African Arguments

Top Menu

  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

Main Menu

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
    • Climate crisis
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • #EndSARS
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Podcast
    • Into Africa Podcast
    • Africa Science Focus Podcast
    • Think African Podcast
  • Debating Ideas
  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

logo

African Arguments

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
    • Climate crisis
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • #EndSARS
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Podcast
    • Into Africa Podcast
    • Africa Science Focus Podcast
    • Think African Podcast
  • Debating Ideas
BurundiSociety
Home›African Arguments›Country›East›Burundi›Is food self-sufficiency making a comeback?

Is food self-sufficiency making a comeback?

By William Moseley
June 15, 2018
4729
0
Innovative approaches to crop-livestock integration are leading the way to improved food-sufficiency in Burundi. Credit: William Moseley.

Qatar and Burundi have been forced to innovate due to political crises. But the rest of the world could learn a lot from their experiments.

Innovative approaches to crop-livestock integration are leading the way to improved food-sufficiency in Burundi. Credit: William Moseley.

Innovative approaches to crop-livestock integration are leading the way to improved food self-sufficiency in Burundi. Credit: William Moseley.

A few decades ago, the notion that countries should produce as much of their own food as possible was a self-evidently good idea. Nations worldwide tried to become self-sufficient in producing the food supplies their populations needed. Part of this motivation was to avoid being dependent on – and therefore vulnerable to – neighbouring countries.

Beginning in the early-1980s, however, things began to change. Neoliberal reformers argued that it was counterproductive to produce food at home if it was more efficient and cheaper to import it from abroad.

In some cases, this assessment was convincing. It made little sense for Saudi Arabia, for example, to produce its own wheat given the nation’s water scarcity and the moisture requirements of the crop. In other countries, including many in Africa, the argument was much less persuasive. But in these places, the World Bank ended up essentially coercing governments, via structural adjustment policies, into ending support for their farmers.

Food self-sufficiency ceased to be a common ambition. But now, three decades later, the policy may be making a comeback. Spurred on by political crises, Qatar and Burundi have been experimenting with domestic food production in ways that the rest of the world might have plenty to learn from.

A farm in the desert

Last year, Qatar, the world’s richest country per capita, nearly became a textbook example of the security risks associated with not being food self-sufficient. Beginning in June 2017, Saudi Arabia and three other Arab states imposed a blockade on the small Gulf nation. Amongst other things, this meant a sudden loss of dairy imports such as milk, cheese, yogurt and the fermented drink labaan.

After a period of turning to Iran and Turkey for these products, the Qatari agricultural company Baladna stepped into the void. Barely a year later, its farm will soon have 14,000 cows and Qatar will be self-sufficient in dairy production. And even more amazingly, a litre of Baladna milk now costs slightly less than Saudi imports did before the boycott.

How did this desert country, with an extremely inhospitable climate for dairy cows, become self-sufficient in dairy production? Clearly, money helps, and it is not known how much the Qatari government may be subsidising this operation. But technology – largely in the form of fans and misters – and increasing experience around the world of raising cows in warmer climates have also made such the exercise more viable than it might have been 40 years ago.

The real question is whether it is environmentally sustainable. Large-scale wheat production is clearly unfeasible in water-starved areas, but dairy operations could be more workable if they can figure out how to effectively recycle water and animal waste.

Innovation in isolation

Burundi is at the other end of the spectrum to Qatar in many ways. It is small, landlocked and currently ranked as the world’s third poorest country. But it too has faced a troubling political situation.

Since 2015, it has become a pariah state after its president, Pierre Nkurunziza, removed term limits in order to stay in power. Since then, the country has experienced popular protests, an attempted coup, and a brutal crackdown on opposition groups and the media. Hundreds of thousands of people, and nearly all aid groups, have fled the country.

Burundi’s economy is in shambles and, according to the UN World Food Programme, nearly 60% of the country’s population is malnourished. Furthermore, due to limited amounts of foreign exchange and a political rivalry with Rwanda, Burundi is often unable to trade with neighbouring countries for essential goods. This is a huge problem for one of Africa’s most densely populated countries with some 11 million people living in a small mountainous nation.

It was this challenging situation, however, that led an innovative crop-livestock integration project to figure out how to boost agricultural production without the use of imported inputs such as expensive chemical fertilisers. Jointly run by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA), the central idea is to use the manure from penned livestock to fertilise crops and to use the inedible byproducts of these crops to feed the livestock.

