Debates

Future Agricultures Consortium recognizes the importance of debates in shaping the future of livelihoods in Africa. In order to raise the profile of important topics surrounding agriculture, the Consortium and its' partners present the following debates:

Big Farms - Small Farms
(January 28, 2009 - March 15, 2009)

Debates on the scale of farming are back on the agenda. In a number of recent articles, Professor Paul Collier, author of ‘The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can be Done About It’, made the case for encouraging large-scale commercial farming as way to get African farming moving. Favouring small farmers, he argues, is romantic but unhelpful.

During 2008 there have been many reports of private companies in the North and state corporations in the South reacting to the opportunity and threat of higher food prices by planning to acquire land in Africa, South-east Asia, Brazil and Central Asia to produce food. The most startling of these announcements is that of the Daewoo Corporation of the Republic of Korea that revealed that it was acquiring the rights to farm no less than 1.3 million hectares of Madagascar, a position from which the company and the government have now backed away from following a storm of local and international protest.

In many cases the reports suggest that the aim is to farm the land on a large scale, rather than to contract production through existing family smallholdings. It is now more than three years since IFPRI, Imperial College, and ODI organised a workshop at Wye for specialists to debate the issues surrounding small farms. It looks to be time to revisit those arguments in the light of higher food prices, the arguments being made for large-scale farming and apparent intent of capital-rich investors.

The Future Agricultures Consortium thus invites you to contribute your views to be shared in a Web Forum (www.future-agricultures.org/EN/e-debates/Big_Farms/farm_debate.html).

 

 

Towards a "Green Revolution" for Africa:

(October 13, 2008 - November 21st, 2008)

How can Africa's farmers, scientists, development practitioners, private entrepreneurs and public officials spark a "uniquely" Green Revolution in Africa, one that responds to the region's unique social, political and ecological conditions? The aim of this moderated e-Discussion is to focus the discussions on action-oriented approaches to address the “how” part of the African Green Revolution discussions.

 

Policy frameworks for increasing soil fertility in Africa: debating the alternatives

Everyone is agreed that one of the central components of achieving an ‘African Green Revolution’ is to tackle the widespread soil fertility constraints in African agriculture. All see soil fertility as central, although the suggested solutions and policy requirements are very different.But what are the policy frameworks that really will increase soil fertility in ways that will boost production in a sustainable fashion; where the benefits of the interventions are widely distributed, meeting broader aims of equitable, broad-based development? Here there is much less precision and an urgent need for a concrete debate.

 

Too many people, too few livestock:
pastoralism in crisis?

Drought in the Horn of Africa – again. With the region's worst drought in over a decade, pastoral households around the Ethiopian, Kenyan and Somali borders have been hard hit. Alongside the humanitarian response, a re-emerging debate on the future of pastoral systems is taking shape. Is the proverbial grass greener on one side than the other? View the comments from this interesting debate.