Right now I am up in Tamale working with the ADVANCE office here.  I am meeting with maize farmers to help them think about how to invest in yellow maize production.  There is a financial institution that is providing credit to farmers in an effort to spur investment in yellow maize and soya beans.  They are offering a loan facility at 18% annual interest, which is much lower than the typical 30% that financial institutions offer for agriculture loans.  Being up here, I have had the chance to see the destructive power of non-government organizations, otherwise known as NGOs.

I have only been here for a few days, but I have colleagues that have been here for months and have been able to talk to them at length about the challenge of using a market facilitation approach in a city that has been described to me as the “NGO capital of the world.”  In a post on the subject, a friend and colleague working with Engineers Without Borders describes it well:

Tamale is the NGO capital of Ghana, with a disgusting and disproportionate number of signposts, land cruisers, air conditioned offices with generators, and hotels with conference centers. I think that pretty much every possible permutation of the words sustainable, community, rural, development has been used to create an NGO acronym.

At a practical level, there is a serious crowding of NGOs who are doing agriculture work, and even more specifically those taking a Value Chains or Market Facilitation approach. I’ve had a chance to participate in 3-4 different forums/workshops that involve different projects with similar philosophies, and even sat around the table during a discussion on collaboration between 3 projects and 1 “private” sector aggregator. I use quotations because there is a growing number of businesses which have been targeted by projects like ADVANCE, whose core business is slipping from profit through sales, to money through grants, trainings, per-diems and the like.

In fact, I was supposed to meet with a maize nucleus farmer (someone who has a large farm and buys from smallholder farms, provides them with financing to pay for seeds and inputs, and sells the produce to a buyer), but he is unable to meet on Saturday (my birthday) because he is attending a course on “NGO Management.”  There is so much free money in the system that the market is completely distorted.

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I attended a gender sensitivity training put on by a partner of ADVANCE. The training was given to two offices with whom I’m trying to work, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to meet and get to know everyone at the training. I had a lot of pre-conceived notions about what a gender sensitivity training would entail, and thought it might be good fodder for some jokes. As it turns out, how the program impacts men and women differently is actually pretty interesting. There are a lot of nuanced cultural traditions that skew the equitable distribution of benefits.

We were divided into three groups and each asked to represent a different actor in the value chain – traders, processors, and farmers. We did a role play exercise where I pretended to be the owner of a rice mill and I discussed how I employ men and women in my business. Each group did something similar, and the next two days were spent drilling down on the reasons that things are the way they are. Towards the end of the training, everyone voted on the most relevant roadblocks that relegate one gender (typically women) to a disadvantaged position. One of those problems was the system of title exchange, which effectively excludes women from owning land and, as a consequence, developing farms.

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I have spent the last week in the region around Accra meeting with small-scale pineapple processors.  ADVANCE has six offices, each with about six field business facilitators (FBF).  I have been working with Collins, the pineapple FBF out of the office in Tema, the main port town a half hour outside of Accra, the capital city.  He put together an association of pineapple juice manufacturers who are all buying fresh pineapple directly from farmers in the area, processing them in small factories with a single assembly line and a few employees.  There is a actually a huge market for fresh fruit juice in the country.  Ghanaians have become more health-conscious in the last few years and are increasingly opting for 100% fruit juice instead of synthetic products.

These pineapple processors have a strong market demand.  They have customers who bring their own bottles and private label their juices with these processors.  In addition, the processors have their own labels and sell to hotels, restaurants, and markets as far as six hours away.  They get their pineapples from multiple different sources.  Some have their own farms and all have relationships with local producers.  They even buy product from the big exporters to the European Union, who have specific quality standards that, if not met, result in the pineapples being rejected.  The processors buy up this excess at a low cost and turn it into juice.  The problem with this arrangement is that the major exporters are also juicemakers themselves, so these processors are effectively buying their raw materials from their largest competitor, which makes for a tenuous relationship, at best.  For now though, the businesses are doing well.  There is one major constraint, however: bottles.

There are no glass manufacturing plants in Ghana, so these processors buy used bottles from companies that collect discarded bottles of Vitamilk and other drinks.  They typically hire two women to wash the glass bottles, strip them of their labels, and pack them into crates.  But bottles are expensive here.  A crate of 24 bottles costs 2.60 cedis.  Once the crates have been filled with juiced, labeled, and corked, they are sold for 7 cedis, which gives you an idea of the thin margins here.  There is, however, a solution to this problem.  Burkina Faso, Ghana’s Canada, also consumes a lot of Vitamilk, but their juice processing industry is much less developed compared with Ghana.  There is an enterprising businessman at the Ghana-Burkina border who buys up all of the used bottles from Burkina and imports them into Ghana.  It is cheaper to buy them at the border (1.50 to 2 cedis per crate), but the minimum order size is 600 crates.  And here is where it gets dark.

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In a new book, Calestous Juma makes the case that Africa can ‘feed itself in a generation.’  Self-sufficiency is ideal, but there are some major roadblocks.  Here is the problem:

Global food production has rocketed in recent decades but has stagnated in many parts of Africa, despite the continent having “abundant” arable land and labour, says Professor Juma.

He estimates that while food production has grown globally by 145% over the past 40 years, African food production has fallen by 10% since 1960, which he attributes to low investment.

While 70% of Africans may be engaged in farming, those who are undernourished on the continent has risen by 100 million to 250 million since 1990, he estimates.

The professor’s blueprint calls for the expansion of basic infrastructure, including new road, irrigation and energy schemes.

Farms should be mechanised, storage and processing facilities built, while biotechnology and GM crops should be used where they can bring benefits.

But what was needed above all else was the political will at the highest level.

“You can modernise agriculture in an area by simply building roads, so that you can send in seed and move out produce,” he told the BBC.

The path to agriculture self-sufficiency is filled with obstacles; some are surmountable, others are not.  Building roads, irrigation facilities (less than 5% of the arable farmland in Ghana is irrigated), investing in crop and seed research, and bringing in tractors and other mechanized implements fall into the former category.  Global trade dynamics, including tariffs and agriculture subsidies among rich nations, belong in the latter.