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"We are a poor village but we never let a visitor leave without a gift from us. Since you have come all the way from America you really deserve a cow, but all we can offer you today is this cock and this hen. We hope you will accept them." Chief of Tandianbougou Village, Mali to Deborah Toler

rom late January until early March I visited nine African countries: Ghana, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mali and Cameroon in West Africa; Eritrea and Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa; and Uganda and Kenya in East Africa.

The main purpose of my trip was to identify African partners with whom Food First should work. I met with university researchers, NGO activists, and especially thrilling, a number of alternative agriculture NGOs. I also met with government officials to get their perspectives on meeting their countries' food needs. The recurring theme in all these conversations was the roadblock Africa's "re-colonization" is posing for achieving food self-sufficiency.

Re-colonization was not always the term my colleagues in Africa used. I use the term to refer to the simple fact that the most important decisions having to do with agriculture and the access to food are being made by outsiders; by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, Western donor countries including USAID, and agribusinesses. I saw first hand the effects of World Bank and IMF Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). SAPs force African governments to dramatically slash their budgets for domestic programs such as education and health. Thousands of rural health clinics have been closed. The people in the Malian village of Tandianabougou led me by the hand to an empty building that used to be their health clinic. There was nothing, absolutely nothing in the building but dust. "Our women can't even get an aspirin to help them through childbirth" their chief cried.

The impact of World Bank imposed export strategies is of particular relevance for Food First's work. The World Bank has pushed African governments to prioritize export crops to earn foreign exchange to repay international loans. In Cameroon I saw huge swaths of areas deforested by export logging, primarily by French companies. In Uganda ten large tea plantations in one district each burned six to seven tons of firewood per day seven days a week. Most poignant of all, in Tandianabougou adults and children alike were severely malnourished. But to earn much needed cash for school fees and household necessities such as sugar and kerosene, the villagers grew French green beans for export, which they do not themselves eat.

There are critically important aspects to the export crop focus of these African countries. First, contrary to population control advocates, most African countries are currently under populated. Labor shortages are a critical constraint on increasing agricultural production. The more labor devoted to tea and green beans for export, the less labor available for maize and millet for household and local consumption.

More than 80 percent of chemical inputs used in agriculture in Africa are used for export, not food crop production. Combined with environmental damage like the deforestation described above, the environmental damage done by chemical inputs in the World Bank-driven export strategy threatens the long term ability of African countries to ever regain their pre-colonial food self-sufficiency.

Food First's future work in Africa is going to be with organizations opposing these SAP induced trends. Alternative agriculture NGOs such as ENDA in Senegal; ADAF/ Galle, HDS, and AMCFE in Mali; INANES and CIPRCE in Cameroon; and TCC, CARD, and JESE in Uganda, are truly impressive. These NGOs have small but incredibly talented and committed staffs-most are volunteers and most are themselves farmers. They are working one-on-one with villagers to promote organic farming, agroforestry and other sustainable agricultural practices for local food production. It is precisely these NGOs' closeness to villagers, to the people most disadvantaged by export agriculture, which offers the most hope for countering the continent's re-colonization.

Institute for Food and Development Policy
News & Views
Summer 1996, Vol. 18, No. 61