In addition to big science, African agriculture needs big organizations. Although there are few scale economies in crop growing, there are important scale economies in all the ancillary activities: innovation, investment, finance, marketing, processing, and logistics. Commercial organizations exist because they are better able to solve such problems than are solo operators. Brazil has developed its agriculture using this approach and its companies are now interested in moving into Africa. But the idea of commercializing African agriculture remains taboo.

Pushing Industrialization

The development agencies that are hugely influential in African policy-making because of their large funding are in turn influenced by the attitudes of the Western NGOs. Although the clients of the development agencies are African, their paymasters are American and most especially European. A few years ago the World Bank estimated that around 80 percent of its incremental resources would come from Europe. Europe, even more than the United States, is romantically attached to the peasant lifestyle that its own societies have abandoned. As a result the development agencies have been silent on the issue of GM, and have virtually ignored commercial agriculture. But most especially, they have failed to focus on the predominant implication of the poor prospects of African agriculture: the region needs to industrialize.

For millions of ordinary people industrialization has been a process not of bondage but of liberation from the drudgery of peasant life. Indeed, within Africa this is the predominant aspiration. Industry can expand to take up additional workers simply by augmenting its capital stock: capital can be expanded whereas land cannot. Further, industry is not dependent upon climate. As India and China, the other major low-income regions, have rushed towards prosperity, Africa’s diverging income has given it the prospect of being competitive in global industry. This is, indeed, the common aspiration within Africa, but it is the donor agencies that have set the agenda in recent years, and their agenda has been skewed towards social services and rural development: industry has taken a back seat.

The neglect of public spending for industrialization is important because Africa’s low wages are not, by themselves, enough to make industry globally competitive. Breaking into industry is difficult: markets are global and established producers in Asia benefit from the scale economies that come from clustering firms together in large cities. Approximately, each time a city doubles in economic size the productivity of its inhabitants rises by 4-8 percent. African firms are handicapped in global markets by the small economic size of African cities: a problem of the chicken and the egg. One reason for the small size of Africa’s cities is the extreme political fragmentation of the region into 54 nations, each with a restricted national market. Few cities have a sufficiently large hinterland to grow truly large.

The solutions to a problem are not necessarily closely related to its cause. Africa’s difficulty in being a latecomer trying to break into global markets for industry is due to Asia having got in first, but reversing Asian development is evidently neither feasible nor desirable. Similarly, while Africa’s political fragmentation has greatly compounded the problem of the inadequate scale of its cities, genuinely greater political integration is at best a long term aspiration: Africa’s presidents are not about to make themselves redundant by merging their tiny fiefdoms. Nor is greater protection of the tiny African markets going to promote viable industrialization. Industry is increasingly global for a good reason: specialization raises productivity. For Africa to industrialize, the developed world will need to adopt two complementary approaches. First, to break into global markets, Africa indeed needs protection in foreign markets. Rich countries need to provide temporary protection to new African entrants into industry from established Asian producers. This would provide African producers with a competitive advantage to offset the chicken-and-egg problem: once African clusters of firms grow to a competitive size, privileged access to our markets could be discontinued. Second, we must focus our aid programs away from the social-rural agenda that has been predominant in recent years to one of targeted infrastructure for industrialization. African ports and power stations need to be brought up to international standards in order for firms in export zones to be able to insert themselves into global markets. In Asia, such zones have created many millions of jobs, and they could be transformative for the opportunities faced by ordinary Africans.

Astonishingly, this vision of urban industrial employment is opposed by many NGOs. Wedded to the romanticism of peasant life, they condemn wage employment in export industries with the vocabulary of “sweatshops.” Indeed, low-skill industrial jobs are mundane and routine by the standard of youthful aspirations in developed countries. But the climb out of absolute poverty is not a tea party. Most US citizens owe their current prosperity to the work of previous generations immigrants who struggled through low-skill, mundane employment. Today it is possible to shorten that phase: China is rushing through it far more rapidly than the equivalent period of industrialization in America or Europe, but it is not possible to eliminate it. The granting of privileged market access to Africa and the reorientation of aid to industrial infrastructure depend upon decisions by our governments, but NGOs are sufficiently influential to block these decisions. To give a trivial but concrete example of this influence, I draw from experience. When evaluating the program of a major continental European aid agency, I urged programs more closely related to support for industrial oopportunities instead of agriculture, health, and education programs. However, the response was that the country’s NGOs were not interested in such industrialization programs and thus they could not be prioritized. But blocking industrialization does not produce a kinder economic development; rather, it condemns Africa to further decades of stagnation.

It is time to get real. The organic peasant life is a luxury that appeals to those jaded by the downside of affluence. Ordinary Africans recognize peasant agriculture for what it is, and the most ambitious seek to leave. We have more influence over African opportunities than we realize: our legislators and our development agencies take their priorities not from African preferences but from ours. Our trade policies and our priorities for aid could reshape those opportunities. Until we shed the romantic notion that Africa can escape poverty while preserving its huge peasantry our policies will continue to be but a shadow of their potential.