Farming and Africa’s employment challenge

Africa’s Heads of State will set off for the Green Revolution Forum in Ethiopia at the end of this month to consider ways to improve livelihoods in this 2014 “Year of Agriculture”. In preparation, they would be well placed to consider the following challenge: Over 350 million young people will be entering the labour force in the next 20 years and even under the most optimistic projections, only half of them will be absorbed into non-farm wage jobs in sub-Saharan Africa.
This means farming will need to employ at least a third of young Africans entering the labour force until at least 2025. However, for agriculture to provide viable employment, young people will require access to land.
Recent research highlights the size of this challenge. Studies by Michigan State University, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and several African research organisations have concluded that 15 to 35 percent of the region’s potentially available cropland has been acquired by large-scale foreign investors. This figure excludes forestland. Roughly, a third of the region’s surplus land is currently under forest cover. The conversion of forests to cropland would entail major global environmental costs.
While foreign ‘land grabs’ have attracted media attention, perhaps a more serious threat is African medium-scale investors, many of whom are relatively wealthy urbanites, have acquired an even greater amount of land. Moreover, 80 percent of Africa’s remaining arable land is highly concentrated in just a few countries, many of which are fragile States.
Most governments’ existing strategies are officially oriented to promote agricultural growth and food security for the millions of their rural constituents who are small-scale farmers. And most of these strategies assume unhindered access to land. However, there are increasing concerns that in reality, these policies are encouraging the transfer of land to medium and large-scale interests without due recognition of how this affects future generations of indigenous rural communities to access land.
Africa is not alone in trying to overcome these issues. Countries such as Japan and South Korea were predominantly smallholder farming societies 60 years ago and their economies now rely on manufacturing and technology. In these countries, smallholder farmers increased their productivity and incomes through good policies and public investments in infrastructure; agricultural research, development and extension services, thereby supporting the demand for non-farm businesses and the growth of employment opportunities off the farm. Over time, most smallholder farmers eventually moved into these non-farm jobs.
Some commentators have concluded that African leaders should expedite the process by giving up on the ‘romanticised’ vision of smallholder agriculture and favour commercialised large-scale agriculture. But large-scale grain production is an extremely weak employer of labour – about one worker per every 100 hectares cultivated – and it pays little more than poverty wages.
While rural people might wish to put down their hoes and walk into white collar office jobs tomorrow, a sober assessment will acknowledge that even in 2014, most African countries are inhabited mainly by unskilled and semi-skilled rural people who are primarily engaged in farming. Their levels of education and skills will prevent this from happening quickly.
Therefore, if policy neglect or allocating the region’s prime land to outside interests pushed rural people off their land, urban squalor and unemployment would only be intensified – and would risk overwhelming governments’ capacity to cope with it.
Africa’s transformation from a primarily semi-subsistence, small-scale agrarian economy to a more diversified and productive economy will still require unwavering support to smallholder farmers so that they are able to participate in and contribute to the region’s economic transition rather than be marginalised by it.
While migration from farm to non-farm sectors and from rural to urban areas will provide the brightest prospects for the transformation and modernisation of Africa’s economies, it will happen only as fast as educational advances and growth in the non-farm job opportunities will allow, which in turn depend on income growth among the millions of families still engaged in agriculture.
Government policies and public investment policies are decisive, as these will determine incentives and scope for investment by the private sector and will largely determine whether the region’s economic transformation is a relatively smooth, robust and peaceful process; or a painful and protracted one.
It is, therefore, African leaders’ interests to protect land rights of rural communities. Major political risk can be avoided if land is made available for expansion of family farming combined with more public investments and enabling policies. This will determine whether a high proportion of young Africans are gainfully employed in agriculture or join the ranks of the jobless.

T.S. Jayne is Professor in the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics at Michigan State University, a Visiting Professor at the University of Pretoria, and a Distinguished Fellow of the African Association of Agricultural Economists
Milu Muyanga is Assistant Professor, Department of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics at Michigan State University.
Lulama Ndibongo Traub is a Lecturer at Stellenbosch University.