Online Reporter
WITH a population approaching 1,7 billion, the largest group of Africans rely on farming for their main livelihood, either crops, livestock or both. In many countries, farming households form a majority of the population, the percentage dropping as industrialisation increases.
But even in the most industrialised countries, agriculture is a critical component of the economy. Most countries want to see at least the bulk of local food supplies coming from their own farmers, with long-range transport not really able to cope with huge movements of food between states.
Cash crops, usually at least semi-processed, ranging from tropical fruits and tobacco through coffees, teas and wines, olives and a growing range of specialised products, through the processing of livestock and export of meat, leather and other products, provide a reasonable additional stream of income to farmers and their countries.
But Africa is probably the continent most affected by global warming with more cyclones and, critically, more droughts. The growing instability of the climate also means there can be more floods, even in countries frequently hit by drought.
All this creates the need to produce more food and more value added products if most rural Africans are to have a decent life and the continent able to cope with food shortages in unstable global markets through what it sustainably grows, ranches and fishes for itself.
Even the major industrial growth everyone knows that the continent must have is threatened by water shortages and pollution and even a higher percentage of health risks that come from these sources.
Around a quarter of Africans, an incredible 400 million people, do not have access to clean and safe drinking water, not even a proper protected well near their home, and parts of the huge cities now rising on the continent suffer from perennial water shortages and bad sanitation.
While bad city sanitation can grab headlines, we have seen rural cholera outbreaks and similar results of both poor sanitation and lack of safe drinking water.
For all these reasons the just end ended African Union Summit in Addis Ababa took as a major theme: “Assuring sustainable water availability and safe sanitation systems to achieve the goals of Agenda 2063”.
This long term programme for Africa covers the basics needed for a decent life for all Africans, bringing in economics, good health, education and all the other factors that must be upgraded.
Many of the solutions require regional and continental input, thanks to colonial boundaries that tended to use rivers as borders, not just national programmes.
Almost all require levels of capital way beyond what single families, communities and even large cities can ever hope to raise. So at least the core solutions have to come from countries and regions.
President Mnangagwa contributed from his own experience, and we need to remember that in private life he is a successful farmer, and the experience of Zimbabwe, where all the ills that affect African agriculture can be seen in most years and where the pollution from large cities is a ticking time bomb.
Zimbabwe is moving away from pure rain-fed farming as fast as possible, with its ongoing dam building programme and putting in the next level of infrastructure to ensure that this impounded water can irrigate as many hectares as possible. The impounded lakes are being developed as fisheries, along with small farm dams and even village tanks.
The point is that the natural environment is not that useful to rural dwellers, let alone those who live in the largest cities, and a respectable slice of the national budget has to be allocated to impounding, storing and moving water, although decent research and proper scientific backing ensure that the water is used most efficiently with none wasted.
This is one of those modern challenges that now face Africa as a whole, different in many respects from what faced the founders of the AU predecessor, the Organisation for African Unity as colonialism was defeated and Africans had to start taking full responsibility for their future, as well as enjoying fully the rewards for that freedom when they overcame the other challenges.
A lot of work we hear little about is being done to fight climate change, from that multinational effort across the Sahel to plant billions of trees and shrubs to first hold back the expanding desert and then reclaim our own.
We are building up livestock vaccines and working out ways that livestock farmers can earn far better incomes, with Zimbabwe, for example, bringing together irrigation and cattle farmers so that quality stock feeds can be grown.
But all of this is based on the fact that there is irrigation, and that means that there are dams holding the water in the best times, that there are good administrators who can figure out the workable amounts of water that can be used year-in and year-out, adding up all the droughts and floods.
We have to be continually learning. Some major irrigation schemes in the past in Africa produced only modest gains as dams were seen as just engineering, without the accompanying other expertise in farming and ecologies.
But we have been learning and getting a lot more right more often. So dams now provide the core starting point, but then must be plugged into complex eco-systems to make proper use of the water.
