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Reaching the poor - a call to action:
Investment in smallholder agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa
FARM-Africa, Harvest Help and the Centre for Development and Poverty Reduction, Dapertment of Agricultural Sciences, Imperial College London
Spring 2004
SARPN acknowledges FARM-Africa as the source of this document.
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Executive Summary
The most severe and intractable poverty in the world is in Africa south of the Sahara. Nearly half of all the people there live in absolute poverty, with incomes of less than a dollar a day. On present trends, two of the most fundamental Millennium Development Goals set by the United Nations – halving the number of people living in absolute poverty and halving the proportion of people suffering from hunger – will not be met by the target year of 2015. Indeed, the World Bank forecasts that in Africa and the Middle East the number of “absolute poor” will actually rise between now and 2015.
To reverse this disaster, the focus of development in sub-Saharan Africa must be on rural areas, where three-quarters of poor people live. Here, tackling poverty means boosting smallholder agriculture and recognising that this is the best – and perhaps only – way of driving broad-based economic growth and poverty reduction in Africa: compared with other sectors, smallholder agriculture has the highest potential for kick-starting and supporting self-sustaining growth and employment across a range of
agricultural and non-agricultural activities.
Achieving smallholder agriculture growth will not be easy. Small-scale farmers continue to face a host of problems, including poor access to markets and to the financial, extension and research services needed to help them work in difficult conditions; limited resources; and high exposure to price and production risks.These difficulties are compounded by the debilitating impacts of HIV/AIDS on individuals, households and communities. Unless these and other constraints are addressed by national governments
and international organisations, the prospects for Africa’s poor remain bleak.
Action is needed to empower rural people and enable them to access technical and commercial information and skills, inputs, financial services and markets. Increases in investment, with new and more farmer-centred approaches, are needed to bring about
coordinated delivery of these services, as well as improved infrastructure, such as better roads, and access to water for irrigation.
Reforms to Northern agricultural and trade policies are also necessary, together with policies that cut the risks and increase the returns on the substantial investments that smallholders must make themselves in expanding output.
Governments have to play a leading role in coordinating new policies and investments, but ministries of agriculture are commonly under-resourced and ineffective. New approaches are needed to define their roles and improve their capacity.
The report ends with a series of specific recommendations and a call for action by donors and governments.
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