Panjab - lessons to be learnt

The state of Panjab, in Northern India, experienced a period of intense agricultural modernisation, for many years it was a success story of the Green Revolution. Panjab's agricultural scene is dominated by primarily small scale farmers, having not experienced the large scale land acquisitions that Africa faces. In recent decades however, the Green Revolution of Panjab has faced considerable backlash on several fronts: high levels of indebtedness, deterioration of water supply, rapidly lowering water table and soil degradation to name a few. The problems being experienced in Panjab could help guide mitigation strategies in Africa, or at the very least prepare farmers for the possible consequences of the Green Revolution.

The issues facing Panjab are legion. They cannot all be listed here, but the following provide a snapshot of what Panjab has been experiencing.

Owing to the existence of a land-owning caste in Panjab, land titling has been established, in some form, for a long time. This helped to facilitate the introduction of the Green Revolution, as land titling is encouraged to make countries more attractive to foreign investment (De Schutter, 2011). Panjabi farmers also have considerable access to credit, and routinely leverage their land to obtain it. However, they typically receive unfavourable terms and may still be forced to rely on non-institutional sources of credit (local lenders). The use of land for debt-financing by farmers has been identified as a serious problem in Panjab (Singh et al., 2014), with the consequences going so far as farmers committing suicide. Institutions such as the World Bank espouse the idea that a land market would see land reallocated to those most in need of it or who can make best use of it - this idea is naive. Land is and will be allocated to those with the greatest access to capital. A commercialising of the access to land and water is and has been to the detriment of traditional communities and livelihoods.

The ecology and personal health of farmers have also greatly suffered, as Vandana Shiva details in 'The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology, and Politics' (2016). The intense use of fertilisers and pesticides, without the proper safety equipment, has seen significant leaching into water sources, including the groundwater reserves that are heavily relied upon for irrigation. The increase in toxicity also poses serious health concerns for humans and livestock, with dangerously elevated levels of fluorine, boron, selenium and aluminium (Rahman, 2015).

Conflicts over water are common, as demand continues to outstrip supply. The construction of dams has also been required in order to sustain water levels for irrigation, with such infrastructure potentially necessary in a "greened" Africa.

Pressures from loan repayments, increasing costs of living and low value of crops drive excessive cultivation of the land and over abstraction. The demand for fertile land for agriculture has perversely resulted in rapid land degradation, with 'land scarcity' accompanying the water scarcity.

The Green Revolution in Panjab has forced intense competition. Despite the lack of land acquisitions, Panjabi farming has still resulted in intense and unsustainable practices. Many of the attributes of the Green Revolution in Africa have helped to drive the situation in Panjab - access to credit, access to better farming technology, better seeds, increased farm yields. It follows therefore that we should avoid fetishizing smallholder farming as some sort of impermeable barrier to exploitation.

If more can be grown, more must be grown - this idea could very well transpire throughout Africa. If it cannot realistically be mitigated against, then Africans must decide whether it is an acceptable potential consequence.

Is Agriculture an Acceptable Platform for Development?

Irrigated land in Africa still only accounts for 6% of total cultivated land. The Green Revolution would look to change that, and it has steadily developed increasing support, especially within Africa itself. This gives it the required political momentum, but does not guarantee that it will be beneficial for most Africans, and nor does it guarantee that African nations will resist opportunities for even greater intensification. Indeed, there are already countries in Africa experiencing an intensification in agriculture.

The Green Revolution proposes transforming smallholder agriculture with improved technologies, better seeds, increased access to credit etc. The vision is for an African-centric, African-led initiative that guides agriculture in Africa. By removing foreign, for-profit, large scale actors that "take over" land, the Green Revolution attempts to better the chances of sustainable development. As the people working on and living the land are also the ones that make the decisions for it. This may sound delightfully idyllic, but a target should be.

This article from the Harvard Business Review is optimistic of the opportunities to come. Highlighting the 'inclusive growth' of current agricultural development in Africa, the article notes that the African Development Bank has grown to surpass the World Bank in 2008 as the biggest lender to Africa. The inclusive growth, a key point of the African Green Revolution video I posted, would see far greater returns for Africa than a simple intensification of agriculture without an overarching plan for the resultant revenue and goods. This would establish a better balance of returns for African countries and people than has been the case in previous decades (as discussed in previous posts).

