That’s how Kofi Annan described the ambitions of a group of farmers he had met on a visit to Mali before arriving here to head up the African Green Revolution Forum.
“I heard their hope for a future,” said the former United Nations secretary general. “To do better year after year.”
Amid the Forum’s talk of improved seeds, better fertilizer use, micro-financing, building harvest storage facilities, and creating markets, another crucial element for transforming African agriculture is gaining prominence: shifting farmer ambitions from merely obtaining sustenance to making profits, from merely living to making a living.
“Leave behind subsistence farming and run farms as a business, create surpluses,” Annan told the gathering.
It is one of the strange realities of Africa that all of these subsistence farmers, growing food to feed their families and living on the far margins of any economy, add up to the biggest business in Africa.
“For a long time we’ve been taking agriculture as a way of life. But agriculture is the largest business there is in Africa,” said Namanga Ngongi, the president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, which itself was formed from an alliance between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “Agriculture gives employment to 60-70 percent of the people, 35-40 percent of a nation’s gross domestic product. Clearly it’s a business. It’s big business. The food crops (mainly grown by the small farmers) are worth something like $200 billion, the cash crops $15-20 billion. We need to support smallholder farmers in the biggest business in Africa.”…
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