africa needs a green revolution

Africa’s peasants are migrating to the cities in huge numbers because it is becoming increasingly difficult to survive on their farms. Meanwhile, very few are finding productive jobs in the cities and most are getting poorer. Africa’s dependance on concessionary food import is growing and these trends can have catastrophic consequences for the continent’s poor people. Current situation in Africa bears some striking similarities in Asia in the early 1960s. Faced with worsening food shortages and slow agricultural growth, Asian governments started spending 10-15% of their total budget on agriculture each year because they realised that rapid agricultural growth was a key step along the path to industrialisation. They invested on agricultural research, irrigation, rural roads and power.  Many of these interventions were targeted to small farms, who enthusiastically adopted the new technologies and typically outperformed larger farms. These policies inspired a green revolution that helped transform Asia. Africa, in contrast, has failed to do the same. For over 40 years African governments have spent less than half the share spent in Asia, and little has been done  for agricultural development. Africa has only exploited a fraction of its irrigation potential and the density of rural roads is very low. Farmers rely almost exclusively on rain-fed farming and face exceptionally high transport and marketing costs. Instead, yields could dramatically increase if farmers had access to improved technologies and markets and if goverments provided more supportive policies for agriculture. An African green revolution would generate many productive jobs in agriculture and provide a leg up out of poverty for many. This would help creating allied industries and lowering food prices, and, finally, would prevent migration of millions of peasants off the land. Two risks, however, should be taken into account: a) the spread of green revolution agriculture may affect both agricultural biodiversity and wild biodiversity; b) the consumption of the chemicals and pesticides used to kill pests by humans in some cases may be increasing the likelihood of cancer.
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urbanisation and cancer in africa

Both in developed and low-income developing countries of the world more than half of humanity resides now in cities, and city dwellers make up more of the world population each year. Humanity is abandoning the countryside and soon more than 25 cities will have populations of 10 million or more. Rural areas depopulate because modern farming techniques require less labor and more technology. In developing countries more and more migrants each year are leaving marginal lands because little rain and poor soils keep agricultural productivity low. In fact, farming income cannot compete with economic opportunities in cities. A growing, affluent urban class thus drives demand in energy and consumer goods and is straining city infrastructure. 

Since 1955 Africa has witnessed the most rapid urbanisation of all the continents, giving rise to cities that rival some of the greatest in the world in terms of size and population although sadly not infrastructure. By the year 2025, 54.0 percent of the African population will reside in urban areas. Some of these cities are Kano, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Abidjan (all with a population of more than 3 million), Khartoum (Pop 4.5 million), Kinshasa (Pop 6.0 million), and Lagos (Pop 10.9 million). The growth of Africa’s population is high while the rates of economic growth are low. As a consequence the growth of available health facilities in these huge metropolitan areas cannot parallel the rate of people urbanisation. In these huge cities “new” diseases such as cancer will reach unexpected rates in the near future due to population growth and ageing, combined with reduced mortality from infectious disease, and lack of primary and secondary preventive actions. Urbanisation in Africa is thus likely to play a major role in favoring the cancer epidemic the continent will be faced to in few years.