Since 2020, the epidemic, locust plague and severe drought have hit many African countries, resulting in a reduction in food production, increasing the economic burden on African residents, and making it worse for African countries that are already food insecure. The continuous conflict in some areas and the continuous social unrest not only make it difficult to cultivate the conflict areas, but also lead to serious price increases. Nearly 80 per cent of southern African countries rely entirely on imports of wheat and its products, and the decline in food exports caused by the Russian-Ukrainian conflict has exacerbated the African food crisis through global and regional price transmission.
Modern Africa is a contradiction. There are 54 countries with a total population of 1.286 billion, much larger than the Americas, but 300 million people are malnourished, and many people are struggling to survive. Every once in a while, we get news of the food crisis in Africa. In early 2008, Kenya faced famine as electoral unrest affected food production and drought reduced food production. In 2009, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations said 20 African countries were in a food crisis and that two-thirds of sub-Saharan Africa's population was starving. In 2014, the Ebola virus pandemic exacerbated food crises in Sierra Leone, Libya, Guinea and elsewhere. There are many causes of food crisis in Africa: rapid population growth, social unrest, drought, disease, war, land degradation, inadequate national agricultural inputs, and heavy dependence on imports for food.
Some say Africans are lazy. If there are more suitable crops, Africans are also willing to grow them. Since corn was introduced to Africa by Europeans, in the past 200 years, corn cultivation has spread to the interior of Africa. Cassava, another food crop that is more suitable for growing in tropical rainforest areas, has been widely cultivated in Africa, and Nigeria is the world's largest producer of cassava. Even on such a barren land as Africa, the yield can often exceed 1 ton per acre, but the nutrition is very poor, and the raw food is poisonous, and it needs to be peeled and soaked before it can be eaten.
Natural causes
Most people are under the impression that Africa is a dry and hot land. In fact, Africa is very large, tropical and subtropical climate, and the agricultural potential is huge. In the tropical regions of sub-Saharan Africa, rainwater leaching is evident due to high temperatures and rainfall. Salts containing potassium, sodium, calcium and magnesium in the soil are washed away by rainwater and flow into groundwater, while organic matter is accelerated into water and carbon dioxide due to high temperatures and rain. Therefore, the soil in tropical and subtropical areas is generally red and acidic, and a large number of laterite-type iron ore, bauxite and nickel ore can be found.
If you want to use such soil for farming, you must first use hydrated lime and other improvements to improve the alkalinity of the soil. In the tropics, it is theoretically possible to ripen three times a year, but the soil fertility will be consumed quickly, the input-output ratio is not cost-effective, and there is no winter in the tropics, various pests live carefree all year round, and weeds grow wildly all year round.
Africa irrigation canal system, field roads and other farmland supporting infrastructure is basically absent, regional agriculture is very primitive, a fire in the dry season, planting crops in the rainy season. If you can't burn it, clean up the roots of trees that can't be moved, you just go with the flow, and you won't level the land. Sowing seeds is also very Buddhist, corn, cassava, peanuts and other seeds, planted wherever it counts. Extensive farming methods have led to local people being very indifferent to the ownership of land and crops, and even the cattle and sheep are often indifferent to eating the crops in their own fields. A nest of corn can put 5-8 seeds, squeezed in a pile, so that the corn cob that grows out, must be thin and short, the yield is naturally not going up.
Human causes
There are also countries in Africa that have developed agriculture, such as Mozambique, and agricultural conditions have been praised by Chinese agricultural experts as "Hainan climate, Han River water resources, and northeast black land". Its soil fertility is comparable to that of the black soil in the three eastern provinces, and the usable arable land is equivalent to ten Chinese Hainan Islands. Its cashew produces five percent of the world's cashews. However, such a good agricultural resource, half of the country's grain depends on imports, and its domestic supermarkets are filled with foreign imported grain. Large areas of land in the countryside are barren, and to put it bluntly, it is not profitable to grow grain, and the enthusiasm of peasants is not high.
Africa's agriculture is entirely export-oriented, growing cash crops and having very little food to eat. The invasion of European colonists in the last century forcibly tied the African smallholder economy to the global market dominated by Europe and North America. Cocoa, coffee, sisal, cashew nuts, pyrethorms (for insecticides), gum arabic, tea, sesame, peanuts and other cash crops and tropical fruits are widely planted in Africa, the output accounts for a high proportion of the world, buy sesame oil in European supermarkets, the origin is basically Sudan, Ethiopia and other East African countries.
There are two ways to increase food production: by increasing yield levels and by increasing the area under cultivation. The method of increasing yields mainly relies on breeding, cultivation, irrigation and agricultural inputs. The growth model of African agriculture is mainly to expand the area under cultivation, rather than to improve production efficiency. Africa, on the other hand, is the fastest growing region in the world, and the hard-won increase in food production has been wiped out by the new population. International appeals, aid, loans and other measures have been exchanged for illusions, and the best result is nothing more than the slow growth of African agriculture. Every time the international situation changes, the African continent is at any time threatened by "starvation".
Fertilizer is the biggest achievement of the industrial revolution in the 20th century, and its role in improving soil fertility and land productivity is obvious. In Africa, the amount of fertilizer input is too low for a long time to form an effective support for the increase in food production. Fertilizer inputs in more than 50 countries in Africa are uneven, North African countries have relatively developed economies and use large amounts of fertilizers, and sub-Saharan African countries have the fastest increase in fertilizer demand, but long-term supply is insufficient.
Before the reform and opening up, China was short of grain, but after 40 years of reform and opening up, it has reversed this situation, relying on policies, science and technology, and investment. With 6% of the world's water resources and 9% of the world's arable land resources, China has solved the problem of eating for 20% of the world's population, and its per capita grain consumption is more than 470 kilograms, which is higher than the world average of 400 kilograms.
Many African countries, with decentralized smallholder farmers as the main body, can learn from China's experience. For example, the labor-intensive technologies used in China's rice and corn can significantly improve land utilization and labor productivity through simple technical solutions of good seeds, dense planting, moderate fertilization, and increasing the number of weedings in middle cultivation. In addition, providing organized training and market-matching services for smallholder farmers through cooperatives and demonstration gardens can also enhance the bargaining power of smallholder farmers and resist external risks.
China's Belt and Road Initiative has provided new growth space for China-Africa agricultural cooperation. Africa can make full use of its land, resources and labor advantages to strengthen agricultural economic, trade and development cooperation with China and other countries, increase investment in agriculture, promote agricultural growth, and change Africa's relatively single and overly dependent on the international market of agricultural production structure, which is the fundamental way to eliminate "hungry Africa".