Africa’s smallholders need to go beyond subsistence

Africa’s smallholders need to go beyond subsistence

Tsilahara Monja pulls a spindly sweet potato out of the dry earth of his field. “If there was more rain, these crops would grow better,” he says. He has even less hope for his maize, due to be harvested in weeks but showing few signs of life.

Like nearly all smallholder farmers in Africa, Monja relies on rain, rather than irrigation, to water his crops. His is an extreme situation. He lives with his young family — a wife and two children — in southern Madagascar, a region that has suffered extreme droughtfor three years. In that time, many of the people around him teetered on the brink of starvation. To survive, his own family ate cactus leaves normally fed to cattle.

Most of the tens of millions of African farmers who work on smallholder plots of up to two hectares are in less precarious straits than Monja, although there have been severe food shortages in other parts of Africa, too — including the Horn and the Sahel region.

But even farmers producing decent harvests struggle to rise above basic subsistence. Knowledge of seeds, fertiliser or techniques to increase yield is often lacking. Even where it exists, the incentive to produce surpluses is