In latest book, geography professor offers new way forward for agriculture in Africa

For more than 35 years, DeWitt Wallace Professor of Geography Bill Moseley has devoted his career to agriculture in Africa. First as a Peace Corps volunteer, then as a staffer with international aid organizations, and finally as a geographer, Dr. Moseley has sought to understand the complex forces, both domestic and foreign, that shape what is grown and by whom in various parts of the continent, as well as who benefits and who does not from these policies and practices. 

In his latest book, Decolonizing African Agriculture: Food Security, Agroecology, and the Need for Radical Transformation, Professor Moseley has concentrated his expertise into an accessible volume that examines the history of food security and agricultural development in four African nations. The way forward, he argues, is to reject the dominant colonialist approach to economic development in favor of less commercialization and more focus on the food needs of local populations. 

Why has agriculture in African nations been such a draw for you as a geographer?

It dates back to when I was in the Peace Corps in the late 1980s. I was sent to a small village of 200 people in Mali as an agricultural volunteer and became deeply fascinated by how people were producing food under very challenging circumstances. Then I went on to work in international development for Save the Children UK, USAID, the World Bank, all on this nexus of food, environment and agriculture. I didn’t take my first geography class until I was a PhD student. What drew me to the field were all these geographers working on similar types of themes. They were not just thinking about how farmers were growing crops in a local place, but how what they were doing was influenced by policy at the national level, regional trading relationships, and the programs of international financial institutions. What geography added was how to think about this problem in the context of the broader political economy.

Your book focuses on four African nations where you’ve worked for most of your 35-year career: Mali, Burkina Faso, Botswana, and South Africa. What was so fascinating for you about these countries?

On the one hand, it’s sort of a random selection of countries where I worked. But I do think it gives you a nice picture of what’s going on in the African continent. Mali and Burkina Faso are low-income countries and former French colonies. It’s where small landholder or peasant farming dominated. That area of the continent was where I first worked, and truth be told, kind of my first love. 

My wife used to call Botswana “Mali with money.” They export diamonds, so it’s a relatively wealthy country and considered to be a development success story. Yet it has serious income inequality and remarkably high levels of food insecurity for a country with that level of wealth. 

Of the four, South Africa was a white-settler colony. There’s this long history since the 1650s of Europeans there, initially the Dutch, then the British. And their thinking deeply influenced the way agriculture was organized. Even coming out of that history post-apartheid, a lot of the ideas about agriculture have persisted and have shaped  land redistribution programs. 

I think across those four countries, you just get the full range of what’s going on with African agriculture today.

What type of thinking has predominantly shaped the way policymakers and practitioners seek to develop agriculture and address food insecurity in the African context?

If we go back to the colonial period, the main goal of tropical agronomists at the time was essentially to change African food systems – to get them to move away from producing food for their own populations and to produce commodity crops that could be exported to fuel industrialization in the European continent. Even though formal colonization is over, and we have independent states, the legacy of what I call “intellectual colonization” lives on within the science of tropical agronomy (now known as development agronomy) today. There continues to be this focus on production of certain crops for export. 

There’s this idea that if people are hungry, it must be related to an absolute lack of food, and that is not true. There are plenty of crops being produced. The problem is that the poorest of the poor cannot access them. So we need to think about agriculture differently. 

You write that the science of agronomy is not apolitical, but rather infused with power and politics. How does this dynamic play out? Is there an example?

My favorite example is when I first arrived in Mali in the late 1980s. This is in the aftermath of a major drought, and I’m sent there to work on gardening. Yet my counterpart in the Ministry of Agriculture has absolutely no interest in producing food crops; he’s all about producing cotton for export. And the U.S. government was fully behind that – directly through foreign assistance through USAID, but also through its support for the World Bank. And so Mali had undergone neoliberal economic reforms, taking out loans from the World Bank in exchange for policy reforms, which were very focused on producing the goods for which Mali was deemed to have a comparative advantage, which was cotton for export. While that worked out for some of the wealthiest farmers, a lot of the research that I’ve done over my career showed that for the middle-income and lower-income farmers, it was leading to increased food insecurity and it was destroying their land. 

