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Lennart Båge
President, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)
 Rising price of inputs means many smallholders are now planting less, no more. In theory, rising food prices should trigger rising food production. Smallholders should benefit, shouldn’t they?
What we at IFAD are seeing from our data is that the first thing that hits many of the smallholder farmers, who could be part of the solution in their own markets by producing more, is the rising price of inputs like seed, fertiliser and transport. So, in many cases, they're actually planting less, not more. And even if they have access to credit, smallholders may not use it. They’re familiar with spikes and collapses in farm prices, and fear that if they take on debt in order to produce more, they might wind up in a hole if food prices fall again by harvest time. So even though we know that the development potential of smallholder farmers will help the world reach the MDGs, it’s not easy to exploit it.
What would you call for to keep the prices of inputs reasonable?
We have the Malawi model, of course, but you can't take a blueprint and apply it equally everywhere. Local conditions are key. You have either strong or weak government institutions, strong or weak farmers’ organisations, strong or weak NGOs and private sector. The point is to rapidly create local and national groups and roundtables where you bring together WFP, FAO, IFAD, the World Bank, the African Development Bank, AGRA, the key stakeholders that have resources and the complementarity to come together with the government, farmers organisations and other stakeholders, quickly map the situation and produce the appropriate type of input support, like affordable seed and fertiliser, to boost productivity.
“Africa’s alleged lack of absorptive capacity is often used as an excuse for inaction.”
In the medium term, you need to work on feeder roads, agricultural research, small-scale irrigation, linkages to the market, and other items on the development agenda. We know very much what to do — the good news is that we don't have to invent new approaches to make smallholder agriculture more productive. But the development agenda needs more resources.
Does Africa have the absorptive capacity?
Africa’s alleged lack of absorptive capacity is often used as an excuse for inaction. The Malawi example shows that you can boost production. According to the figures, an investment of about $70 million in around 2 million farmers, or about $35 per farmer, yielded an additional harvest output of about $160 million, which isn't a bad rate of return. You can't take that as a blueprint for universal application, but if you make a quick calculation, and figure $35 input per farmer for the 80 million farmers in Africa, that makes about 2.8 billion dollars, and we're not even close to that.
Do you expect the food-price crisis to go away?
This crisis won’t go away overnight, and two issues will remain to make the situation more long-term, more difficult to deal with and more unpredictable than before. One is biofuels, in that there is now a direct linkage between the food system and the energy supply, and the other is climate change.
Whenever I travel, whenever I ask ministers how things are, they all say the same three things, almost without exception: First, they are seeing floods like they’ve never seen before. The statistics show that the number and severity of floods have gone up almost exponentially over the last few decades — exactly what the climate change model predicts. Second, they’re saying droughts are becoming much more severe. For example, is Australia’s drought an isolated event, like the Dust Bowl in the US in the 1930s? Or is it something longer-term? Third is the unpredictability: apart from floods and droughts, you have rains coming at times of the year when they haven't come before, making for a much bigger challenge to the sustainability of the agricultural system.
When we talk about climate proofing, it's not just about having a more resilient agriculture that can withstand droughts and floods and shorter growing periods and new pests and diseases that come with increasing average temperatures, it also has to mean greater reserves on a global scale. We have to have a cushion, a stronger, more resilient system not only in growing, but also in storage.
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