Africa presents key issues that were not necessarily present in the same way in previous Green Revolutions however. Donald Larson of the World Bank contends that Africa presents a far more heterogeneous agricultural profile than Asia, where there were only two principle crops - rice and wheat. This complexity would undoubtedly make it harder to coordinate agricultural practices and development. Further, the groundwater profile of Africa is incomplete (MacDonald et al., 2013), and this may limit the scale or the sustainability of intensive agriculture.

In parts of Northern Africa, the groundwater dates back thousands of years, and so abstraction of water from those aquifers should be treated more akin to 'mining' the fossil water. Other parts of Africa however have decadal recharge timescales, and can be more easily monitored to track (over)abstraction. However, as Africa's population continues to increase, and urbanisation and increased living standards inevitably demand more water, the loss of large amounts of groundwater to intensive agriculture may present a serious problem. These groundwater reserves can act as 'buffers' against climatic variance (Calow et al., 2010), which is only expected to increase: and so increased stress on groundwater reserves would carry greater risk of water shortages, whilst perversely fuelling greater growth and thus demand.

Agriculture around the world is supported by state intervention, from EU and US subsidies to minimum support prices in India. There is consistent pressure to drive prices down, and as the purchasers of this food can pick from nations around the world, each country reliant on agriculture is forced to keep prices aggressively low. Kaplinsky (2005) highlights these 'declining terms of trade' for producers in the global supply chain. Africa is constantly picked out as an area of "under utilisation", a "final frontier" for agriculture. Once/If agriculture is intensified on a large scale across Africa, and the boom is over, might businesses flee before African economies have the chance to move on from agriculture?

There are many other risks and questions raised when allowing so much of the African economy to be linked to the Green Revolution. The manufacturing, services and technology sectors are all viewed in higher regard (for good reason) than agriculture. Would establishing Africa as the premier agricultural hub do much to elevate Africa to the levels of developing and developed parts of the world? Does this continue to hold Africa on the lower rungs of the global economy? This is touted as the necessary future of agriculture; could Africa adopt such an advanced image of agriculture with smallholder farmers, and if so, could it retain the necessary wealth to sustain inclusive growth, or would this hand power back to the developed nations? All of these questions require speculation, and there is little data, quantitative or qualitative, to make such predictions about the future.

Agriculture is by no means risk-free, but nor does it need to be. Intensive farming has obvious connotations of unsustainable farming, but the Green Revolution for Africa proposes a model where smallholder farmers are enabled and empowered. There is not the forced, intense pressure of intensive farming, with necessary overuse of water reserves. And if the gains from the Green Revolution can be internalised, it would help to provide some shelter to the continent from excessive foreign influence. There is indeed a vision of inclusive development and responsible water management that can be met by agriculture. 

Next week I'll be looking at an example of smallholder agriculture from Panjab. It provides an example of an agrarian economy that already has the land titling that is to be expected in Africa in the future.

Green Economy

I was suggested a book by Professor Taylor, the Handbook of Land and Water Grabs in Africa, you may have noticed I drew on sources from that book in my previous posts. I thoroughly recommend it for those interested in land acquisitions and, crucially, its implications for water security in Africa. There is one chapter in particular that has caught my interest, and it ties in well to the recent discussions on this blog: Land and water grabs and the green economy, by Martin Keulertz.

Keulertz argues that fundamentally the nature of current economic philosophy is not geared towards a green economy - that being the system of economic activities that result in improved human well-being over the long term without exposing future generations to significant environmental risks. Keulertz applies the theory of Kondratiev Waves (referred to as Kondratieff economic cycle theory in the chapter), claiming that we are in a current period of creative destruction, where excess and slow-moving companies are outpaced by innovation. With the view that neoliberal practises will mismanage water resources and force a change in paradigm, a green economy will be established where land rights may be properly respected and water properly managed.

I'd argue however that it presents an overly simplistic assessment of what is happening, and rather wishful in its hopes for the future. Whilst there may be changes in the neoliberal order, there is nothing to genuinely suggest that a green economy will be established. A green economy fundamentally requires a sustainable and long-term outlook, which empowers all actors to ensure well-being is improved. Such a shift in power, away from the economic and political elites, would require seismic change. Even if renewable energy becomes the norm and we reduce plastic consumption etc., there is nothing to suggest that such movements would begin to spread wealth away from banks, institutional investors (including pension funds) and the elite. There is little to suggest that companies will write-off investments and risk losing their shareholders to give the farmers of Africa a better deal with sustainable farming. The creative destruction that is referred to has been seen countless times, with the shift from CDs, to MP3 players to now streaming being a good example (Warf, 2013). But these instances of innovation have, ultimately, been guided (and funded) by the drive for more profit.

