You reap what you sow...just sow more

I just read an article today on Reuters that directly ties to Kate’s blog-post about Africa’s resource curse.  The article highlights a recent study by The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center that found that countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are only producing 10-25% of its wheat production potential.  As Kate noted, resource-rich African countries have failed to make a large dent on their poverty levels.  But the article I read points to brighter futures as long as some of these agriculturally rich nations take actions to increase potential wheat production.  It would be a big step forward towards self-sufficiency as it would help curb starvation, limit political instability, and avoid the price shocks of global wheat imports.  As the report estimates, in 2012 African nations will have spent approximately $12 billion on wheat imports.  This is great for American farmers, considering a significant amount of crops like wheat and corn are exported to Africa, but this places impoverished nations in a tight spot when the prices on these imports spike unexpectedly.  Especially this past summer, record level droughts in the Midwest spiked food prices internationally.  I remember various news sources predicting food riots and political instability in impoverished nations that rely on the US for food imports, a la the bread riots of years previous in Mozambique. As the IMWIC suggests, many Sub-Saharan African nations do not need to subject themselves to these sorts of peril.  As Bekele Shiferaw, a lead author of the study notes, “If Africa does not push for wheat self-sufficiency, it could face more hunger, instability and even political violence.”  Rather than spending the money to import the crop themselves, countries like Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Tanzania and Uganda could take the money spent on imports and invest in fertilizer as their natural resources have the proven biological capacity to produce high yields of wheat production.  Essentially, why rely imports with unstable prices when you can reap the benefits of local wheat production?  The study points to 2008 as a perfect example when Zambia and Rwanda were able to dodge international price shocks because they were able to sufficiently produce domestic crops. 

Though the biological potential is there, infrastructure is the one thing that stands in the way.  According to Hans-Joachim Braun, the director of the IMWIC’s wheat program,  “The big issue is the road infrastructure. It doesn't help very much if the farm is far from the cities.” 

As noted by Stiglitz in Making Globalization Work, Africa was unfortunately bypassed by the Green Revolution of the late 20^th century, due to “widespread corruption, insecurity” and “a lack of infrastructure” (42).  It is within this issue that Kate’s blog-post comes into context again.  If they decide to do so, how will these nations finance projects to improve their infrastructure?  Is their path to agricultural self-sufficiency contingent upon foreign direct investment in infrastructure?  If so, there is the possibility of continual inequality and corruption due to opaque policies and a lack of international governance.  In the years to come, it will be interesting to see how these Sub-Saharan African countries will go about obtaining complete self-sufficiency in wheat, if they choose to do so.