By Chima Christian
For generations, traditional African agriculture was built on communal strength and biological balance.
Many African farming communities practiced group rotational labor, taking turns working one another’s farms. Farmers saved seeds from their harvests for the next planting season. Soil fertility was managed through shifting cultivation, cover crops, animal manure, kitchen waste, and strategic crop rotation.
Our forefathers may not have had the scientific language to explain everything they were doing, but they possessed a native empirical understanding of ecological balance. Where science has investigated some of these practices, it has found rational explanations for why they worked so well.
Take shifting cultivation which simply means farming on new lots of land so as to let lands rest in turns, as an example. Or crop rotation, which farms on the same lot but systematically changes the plant family grown in each growing cycle, as another example. These have been found by science to be beneficial in that it allows the land to regenerate itself by naturally replenishing soil nutrients, improve beneficial microorganisms, disrupt pest and disease cycles and rebuild soil structure.
Through intelligent practices arrived at after decades of observation, our forefathers were able to naturally conserve soil nutrients, fight pests and diseases, cheaply produce good food year after year, feed entire populations, and had surplus.
The introduction of western industrial model gradually dismantled this entire structure. In place of communal cooperation, it introduced paid out-of-pocket labor for every unit of effort, driving up production costs beyond the reach of many. Where a farmer once saved seed from the previous harvest, the new system has forced him into annual reliance on foreign seed corporations. In place of natural soil management, it introduced specialisation and monocropping which encouraged farmers to plant the same crop year after year on the same land. And when the land protested, they introduced synthetic fertilizers followed by aggressive chemicals to suppress the erosion of soil nutrients and fight pest and disease outbreaks that this system inevitably creates.
Every individual intervention may appear reasonable. But put them together and you have created a system in which the farmer has to continuously spend more money year on year simply to remain a farmer.
Through “improved seeds” that acceptably deliver initial results, the farmer, unknown to him, has shifted from being the owner of a productive biological system to being a recurring customer in an agricultural supply chain he neither owns nor controls.
The economic fallout of this shift is catastrophic. When the Strait of Hormuz faced regional disruption, global fertilizer prices surged nearly 40% year-on-year causing many more farmers to abandon their farms due to costs, and run to the cities looking for “greener pastures.”
We attribute rising costs of food to insecurity in the rural areas. Yes, it contributes. But a significant percentage of farmers abandon their farmlands because of unsustainable costs of production. The system they had been taught had made them dependent on farm inputs that had suddenly become too expensive.
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Culled from Chima Christian’s upcoming Opinion Piece titled: Modern Agriculture, Public Health, and Africa’s Food Sovereignty.
_*Chima Christian* _is the Co-founder and CEO of Teva Foods, a Nigerian social enterprise working to build more sustainable and locally rooted food systems. Through large-scale food production and processing, climate-adaptive farming, agricultural training and the development of local food value chains, Teva Foods is exploring practical ways to address food insecurity while strengthening Africa’s capacity to feed itself. Its work is grounded in a simple conviction: that no African should go to bed on an empty stomach, and that Africa’s food future must ultimately be built on systems the continent can own, understand and control._
