africa’s millions of small-scale farmers.
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The higher food prices that have world food experts worrying about rising hunger and starvation also are seen as an opportunity for farmers to make more money, invest and expand production. Yet farmers and their representatives insist much of that promise is being lost.
“The higher prices don’t trickle down to the small farmer,” Arinaitwe Rwakajara, president of the Uganda Young Farmers Association, said in an interview June 1 during a meeting of the International Federation of Agricultural Producers in Warsaw, Poland.
“At the end of the day, the farmers do not benefit. The middlemen and the input suppliers do.”
It was a story heard repeatedly during interviews with farmers and farm leaders from other African countries.
“Unfortunately, the price rises are not translating into higher incomes on most farms, and that is a problem,” said Zambian farm leader and new IFAP president Ajay Vashee.
“The problem is that people and governments hear of these high prices, assume farmers are getting it and that reduces the pressure for action, and that is a problem.”
Even the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which sees increased farmer income as one of the few bright spots in what it describes as a world food crisis, warns that it will not happen automatically.
“The present agricultural commodity boom provides an important opportunity for stimulating both short- and long-term growth if it is not imprudently taxed away and if the public sector provides the necessary resources in the form of public goods which will increase agricultural productivity,” it said in an analysis prepared for the early June FAO world food summit in Rome.
And that, say food and poverty experts in Africa, is the crunch.
A way must be found to ensure affordable and reliable inputs for farmers to intensify their production. Investment in irrigation systems would help alleviate problems caused by shifting climate and rain patterns.
Roads must be improved so farmers can get their produce to markets.
Even if all that miraculously happened, it still would not guarantee that higher prices stay with the farmer.
Most do not have on-farm or local storage facilities so produce usually must be sold shortly after harvest. As well, farmers do not generally work together in marketing schemes or organizations, pitting them individually against food buyers and brokers.
In Kampala, food security and poverty specialist Peter Atekyereza, a university professor and national
co-ordinator for the research network Renewal Uganda, offers the example of soaring banana prices in Kampala.
In southwestern Uganda, where banana production is dominant, farmers sell their produce from roadside stands to truckers hired by wholesalers or brokers, which offer 3,000 Ugandan shillings, or $1.95 Cdn, per bunch.
By the time the bananas are driven back to the capital and sold to a wholesaler, the price has doubled to 6,000 shillings.
“And I’m paying as much as 8,000 shillings, which is much more than I paid last year, but that high price is not going back to the farmer,” Atekyereza said.
“Farmers do not have the market organization and power to extract the most of that better price.”
On Godfrey’s mixed farm southeast of the city, he said the numbers tell the tale. The prices he is paid for his coffee, corn and pineapples have doubled, but the cost of pesticides, fertilizer, fuel and labour have increased more.
He is trying to add value by producing pineapple wine on the farm, but volumes are small.
“Most of the money goes to other people,” he said. “And most of the farms are being run by old men like me. The young people go to town to drive bada bada (motorcycles for hire as taxis) or to look for work. They don’t see a future here.”
Government, farm leaders and international organizations hope they can change that mentality and inject optimism and growth into small-scale farming, the core of Africa’s food production.
At the IFAP meeting in Warsaw, an official with the Southern Africa Council of Agricultural Unions told African farm leaders they should be more positive.
“As farmers we need to decide which side we are on,” Ishmael Sunga said. “When prices were low, you were complaining. When prices are high, you are complaining that someone else is getting it. This is a confused political message.”