While this is not a new concept, the programme is perfecting it for a range of income groups. For wealthier households, it has developed combinations involving cattle with maize. For poorer ones, it has worked on combinations of pigs with cassava, sweet potatoes and soybeans; chickens with beans; and rabbits with vegetables. These kinds of approaches are critical for addressing hunger in a poor and isolated country where land is scarce and soil fertility is declining.

Learning from experimentation

After the 2007-8 global food crisis, we began to see a slight return to policies aimed at food self-sufficiency. Governments were under pressure to respond to challenges that high food prices created for poor and middle income households. Now, we are seeing further experimentation in Qatar and Burundi, reminiscent of the food production innovation seen during the Cuban embargo in the 1990s.

As in that episode, we should seek to learn from their experimentation rather than dismiss them as unusual solutions prompted by difficult situations. After all, these innovations could help a broader range of countries avoid the risks of over-dependence on imported food. While part of the response to the 2007-2008 global food crisis was a Green Revolution approach that emphasised external inputs such as hybrid seeds and chemical fertilisers, what we see in Burundi in particular are developments based on sustainability and the science of agroecology.

While born of necessity, this latter approach is not as dependent on external inputs and thus more accessible to a wide range of farmers, potentially across Africa and beyond.

Previous Article

Zimbabwe: Six issues that must be fixed ...

Next Article

Ethiopia and Eritrea: Turning the promise of ...

mm

William Moseley

William G. Moseley is DeWitt Wallace Professor of Geography, and Director of the Program for Food, Agriculture & Society, at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN USA. He has long worked in West and Southern Africa and serves on the High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE), a scientific advisory board to the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS). While his thinking has been informed by colleagues on the HLPE, the views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the policies of the HLPE or the CFS.

Leave a reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  • Politics

    Fighting poverty in South Africa: the NDP, ANC and a political Big Beast – By Desné Masie

  • Nigeria's Minister for Information and Culture Lai Mohammed.
    NigeriaPolitics

    Nigeria’s grand plan to stop fake news in 2019? Fight fire with fire.

  • Politics

    Malawi’s new president must build support and mend donor relations – by Keith Somerville

Subscribe to our newsletter

Click here to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter and never miss a thing!

  • 81.7K+
    Followers

Find us on Facebook

Interactive Elections Map

Keep up to date with all the African elections.

Recent Posts

  • Oligarchs, Oil and Obi-dients: The battle for the soul of Nigeria
  • Of cobblers, colonialism, and choices
  • Blackness, Pan-African Consciousness and Women’s Political Organising through the Magazine AWA
  • “People want to be rich overnight”: Nigeria logging abounds despite ban
  • The unaccountability of Liberia’s polluting miners

Editor’s Picks

Editor's PicksSociety

The pandemic has set gender equality back. Its legacy must not.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been tough on everyone, but women have shouldered the bulk of the burden at home and at work. Most years, International Women’s Day offers an opportunity ...
  • African ecofeminism. Credit: Caroline Ntaopane/Womin.

    Why the world needs an African ecofeminist future

    By Fatimah Kelleher
    March 12, 2019
  • People in Juba, South Sudan, greet the arrival of a delegation from the UN Security Council in September 2016. Credit: UNMISS.

    South Sudan needs elections. Here’s a clear plan for how they can happen.

    By Peter Biar Ajak
    February 23, 2022
  • Tunisia's President Kais Saied meeting with then US Defense Secretary Mark Esper at Carthage Palace, Tunisia, in September 2020. Credit: DoD/Lisa Ferdinando.

    Is Tunisia’s democracy slipping away?

    By Raed Ben Maaouia
    June 16, 2022
  • French and Chad military participate in a flag ceremony to commemorate the launch of Operation Barkhane. Credit: U.S. Army Africa photos by Chief Warrant Officer 3 Martin S. Bonner.

    Chad: France firmly backs continuity, but will the people?

    By Kyrre Berland & Chris Brew
    April 28, 2021

Brought to you by


Creative Commons

Creative Commons Licence
Articles on African Arguments are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
  • Cookies
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
  • en English
    am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu
© Copyright African Arguments 2020
By continuing to browse this site, you agree to our use of cookies.
en English
am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu