This post is a draft of the article of the same title that I sent to AgFunderNews that was then edited and published in 2023 under the title Africa’s smallholder farmers need access to irrigation technologies before 4IR agtech solutions can take off
Funding Agtech for Mars while Africa Can’t Feed Itself
By Prosper Chikomo
4 July 2023
The African Development Bank https://www.afdb.org/en/the-high-5/feed-africa projects that by 2025 Africa’s net food import bill will be over US$100 billion. This presents a huge opportunity for local food production, food independence, and national food self-sufficiency.
WHAT FOOD DOES AFRICA IMPORT
Genetically engineering foods/organisms, biological fertiliser https://agfundernews.com/biologicals-wont-replace-chemical-crop-inputs-anytime-soon-heres-why, biomanufacturing https://agfundernews.com/africas-next-leap-forward-part-2-biomanufacturing-in-focus, containerised environment agriculture, and even synthetic meat cultivation are not practical solutions to accelerating solving hunger at scale in Africa, and lifting Africans out of poverty in the process.
Africa primarily imports staple grains such as wheat, maize, and rice. These grains are also grown in Africa under rain-fed farming, especially maize.
The imported staple grains are mostly grown under irrigation in the exporting countries such as USA, Ukraine, Brazil, Mexico, and Russia. According to IFPRI https://www.ifpri.org/blog/irrigating-africa, only 6% of Africa’s farmland is under irrigation, compared to almost 40% in Asia, and in Sub-Saharan Africa, water withdrawals as a share of total renewable water resources are only 1%. Africa has plenty of water! The low irrigation penetration and unpredictable rainfall patterns in Africa, despite an abundance of water resources, are why Africa is a net importer of food.
The main problem in Africa has been that irrigation development has been focused on large-scale farms and centralised, while smallholder farmers in Africa who actually produce over 80% of the food consumed in Africa were left to rely on the rains for irrigation. According to the World Food Programme https://m.wfp.org/purchase-progress/news/blog/five-things-you-didn%E2%80%99t-know-about-post-harvest-food-losses, farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa experience post-harvest losses of up to 30%. Solutions to increase irrigation penetration and improved post-harvest solutions can increase food availability as well as farmer incomes.
With distributed smallholder irrigation technologies such as drip irrigation kits and solar-powered pumps, and improved grain storage, Africa could feed itself, decrease poverty, and increase prosperity. Africa has the highest solar irradiance in the world, which means solar-powered irrigation and storage have great potential.
Asia’s Green Revolution was enabled by a convergence of electricity (energy), water pumps, tubewells (boreholes), fertilizer, and hybrid seeds, and not just hybrid seeds or fertilizer in isolation as some authors suggest.
CORRELATION OF RAINS AND OUTPUT
I am no guru, but looking at the data, I found out that each time that the rains were good in Southern Africa (Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi), those countries would produce enough grain to feed themselves and even export. Each time that there is a drought, those countries would import grain and appeal for food aid, with millions of people facing hunger and starvation.
Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi have a ban on growing GMOs, so they could feed themselves without growing GMO maize when rains are good, evidently they can end hunger even without GMOs if the crops can get enough water.
The point is, these countries, with the little they have, and without sophisticated machinery and complex proprietary genetically-engineered technologies, are able to feed themselves when the rains are good, which means those countries can potentially feed themselves, and that their only need is access to even basic irrigation technologies, not acronym technologies like AI, IoT, ML, GMO, etc.
WHAT TECHNOLOGIES ARE IN WIDESPREAD USE IN AFRICA
Over 90% of the farmland in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi is not under mechanised irrigation. Most of the farmers are subsistence smallholder farmers. In the rainy season, they grow mostly the staple food crop, maize, and other grain crops.
Now, because of variable, changing, and unevenly distributed rainfall patterns, crop yields are variable. The crop varieties are all non-GMO, and include hybrids.
Most food grown in Africa is grown using the hoe. Most of the grain consumed in Zimbabwe is milled using smallscale grinding mills. There is very little mechanization on African farms. A typical smallholder African farm does not have a grain bin/steel silo, which leads to high post-harvest losses of grain, which translate into lost calories and income.
Zimbabwe on its own has a shortage of 30 000 tractors https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/zimbabwe-agricultural-sectors, and yet, when the rains are good Zimbabwe can produce enough maize to feed itself. The same with Zambia and Malawi.
Recently, the Government of Zimbabwe https://www.thezimbabwean.co/2020/08/john-deere-deal-revives-zimbabwe-mechanisation-hopes/ went into a deal with John Deere to sell tractors in Zimbabwe on very favourable terms. Without irrigation, and at the mercy of the rains, many farmers will default their tractor loans. Even if somehow the average farmer in Zimbabwe could get a loan to buy a tractor, if those crops do not get water, it would be impossible for the farmer to repay that loan from farming with that tractor.
