Millennials ‘Make Farming Sexy’ in Africa, Where Tilling Soil Once Meant Shame
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
1. You've got high unemployment and a homegrown agriculture will put people to work.
2. Citizens diet is less dependent on a long supply chain
3. A local agriculture will drive down the cost of food. This will make a measurable difference in everyone's life. In America we pay 6.4% of our income for food, in Africa it's 60%. If the cost of food goes down people will have more money for other things.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/this-map-shows-how-mu...
> The figures do not mean that food is more expensive in Nigeria than in the US. In fact, quite the reverse. The average American spends $2,392 per year on food, the average Nigerian half that: $1,132. The average Kenyan spends just $543 a year on food.
There are many benefits of Africa having the infrastructure/skills/industry to produce food in a more scalable way, but % of income is possibly not the metric to measure by.
[edit] changed last sentence.
What we do know is that food is already very cheap in Africa. It's not obvious that food could get much cheaper, let alone the 300% price reduction that you give in your example.
On the other hand, we do know there are huge gains to be had when it comes to increasing income and economic activity in general. That's where our effort would be best spent.
Maybe I am not understanding the math properly. Food is cheap in the USA because we import them from poorer countries where labour is cheap. And we also consume a lot. This benefits the exporting country. But if we were to produce our own food, the local production won’t be cheaper.
Both of these feats would be incredible. So yeah, if we could do incredible things, that would be amazing.
Let's get back to reality though: Food prices are more or less set by international markets. African farmers can't compete with other countries, because they work so inefficiently. Making more people work as farmers doesn't change that.
That's the reason why Africans import so much food. It's actually cheaper. You don't need more people working as farmers, you would need automation to be competitive, but then less people are actually employed. Even then, this wouldn't lower food prices below market price, because those farmers can now export instead of serving the domestic market.
I do wonder if this accounts for SNAP and other food expenses not directly paid with cash income.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/consumer-expenditures/2017/...
I would suspect the average HN reader tends more towards upper-middle class than the average nationally.
Is this true? In my experience the cheapest food is rarely almost never locally produced. It may be marketing and the demand for local food is higher.
Long supply chains have a lot of value add. Sure there is cost to transporting and storing the food, but the process has other efficiencies that more than make up for the cost. I've even read stories about Central American countries exporting their produce only to reimport it back for the locals to conusme.
In low cost of labor countries, I've seen the exact opposite. It's probably not very profitable in the US to setup a vegetable stand for 12 hours a day along a highway for $10/hr of sales. In many countries it is - you have a market garden and put one of the grandparents/children/cousins/etc. manning the retail operation. A single western tourist can make your entire day profitable (including opportunity costs) assuming no other sales.
In my experience you pay a huge premium in the US for locally grown (e.g. weekend farmers markets) - but in other countries it's the opposite - supermarkets are pretty expensive, and the "local farmer" markets are a quarter of the price.
Large supermarkets, etc, can get access to these ridiculous prices and so it can cause prices to stay fairly low. However, it is not really healthy for the farmers. If you live in a really rural area that doesn't have access to a large world-wide market, the local food will be a lot cheaper because the only outside food you have access to is super expensive.
For me, buying local is about agricultural sustainability. It's about making sure that my neighbours can grow food, sell it and live comfortably. I'd also rather have many small farmers producing the best quality produce they can, than 1 super farmer that is trying to produce the cheapest produce they can. This all adds up to higher prices, of course.
I often feel that we should have "fair trade" in food everywhere. I can buy a pound of raisons from California for less than $2. The same grapes would be 4 pounds. $2000 of raisons at a retail price is 4000 pounds of grapes... And you think for those tonnes of grapes... how much is the farmer getting? It gets a bit crazy.
The weird thing is that small scale farming will only be viable as long as Africa is not attractive to big farmers. The moment big farmers can get going I think it will be the end of small scale farming.
Because when you look at broad trends you can see patterns among cohorts, and sometimes those patterns are important in economic and government policy.
One of the key traits (stereo)typically discussed in the media w.r.t. millennials is a sense of entitlement, growing up with technology. And to a lesser extent, millennials tend to be more understanding of the importance of the environment and diet.
That happens to reflect exactly the article's premise: agriculture is seen as something that poor, illiterate rural people do. Whereas millennials in Africa are urbanising, have mobile phones, are literate and went to school and are looking for a manufacturing or services job, not an agricultural one. The concept of the millennial translates just fine to the African context, in the case of this article.
