“Food miles,†are a new barrier to the export of African food products to the rich world.
Let me explain. Here in Uganda, where I am visiting this month, the buzz is about the push towards “smart†organic farming, which means farming organic without an income penalty to the ordinary African farmer. As a senior agriculture expert in Kampala told me yesterday at lunch, “It is inconceivable to encourage farmers to go organic, if the switch makes farmers poorer.†That’s because organic farmers often produce fewer crops per acre – and yet the premium for organic isn’t large enough to make up the difference. “What’s needed is a package of organic tools – from ways of controlling pests to enriching the soil – that give the farmers yields equal to you, or even greater, than conventional farmers,†the adviser says.
In Uganda, organic cotton, coffee, sesame seeds and sunflower seeds are among the crops where organic is making the greatest inroads. But just as African farmers become hip to the appeal of organic – and the way their own traditional methods of non-chemical farming fit the organic criteria – consumers in Europe are trying to switch the rules. Radical enviros, after years of applauding African efforts to promote organics farming are suddenly complaining that that air transport – the usual way that high-value African produce is brought to European grocery stores – creates too great of a “carbon footprint,†Air freight contributes to global warming, in short. So just as African producers are becoming capable of benefiting from global food trade, Europe’s enviros are threatening to stop buying – and even ban – African organic food from European tables.
Were this threat not true it would be a cruel joke. Indeed, the BBC reports today that activists are already pushing a measure in Britain, which is the number one receipient of fresh produce for many African countries, that might could call for a total ban on imported organic African food. Any restrictions of African organics will hurt ordinary farmers, and make more difficult the task of rising out of poverty. That the British — who have made so many self-congratulatory gestures for their part in “aiding†Africans — should be the driving force behind this new threat to Africa’s poor is a rather extraordinary example of the contradictions in the relationship between the self-styled do-gooders of the rich world and their presumed beneficiaries in the sub-Saharan.
Alas, the world has changed, and African farmers are no longer the hostage of their former European masters. Thanks to the rise of Asia, Africans need not beg, plead and prostrate themselves before the altar European self-righteousness and gratuitious moralizing in order to merely subsisit. As consumers in China and India grow wealthier, they will buy African produce at fair prices, happy for the chance to eat higher quality foods – and unconcerned with the lost opportunity for empty moral gestures.