This particular type of sales approach that uses a push strategy is characteristic even of funding of investment in Africa-focused agtech that is just too advanced and not yet ready for Africa.
I know African startups that are doing blockchain in agriculture and as far as I am concerned, their blockchain does not increase output or prevent theft of my crop. So why do I need it? It’s really a nice proof of concept, and not a really useful agtech product to me.
We have to build a solid foundation for African agriculture first for everything else to take off. That means investing in the basics like irrigation and storage. But investors would rather fund meat grown in a lab.
How can an African agtech startup in blockchain, AI, ML, crop monitoring, drones even, thrive in Africa if the African farmers do not have irrigation and post-harvest technologies to guarantee them higher disposable incomes? Where will the farmers get the money to pay for those advanced agricultural technologies?
The cart must come before the horse, otherwise all these African so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution agtech startups will be serving very niche markets when the investors’ reasons for investing in them in the first place is to do in African agriculture what the mobile phone did for telecommunications in Africa.
TECH INVESTING
At the start of 2020, the World Food Programme required US$200 million to acquire 200 000 tonnes of grain to feed 4.1 million Zimbabweans in the first 6 months of 2020. (30 December 2019) https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/12/1054491. Those 4 million people were half the number of Zimbabweans who were facing hunger and starvation.
With US$200 million, you can put 200 000 hectares under irrigation in Zimbabwe, which can produce between 2 million to 4 million tonnes of maize, – which is 10 to 20 times the grain the WFP would deliver at the same cost -, making Zimbabwe self-sufficient in grain production, averting starvation of over 8 million Zimbabweans annually in the hunger season for several years to come.
(It so happened that, sometime after that, the WFP Chief urged https://twitter.com/WFPChief/status/1450388737444257797 Elon Musk to donate billions of his wealth to end world hunger, and Elon Musk challenged https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1454808104256737289 the WFP to open its books to the public. It was funny.)
I asked a WFP official why they don’t invest in irrigation and end the cycle of African countries’ dependence on foreign food aid. He told me that their mandate is to make sure no one is hungry. I could see their logic, acquiring already existing food instead of investing in local agriculture is safer, cheaper, and has immediate results and outcomes. He also told me that the UN has other arms that are interested in irrigation development.
But why don’t investors invest in irrigation development in Africa? I am talking about something I tried to do and I could not get any funding.
Throughout 2021 and 2022, I read AgfunderNews with shock and horror as containerised-environment agriculture startups, vertical farming startups, cultivated meat startups, agrobotics startups, and biotech startups were reported to have raised as much as US$200 million a piece. Investors were funding anything crypto and anything with acronyms.
Bowery, an indoor farming startup, raised US$300 million.
https://agfundernews.com/bowery-raises-biggest-ever-vertical-farming-raise-with-300m-series-c.html
Impossible Foods, an alternate-meat company, raised US$500 million, adding up to almost US$2 billion raised by that time. https://agfundernews.com/impossible-foods-brings-total-funding-to-2b-with-new-500m-raise.html
In comparison, in 2021 African startups received US$482.3 million in funding.
According to AgfunderNews, https://agfundernews.com/africa-agrifoodtech-startups-raise-1bn-in-5-years
Agricool https://www.verticalfarmdaily.com/article/9414249/urban-farm-agricool-placed-in-receivership/, a French startup founded in 2015, did not have a viable business model, and yet it was able to raise US$35 million. Its founder, Guillaume Fourdinier, was quoted in 2020 saying, “We are giving ourselves a year to prove that this farm, which is probably the most advanced in the world in terms of technology, is viable both economically and ecologically.” In 2020, it had losses of over US$7 million euros on revenues of less than US$200 000.
In Zimbabwe, with US$35 million you can put enough land under irrigation to produce over 300 000 tonnes of maize within 150 days, and this would put over US$75 million into the pockets of maize farmers in one crop cycle. Many smallholder farmers in Zimbabwe would have food to eat, money to pay school fees for their children and invest in their farms. That tonnage can feed more than 4 million Zimbabweans for months, as the WFP showed.
It seems investors now want to invest in just tech, than for profit. Farming in Africa has a viable, and tried and tested business model. How can investors put US$35 million in container-based farming that has no viable business model, while Africans starve for lack of investment in irrigation? These farmers have shown that they can feed their country when rains are good.
In my view, funding irrigated agriculture, let’s be green and call it “climate-proofing agriculture” in Africa may not be sexy, but it may have a better return on investment than crypto, lab meats, and novel acronym technologies, and has demonstrated that fact a number of times.
It is also possible to farm even 1 million hectares in Africa if you are serious and you know how. No corruption involved, just talking to the farmers. The landownership regime in Zimbabwe and Zambia is the same as Ukraine’s, and yet Ukraine agriculture has got billions of dollars in investment, so there is really no excuse not to invest in Zimbabwe or Zambia.
