Member in the News: Thomas Jayne

Africa’s real land grab

Never mind foreign interlopers. African urbanites are scooping up more land

Posted: July 23, 2016
AFTER half an hour poking around Martin Shem’s farm, Paul Kavishe is impressed, even a little jealous. “He has done well,” says Mr Kavishe. “He’s a real farmer!” This is strange praise, not because Mr Shem’s dairy, maize and mango-growing operation on the outskirts of Morogoro is not admirable, but because both men have had university careers. For middle-class Tanzanians, though, a successful farmer trumps a successful academic.

“Every Tanzanian is a farmer,” explains Ali Aboud, another professor who has moved into agriculture. He cultivates about 20 hectares of rice paddy; in the past three years a businessman from Dar es Salaam and another city-dweller have bought big farms near his fields. These men are part of a quiet, hard-to-track but momentous change in Africa, which has profound consequences for the continent’s most important industry.

Surveys show that most farms in sub-Saharan Africa are smaller than two hectares. But that is the wrong way of measuring agriculture, says Thomas Jayne of Michigan State University. Look at land rather than farms, he says, and it is clear that a fairly small number of farmers now own a large portion. The fastest growth is among the middle class. In Ghana, 38% of agrarian land is occupied by farms of between five and 100 hectares; in Zambia, 52% is. In both of those countries, and also in Kenya and Malawi, medium-sized farms collectively take up more land than larger ones, whether those are owned by rich Africans or the foreign investors who are often accused of “grabbing” land.

 

Read the entire article here: http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21702472-never-mind-foreign-interlopers-african-urbanites-are-scooping-up-more?frsc=dg|a