Agroecology is crucial for the future, you argue. How does it differ from the more commercialized agriculture processes that you just described?

Agroecology is both a science and a social movement. Agroecologists think about a farmfield as a modified ecosystem. You can study interactions between different crops, crops and insects, crops and the soil. And if you understand those ecological interactions, you can leverage them to produce more and maintain soil fertility. A lot of African farming systems have what we call intercropping or polycropping – for example, you plant a legume with a grain crop and the legume fixes nitrogen that is used by the grain crop. These more diverse systems tend to have fewer insect problems. Another example is agroforestry, the mixing of trees and crops, and this cuts down on wind-borne soil erosion and the decomposition of organic matter in the soil from direct solar radiation. 

Many of these approaches are indigenous or traditional. For me, what’s more decolonial about agroecology is that it is not saying that informal learning is bad. Instead, it recognizes that we have scientists in the formal education sphere, and then we have all this informal learning that goes on in the field, and that together you can come up with better solutions. It bridges these two worlds of knowledge, formal and informal. 

The social movement aspect is that once you recognize that traditional agronomy is inflected with politics, and you see there are powerful interests that are pushing this approach, then you need something to counter this. All we have to do is look at schools of agriculture in the United States and who’s funding the research and who’s going to make money if we sell more seeds in Africa. If you’re going to dislodge those entrenched interests, you need a social movement that’s going to support this new type of science. Otherwise, the status quo will be maintained.

Is there an example of how this has worked successfully? 

Yes. In the book I didn’t want to just explore what has gone wrong because that’s depressing. Very interestingly, in Mali, in the lead up to the global food crisis of 2007- 2008, when average food prices went up 50 percent, and rice, which is a staple crop in a lot of urban West Africa, went up 100 percent, this led to social unrest in a lot of West African cities. But it didn’t happen in Mali, and the reason it didn’t happen is that Malian farmers were organized. A few years before that big price hike, Malian farmers decided that they didn’t want to grow cotton because prices had gotten too low. They shifted to sorghum, so when this crisis happened in Mali, some urban families were already downshifting into sorghum. It wasn’t really planned that way, but through this accident of history, Mali had a lot more local food production, which helped avoid the food crisis and social unrest.

In the book, you put forth a three-part basic argument. How does it work?

First, we have to stop being so focused on production. I lay out a six-dimensional approach to thinking about food security: Availability, access, stability, utilization, sustainability, and agency. Historically, we’ve been so focused on production, or availability, that we’ve ignored these other five dimensions. At least to me, it’s no mystery that that’s why food security has been moving in the wrong direction. 

The second piece is that we need to stop thinking about agriculture as the first step in a development process. In classic modernization theory, first you commercialize agriculture and then industrialize. But is that realistic for a lot of African countries? I just don’t think it is. That was the European path, the North American path. We need to think about agriculture as a sustainable livelihood that has value in and of itself. 

And then thirdly, how do we get there? The important piece is to have a different model, and what I’m suggesting is agroecology is this more decolonial model.

You mention 11 of your former students in the introduction. How has working with Mac students shaped this book?

In three of the four countries – Burkina Faso, Botswana and South Africa – I had students help me with different dimensions of this research. They also had projects on the side that alerted me to issues that maybe I wasn’t thinking of. 

A classic example of this is Julia Morgan, who was with me in Burkina Faso. She became very interested in foraging. We were there doing surveys with women rice farmers, and because of her, we also asked them questions about foraging, which turned out to be a really important source of dietary diversity. 

I think most scholarly contributions are not the result of the efforts of one person. It comes from a lot of people who have been working together over time. In my case, that’s with many different Macalester students and many different African collaborators. And it was important to make an effort to give them the credit they’re due.