The average age in Africa is 24, yet the average farmer is 60. That's where millennials come in, reshaping the idea of farming, and giving it a modern touch. That's what the article is about.
> Aren't these generational terms relevant to the USA only?
I mean, even if you disagreed that an African millennial made sense as a concept... there's hundreds of millions of people living in countries with very similar concepts. (e.g. much of Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan etc). It's not a term exclusive to the US.
Africa is a very big place, though, in varying stages of development. Several places have burgeoning middle classes, with access to similar amounts of consumer goods as the rest of the world. Is there any reason to think that these middle classes don't face similar generational shifts?
South Africa on the other hand, the country I work in is very different from other parts of Africa. There are large commercial farms which produce most of the food for the country. Suppliers are not interested in small scale farmers. Animal medicines only sold through vets or in quantities of 10 000. Suppliers of shade cloth and other farming materials largely ignore you when you want to buy a handful of stock. It is very different to my home country where everyone has a few animals and you can buy whatever you want in small quantities. South Africa represents what Africa will be in the next generation or two. I full agree with your comment and I would like to enjoy the small scale farming while it is possible.
Even more than that, farming is an essential human activity and we could use another green revolution.
So how are those "native farmers" going to bring their societies from poverty to prosperity, by being completely uncompetitive, but protected at the same time?
So I don't see how they can avoid a process similar to what occurred for western farmers starting ~1900. They don't need to be competitive on a global scale, they need to find a profitable niche in their own countries. Additionally, increasing employment seems far preferable; likely developing local economies is the best way to increase standards of living rather than relying on foreign aid.
Also note that there are many crops even in the US that heavily rely on hand labor (typically fruit/vegetables). While it may not be feasible to compete with imported grains, I can certainly see how local farmers could effectively compete for these crops- which would likely also increase the diversity of foods avaliable in local markets.
How is it anything but a net positive for them to develop local industries; the increased economic output is likely to improve the entire local economies and doesn't rely on foreign aid (which can suppress long-term economic development).
Of course not. I'm suggesting the opposite: That they have no chance of competing with manual farm labor, so there's no point in trying.
> So I don't see how they can avoid a process similar to what occurred for western farmers starting ~1900.
I don't see how a development process that may have happened in the West over a hundred years ago, under completely different circumstances, can be repeated in Africa in 2019. That's literally the question I am posing: How could this kind of development possibly work through farming?
> They don't need to be competitive on a global scale, they need to find a profitable niche in their own countries.
You can't ignore the global market. The whole reason why many farmers can't make a living in Africa is because foreign produce is cheaper, due to automation. So you would have to restrict foreign produce, raising its prices and therefore making everyone poorer (except the farmers).
> Additionally, increasing employment seems far preferable; likely developing local economies is the best way to increase standards of living rather than relying on foreign aid.
Developing local economies is fine, doing it through farming is completely misguided. In farming, a massive amount of labor can be automated away and will be automated away if economic development actually takes place, so any employment here would be temporary at best.
Instead of farming, let's take the manufacturing of clothes. Some of it can be automated away, but not necessarily to the point to make 99% of workers redundant. As a result, you can see many emerging economies producing clothes for international markets.
> Also note that there are many crops even in the US that heavily rely on hand labor (typically fruit/vegetables). While it may not be feasible to compete with imported grains, I can certainly see how local farmers could effectively compete for these crops- which would likely also increase the diversity of foods avaliable in local markets.
I did note as much, specialized farming may well be a profitable niche for exporting. Except those misguided western do-gooders aren't helping them build supply chains to western markets for valuable produce, they're telling them that raising rats and snails for the domestic market is totally the right thing to do for economic development. Utter nonsense!
> How is it anything but a net positive for them to develop local industries; the increased economic output is likely to improve the entire local economies and doesn't rely on foreign aid (which can suppress long-term economic development).
Because of comparative advantage. Making domestic farming sustainable would require protectionism. We figured out hundreds of years ago that protectionism doesn't work and effectively makes everyone poorer, yet somehow it's still popular among politicians (like Mr. Trump).
In 2019, being a farmer without modern machinery is pretty much the least valuable form of labor one could perform, unless we're talking about very specific foods that need special care, i.e. not the kind of food that actually feeds a population.
Only narrow-minded "back-to-the-roots" westerners who idealize farming could come up with such a non-solution. Thankfully, the Chinese who idealize money are building factories in Africa to turn that labor into real economic value.