Once the premise of a change in the global order is accepted, the arguments put forth can be accepted and a green economy appears to be a reality - a rather pleasant one. But the premise does not stand, it merely bears the hallmarks of the countless theories that have proposed the imminent collapse of capitalism and the ushering in of a fairer world. I propose that it is more positive, and better for those in need, to deal with the reality of power imbalances and privileges at hand. I agree with Keulertz that there will come a point when decisions must be made that better manage water, but that does not mean they will necessarily conform to the ideals of the green economy, which sets a particularly high bar.


In my next post, I will move further from the topic of Land Acquisitions, and begin exploring agriculture, particularly in the context of managing water resources, and African position on the global political stage. 

Are the Land Acquisitions all about Water?

Much of the literature on Land Acquisitions have focused on the link to water, asserting that these acquisitions are intended to secure water for the investor-nation. Hall (2011: 194) states that 'China, India, South Korea and the Gulf States are among those at the forefront of this agricultural expansion, as they seek to produce food overseas for their growing populations'. These land deals are claimed to facilitate a virtual water trade, as countries try to manage their water consumption through outsourcing.

However, I came across this relatively recent study by Breu et al. (2016) which contends that in many cases, the investor countries engage in agricultural practises abroad that are less intensive than their domestic crop production. They also found that net global water use decreases when these land acquisitions are used. Conversely, the paper also notes that certain key investors, such as the US and Saudi Arabia (the only one of the Gulf states that shows this trait), are indeed 'externalising crop water consumption' through these land acquisitions. Crucially, the study found that water use intensity did increase in the host countries.

Whilst the study states that these findings suggest water is not always the key determinant behind land acquisitions, the fact that water use intensity was found to increase in the host nations still establishes the potentially negative consequences of land acquisitions. On a global scale, it may be a smart use of water resources, but on the African country scale, it does not necessarily bode well for development.

Why are Land Acquisitions not Development focused (Part 2)?

Continuing on from the previous week's post...

What is apparent across the literature on corporate and state investment in land acquisitions is a dehumanising of the African continent into another notch in a portfolio, or a matter of strategy. Such behaviour is enabled by distance (Held et al. 1999). The physical distance between the investor and "investment" against the relative ease with which money and technology can flow across space, results in a relationship that, on a human level, is rather callous. This dehumanising is not conducive to development, as development requires an appreciation for the individual. The displaced nature of TNCs, and the distant policymakers of foreign countries, create privileged relationships in which the land and water users in Africa are seen only as a vehicle for profit/loss (Hawthorne, 2004).

There is little appreciation for the externalities (an externality being the cost or benefit that affects a party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit) of their business, beyond the need to keep things going without farmer revolt or government retaliation. Degradation of soil and water quality, as is typically evidenced in intensive farming (Tilman et al., 2002), disproportionately harms the host nation on timescales that TNCs are unlikely to worry about. Further, the use of water for agri-industrial processes typically threatens the water supply of surrounding communities. It would require significant government oversight to keep this all from resulting in unsustainable and exploitative practises, but such oversight has yet to be seen (Cotula et al., 2009), and is unlikely when host nations are so reliant on foreign direct investment, and such investment is needed across a nation's economy (Allan, 2013). Indeed, land acquisitions make full use of government subsidies and offtake agreements (Woertz, 2013).

With the process of intense globalisation experienced over the past century, there has been an intensification of the divide between rich and poor countries (Dicken, 2007). As suppliers have been brought into the global supply chain, they have typically (with a few exceptions) been exposed to increased risks but only received a fraction of the profits, with the wealth gap exponentially increasing between the richest and poorest nations (see Figure 1).  Even if land acquisitions yield absolute gains for the host country, the intense inequality in that trade does not allow for it to be genuine development. It's a very small slice of a rather large pie.

Fig. 1 Widening income gap between countries

The terms of land acquisitions so far have been too heavily in favour of the investor. Development would not require an equal split between investor and host nation (that would be extremely unlikely), but an ever-increasing gap between rich and poor is simply unjust. Thus, the income inequality is indisputable and the intensive agricultural practices are of questionable sustainability. Land acquisitions have thus far not fit even the broad definition of development being used. They would require that host nations to gain far more from the agreements in order for them to be truly mutually beneficial.