African Agriculture

After Asia, Africa is the world's second-largest and second most-populated continent, covering 6% of the world's surface area. Nine hundred million people live in 53 countries in this huge continent. Both Asia and Africa were colonized by European countries, and their natural resources exploited to profit countries like Britain, France, Holland. With the withdrawal of colonial overmasters, and the independence of the countries of Africa after 500 years of foreign exploitation, Africa is still the largest recipient of food aid world-wide.

With its vast land mass and arable land, Africans haven't seemed to be able to cultivate the land in a way that would see them feeding themselves. Despite independence, their rulers are still amenable to making natural resources available to huge Western and European industries through mineral and precious metals and gems extraction, profiting few in Africa itself. It seems that only white farmers in Africa who had succeeded, through the years of colonial rule to amass huge tracts of land, have been capable of providing agricultural stability, enabling many countries to adequately feed themselves.

When Robert Mugabe enacted his land distribution process, violently wrenching land, without due process of law, from white land-owners who had farmed the land they had amassed for generations, employing countless black Zimbabweans as farm workers, the economy of the country went into collapse, and food became scarce. South Africa has now begun its embarkation on a like mission for land distribution, without the violent upheaval. And white South African farmers are anticipating that they will have to look elsewhere for arable land to be profitably farmed.

But it isn't just Zimbabwe and South Africa in agricultural transition. Many countries in Africa are now earning petro dollars, drilling for oil, in a consortium with international oil companies, and this is where attention has turned, neglecting farmland that once was intensively farmed, feeding their people. Other countries have turned to Africa to themselves invest in renting former agricultural land laying fallow, from the United Kingdom in Angola, Saudi Arabia in Sudan and Ethiopia, Qatar in Kenya and China in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

This new initiative puts cash infusions into the countries' treasuries and in the pockets of government officials, but it doesn't trickle down to the population who are perennially short of food, and have to pay more than their income can sustain for imported food. South Africa's white farmers, represented by their union, Agri SA, have begun a deal with Republic of Congo to lease up to 200,000 (for starters) hectares of under-utilized Congo farmland to grow corn, soybeans and to raise poultry.

Agri SA has looked at offers of land leases from 17 African countries, opening negotiations with Angola, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia and Sudan, for prime production land. This can conceivably be a positive element in the future of agriculture in Africa, on the part of white South African farmers. In the end, benefiting the countries where the agricultural pursuits are taking place. Far less so when countries like China, the U.K. Qatar, Saudi Arabia invest in their own pursuits to ensure that the populations of their own countries have sufficient food through agriculture undertaken in Africa.

It puts no food on the table for millions of Africans already in a perilous state of insufficient food production, and needful of assistance from the international community to stave off starvation. It's past time for African countries to recognize the enormity of their need and their responsibility to their populations. And to move with determination to encourage large-scale farming on their own, undertaken by their own citizens, to benefit their own populations.