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There’s progress on all three fronts. Cassava, for example, is a staple food in much of Africa and is hardy against drought. New varieties, called Baba 70 and Game Changer, can more than quadruple yields per hectare on small farms in Nigeria when cultivated with good agronomic practices and weed control, Chikava said. As for extension, countries are informing farmers digitally because they can’t afford to put enough extension officers in the field. On market incentives, sub-Saharan nations are using a mixture of price supports and subsidies for inputs such as fertilizer. That may offend pure free-marketers, and isn’t the best permanent solution, but often it’s the only way to keep farmers from quitting because they can’t make a living, Chikava said.
Tech companies are springing up to help. One example is Releaf, an agricultural technology company based in Lagos, Nigeria, that supplies palm oil to food companies. It’s using geospatial mapping and other technologies to locate small processing facilities closer to palm nut farmers, who can’t afford to ship the nuts long distances.
There’s a long way to go, though. Another reason for low productivity is that under the land tenure system that’s common in much of Africa, people keep the land only if they keep using it. So some farmers are doing just enough to maintain their claims, Kate Schecter, the president of World Neighbors, a U.S.-based charity that operates in 14 countries, including six in Africa, told me. In Burkina Faso, for example, World Neighbors’ country director told her that landowners “don’t necessarily learn very much about how to use the farm,” Schecter said. “It’s underexploited.”
Christopher Udry, an economics professor at Northwestern University, taught secondary school in Ghana while serving in the Peace Corps in the 1980s. He was struck by the missed economic opportunities. Children who spoke four languages dropped out after elementary school because they couldn’t make it to the nearest junior secondary school. “Once you meet people like that, it’s hard to think of anything else,” he said in a recent interview with Yale University, where he earned his doctorate.
Confirming what Chikava and Schecter told me, Udry said that agricultural yields are declining the most in the places where farmers have the most opportunities to do something else with their time. The more that opportunities in cities multiply, the more farmers are drawn away from the land.
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