Queen’s Speech

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Dillington]

My Lords, I want to talk about African agriculture. When I say “Africa”, please read “sub-Saharan Africa” for the sake of brevity. Africa contains 13% of the world’s population but 25% of its undernourished people. It contains 23 out of 30 of the world's least developed countries. Of its population, 80% depends on agriculture and 70% of these farmers are women.

If one can focus on turning Africa’s smallholder subsistence farmers into very small but money-earning farming businesses, then one can kick-start their rural economy while helping to feed the people from their own resources. One can empower these lady farmers to take control of their own lives, which is an agenda in itself. One can ensure that they bring up children whose health is based on a varied diet. Above all, one can ensure they have the means to educate their children. You ask any lady farmer who has been taught how to earn money from her farming what she is going to do with that money, I can promise you 100% that she will answer, “I am going to educate my children”. And they do.

The point I am trying to make is that every single one of the millennium development goals can be met by focusing on farming. The potential for successful African agriculture is huge. Agriculture and agribusinesses already represent nearly 50% of the GDP of Africa. According to the World Bank, the African urban food markets will grow four times between now and 2030. Africa, with 60% of all unused agricultural land in the world, and its barely used water resources, represents a great opportunity for science, business and agriculture to combine to transform a continent.

How do we realise that potential? How do we overcome the greatest poverty of Africa, which is a poverty of information? How do we get the information to transform lives through agriculture, to the people whose lives need transforming? To me, that is the key to unlocking the potential. Yes, we need roads to carry goods; yes we need markets and storage to ensure that good food gets to the right places undamaged and at the right price. But, above all, we need farmers to know how to access the best seeds, to know when to plant them, to know when it is going to rain or not going to rain. There are very few weather forecasts for farmers in Africa and, if you think about it, such information is the difference between life and death to a farming family. We need farmers to know how and when to treat the crop so that they get a quality product which sells well in the marketplace. Above all, we need farmers to know how to sell their product and get a fair price.

To some extent, this information can be distributed via the various Governments’ agricultural extension services. But, frankly, if you have 250,000 farmers per district, as in some parts of Africa, these underpaid, underincentivised and often undertrained national extension officers are never going to do much more than touch the surface. What you need is to encourage more agribusinesses to take on the risks and the role of supplying smallholder farmers not only with seeds and fertilisers but also with the knowledge required to bring their crop to fruition and, above all, to market.

These businesses will need help to understand that they have to work patiently with local communities. Patient capital in Africa often requires many years to take effect, many years to prove the benefits of every change to local practice and many years to encourage the necessary co-operation among smallholders. However, once you establish the lines of communication and the supply lines, for seeds and fertilisers in and harvested crops out, much of the other information on weather, timings of crop treatment, prices and collections can now be accessed on mobile phones. Crop insurance and money transfers can also be done on mobile phones. You do not need banking arrangements or cash, both of which leave room for corruption along the line. You pay a farmer directly on to her mobile phone. She uses her mobile phone to buy food in the shops as well as to pay for her seed and also—do not forget—to educate her children.

All this is now possible and happening in certain projects in Africa. We just need to scale it up. Of course, we need the right business environment to exist in the countries involved. No government control of inputs, please: we need free competition so that inputs are delivered to the farmer at the cheapest possible price and, most importantly, without any politicians taking a rake-off on the way through.

However, even if we manage to persuade national Governments to deliver this competitive business environment, there is still a great risk to the agribusiness involved. Food is a perishable commodity, and the endless official and unofficial delays and transport difficulties of doing business in Africa mean that the risks will remain high.

There is no one exact solution to how the UK Government can best help agribusinesses minimise their risk. There will be a multiplicity of solutions—different ones for each business, each country and even each district. Already the Africa Enterprise Challenge Fund does work of this nature and is one of DfID’s very successful conduits for its aid. However, now is the time to look again at the work that this fund does, to see how it can better sell itself and better assist all sorts of agribusinesses that specifically target smallholders. They are the key; I underline that point. If it can promote much more agribusiness activity with smallholders in Africa, the economic and social gains to huge swathes of the African population will be enormous.