By Elena L. Pasquini on 12 April 2013
One of the beneficiaries of the U.S. Agency for International
Development's Feed the Future program in Tanzania. Photo by: USAID
Tanzania
A revolutionary partnership between smallholder farmers and private
companies, or a Faustian bargain that will benefit only multinational
groups?
One year after the launch of the New Alliance for Food Security and
Nutrition at the G-8 Summit in Camp David, which endorsed once and for
all the private sector as an essential partner of donors and governments
in addressing food insecurity, Africa’s farmland is still witnessing
the clash of two different visions on how to develop agriculture on the
continent.
Part of the aid community is skeptical about how companies are actually being engaged in the fight against food insecurity.
The advocacy organisation One, which called the New Alliance
“opaque,” analyzed summary documents signed by the private companies
engaged in initiative, later calling for the publication of their entire
contents. One’s findings show that “few large investments account for a
disproportionate share of the commitments” and that 39 percent of the
investment comes from multinationals.
“There are concerns about attendant transparency and accountability
measures to ensure companies are prioritizing the needs of targeted
beneficiaries (e.g. smallholders, non farm-workers),” One’s policy brief noted.
But donor officials who have recently travelled within Tanzania,
where the New Alliance aims at helping 6.7 million people emerge from
poverty, say they saw promising partnerships implemented on the ground.
Tanzania and the New Alliance
Tanzania — along with Ghana and Ethiopia — was one of the founder
countries of the New Alliance and can be seen as a prototype for the new
approach to agricultural development based on public-private
partnerships.
The United States pledged $315 million until 2015 and the European Union $99 million until 2013 to Tanzania’s New Alliance framework.
Other bi-lateral support included commitments from Japan ($178
million), the United Kingdom ($99 million), Germany ($95 million),
France ($50 million) and the Russian Federation ($50 million).
One of the biggest innovations of the framework concerns the
Tanzanian government’s strategic and investment national plan, which
states that donors and the private sector now have to align their
actions with the country’s priority objectives, U.S. Ambassador to the
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization David Lane told Devex.
Another novelty is that the donors’ focus is not only on boosting
production, but on the entire demand-side value chain, including the
relationship between farmers and markets, he added.
Lane also mentioned how Tanzania is encouraging smallholder farmers
to think like businessmen within the commercial agriculture system.
“It’s not just about feeding their families,” he said. “It’s about
generating incomes they can provide for their families to live better.”
Opportunities for smallholders
One of the initiatives supported by the New Alliance is the SAGCOT program,
a multi-stakeholder partnership launched in 2010 by the Tanzanian
government to develop agriculture in the so-called southern growth
corridor, a strip of land that stretches from the country’s largest city
Dar es Salaam to neighboring Malawi.
It is within this corridor where the largest part of the technical
assistance and private sector investments for Tanzania are located.
Tanzania’s flagship program provides opportunities for smallholder
producers to engage in profitable agricultural activities, aiming to
mobilize $2.1 billion from the private sector over the next 20 years.
Leveraging these resources is the responsibility of the SAGCOT
Center, which is tasked with facilitating the relationship between
local and international investors, as well as with civil society groups
and the government. However, according to Thomas Hobgood, a senior
agricultural and food security advisor for the United States Agency for
International Development in Tanzania, it does not manage those
investments directly.
There is a sense of optimism about the SAGCOT
program’s capacity to attract private investment. “I believe programs
like the New Alliance, in collaboration with initiatives such as Feed
the Future and the SAGCOT Center, work to
create an enabling environment for private sector investment in
Tanzania. It’s clear to me that real progress is being made,” David Lane
said.
One method that is set to further boost progress is the so-called
“hub and outgrower” model. This model sees smallholders interact as
outgrowers with large farms that provide input and make available
processing and storage facilities, as well as machinery. All the actors
involved are organized into clusters of companies. “Commercial farmers
who invest in processing and storage capacity and engage in contract
farming schemes would bring the sorely needed finance, inputs and skills
to smallholder farmers, while creating incentives for additional
investments and thereby creating clusters of productive agriculture,”
David Lane said.
Smallholders vs big companies
Donor officials see SAGCOT as innovative in
targeting smallholder farmers by fostering responsible private sector
investment. However, stakeholders expressed some concerns about the program’s implementation.
In Tanzania, specifically with regard to SAGCOT,
many ask whether smallholder farmers are taking advantage of the
engagement with private companies or whether, conversely, private
companies are exploiting smallholder farmers.
The risk of unbalanced partnerships has been addressed, according to
David Lane, empowering farmers and strengthening their capacity to work
together. “The important thing is for farmers to gain power so that they
are able to deal with large companies or big buyers in a more effective
way […] Smallholder farmers need to organise [themselves] and work
together. And we saw a lot of that everywhere we went,” he said.
One of Feed the Future’s objectives in Tanzania aims to further
strengthen these capacities. As Thomas Hobgood explained, this would be
achieved by helping farmers engaged in contract farming in “building
their organizational, management, and agronomic skills.”
Giving farmers access to financial instruments such as advance
contracts, collateral loans, or secure loans can also help improve their
market power. Warehouse receipts programs, for example, “allow farmers
to bring their crops to a [shared] warehouse […] and then store until
later in the year when the prices are much higher. Usually they are
desperate for cash by the end of the season. The receipts program allows
them to get 80 percent of their estimated price for that day as a loan
[…] That’s made a huge, huge difference for the farmers that we saw,”
David Lane said.
A second question is what kind of agriculture the New Alliance and
other private sector partnership-based initiatives are pushing for.
Intensive, export-oriented, GMO-based? “Since
private capital wants guaranteed returns on investment, export
agriculture is likely to be a major focus [in the southern growth
corridor],” according to a paper published by Econexus.
Many projects on the ground in Tanzania are focused on big cash
commodities such rice and maize, but according to David Lane there are
notable exceptions. “We saw lots of smallholder farmers […] producing a
lots of things, including mushrooms and very interesting kinds of other
crops that are not big commodities, working together in cooperatives […]
They were producing lots of vegetables, some for export, some for local
markets. They were producing onions, tomatoes, peppers, marketing them
together for higher prices because of their farmer cooperatives and
farmer unions,” David Lane said.
Concerns remain
There are some concerns, however. One issue is the fear that programs such as SAGCOT,
which necessitates the acquisition of huge tracts of land, could led to
land grabbing and conflict over the use of natural resources. Tanzania
recently decided to restrict the size of land
available for foreign acquisitions, setting a limit of 10,000 hectares
for investment in sugar and 5,000 for rice. According to Econexus,
however, they are still very large areas in a country where small farms
total on average about two hectares.
Stakeholders also stressed the need for transparent mechanisms for the management of programs such as SAGCOT,
in a context of “weak governance, low institutional capacity and
endemic corruption.” The New Alliance, which “adheres to international
standards of responsible agricultural investment, including land,
environmental and governance issues,” has mutual accountability
structures that can be a forum for corruption issues, according to
Thomas Hobgood. “And since the New Alliance includes all G-8 countries’
agreement, it can be a powerful voice,” he said.
Note:
Elena Pasquini covers the development work of the European Union as well
as various U.N. food and agricultural agencies for Devex News. Based in
Rome, she also reports on Italy's aid reforms and attends the European
Development Days and other events across Europe. She has interviewed top
international development officials, including European Commissioner
for Development Andris Piebalgs. Elena has contributed to Italian and
international magazines, newspapers and news portals since 1995.
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