Urbanisation, the advent of the ‘superfarm’, a lack of legacy structures and a desire for food security; plus new thinking on aid, sustainability and investment models, will play a major part in changing the continent from one dominated by smallholders to one at the cutting edge of agriculture practice.
Unlocking Africa’s potential
Africa is part of the vital Brazil-Africa-China axis, which represents a major geostrategic triangle in global agriculture. The food needs of China (among other industrialising markets) cannot be met by Brazil (among other countries in the Americas). The completion of this axis is essential for global food security.
Food security
The underutilised resource that is Africa‘s Guinea Savannah accounts for 400 million hectares of possible land for farming. Given the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation‘s (FAO) belief that only 70 million hectares of additional land is required to feed the world‘s nine billion people by 2050, this represents a major opportunity for Africa to provide for its own food security needs, and possibly those of other parts of the world.
Urbanisation
An urbanising Africa has given the continent a structural food deficit approaching $30bn pa. Africa‘s domestic food needs, its burgeoning urban population and the capital/labour trade-off will transform the outlook for the agriculture sector in the year head.
Superfarms
Industrial agriculture is inevitable. Africa has no legacy structures in agriculture, and we believe it could leapfrog other parts of the world in advanced farming techniques, such as precision farming, no-till farming and aerial mapping. The idea that large-scale farms are uneconomic is unfounded.
Sustainability
The collapse of food supply systems that support urban societies has been a permanent issue since urban centres were founded. We expect a great deal of new thinking on sustainability in agriculture, and expect Africa to lead much of that new thinking.
Resource nationalism
Often associated with the extractive industries, we should expect urbanisation, very large-scale human migration patterns, the advent of superfarms and political populists to combine, bringing resource nationalism to the fore in African agriculture.
The future of aid
African food aid will likely be transformed too. The idea that some aid agencies are seeking to transform themselves into commercial enterprises highlights the new thinking that abounds in Africa. We expect traditional methods of delivering aid to become redundant in the decades ahead.
In our view, the investors, opportunities and structures that will come to dominate the African agricultural landscape are as varied as the industrial equivalents that transformed the Chinese economy throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