No, there is no US embargo on Zimbabwe. John Deree is doing business with the Government of Zimbabwe. There are US sanctions that prohibit transactions between US persons (companies included), and listed “specially designated nationals” and entities in Zimbabwe. https://ofac.treasury.gov/sanctions-programs-and-country-information/zimbabwe-related-sanctions You can ask your lawyer. In
any case, you can always apply https://ofac.treasury.gov/ofac-license-application-page for an OFAC License online for authorization to do business that would otherwise be prohibited, which is what I think John Deere may have done. The US Ambassador to Zimbabwe even attended the ceremony and made lots of noise there.
SCALE. 10X!
I have heard and read that VCs want 10x returns, meaning “or more”. Right now in Zimbabwe the average non-GMO maize/corn yield is less than 1 tonne per hectare (about 16 bushels per acre) because almost all farming is rain-fed, and most planting is done using a hoe. Then there are the 2 million hectares of farmland that can be put under irrigation.
With good rains, Zimbabwean farmers can achieve even 5 times that yield, and with mechanized irrigation, 10 to 20 times that yield, in one crop cycle. 20 tonnes per hectare is actually very possible https://www.seedcogroup.com/zw/ke/media/news/seed-co-11-tonne-plus-club-20162017-winners. This is yield of one crop. Now imagine the potential from all-year-round farming of different crops under irrigation.
Yet some experts will want to push GMOs, usually because that is their field of expertise, saying GMOs have higher yields, disease tolerance what not, but Africans have demonstrated that they can feed themselves without GMOs, so long as the crops get water. Is there any GMO corn that can grow without water?
In 2023, containerised-environment agriculture and cultivated meat startups would implode like dotcoms in 2000. If the investors who lost their wealth in the crypto bust and lab foods had put their money into African agriculture, at least they would still have some money and the benefits to Africa and the world would be higher. They would even have that rare feeling of having done good with their money and not lost it.
I am of the conviction that it is greater philanthropy to invest in for-profit startups in underserved and poor communities than to donate money or goods or food aid to them.
FOOD FOR MARS
Lab-grown/Cultivated meat will never replace widespread consumption of real meat until there is a human being living on Mars, or the Moon.
It would take time or something of the scale of the Covid pandemic or a World War for lab-grown meat to even scale to common consumption, and even then, it would have a demand curve no different to that of canned beef.
Canned meats have been around for decades, but their consumption has not surpassed their fresh uncanned versions. There is a worldwide trend against factory-made foods, from potato chips to even meat. What more meat grown in a tank in a factory?
If bottled water becomes the main source of water for human consumption, then you will know that there is a problem in this world, a crisis.
One selling point of some cultivated meat startups is that their meat does not have antibiotics, unlike farm meat. It’s like those ads that say “Chemical-free”. Well, what about preservatives? The issue of preservatives is not going to go away. People want to know what’s in the meat.
Is the cultivated meat industry going to be blunt that they are selling meat synthesized in a tank, or they will brand it as “real beef” https://agfundernews.com/scifi-foods-we-can-make-a-blended-product-commercially-viable and let the customers make their own assumptions? This is a very serious question with very serious ethical implications. Elizabeth Holmes had a real fake blood-test. Will the cultivated meat startups even put a photo of a cow on their packages to drive sales or to fool confuse customers? Imagine if she had not got caught until millions of people had died.
A lot of people have issues with GMO seeds and foods https://agfundernews.com/cultivated-meat-foodtech-fantasy-or-the-future-of-meat-none-of-this-stuff-makes-any-commercial-sense-until-everyones-eating-it, what more lab-grown genetically engineered meat?
If animal welfare is the driver, there are lots of otherwise healthy cows that die only due to drought in Africa. Irrigation could save them and there would be plenty meat from cows that were happy.
Meat-eaters will find consuming meat that never had a life before to be distasteful or against their convictions. It’s like my views on A.I., artificial insemination. Is it fair for a healthy cow to be artificially inseminated, because, well, profits and it can’t talk? Are these not sweatshops for cows? Would you as a human being like only to be used for artificial insemination? But “genetics” is what gets funded, not irrigation in Africa. Why would a VC firm give a startup US$2 billion to genetically engineer a cow that does not even drink water because, well, sustainability, save water, right? It is getting to the point where one dotcom where there was even a startup that got funded to transmit scents via an internet connection.
Some VCs are funding startups that say cows emit greenhouse gases and their solution is to create cows that don’t emit any greenhouse gases or to make cows not emit any greenhouse gases, somehow.
We have cows in Africa, imagine being told that “meat” grown in a tank that was made using iron ore that was mined 20km away from you and then exported abroad is good for you and good for the environment, and is even better than meat from a cow that eats grass in the open. Maybe that is why African farmers and startups cannot get funding for even back to the basic farming; greenhouse gases, good for the environment.
If African farmers do not have profitable farms because of a lack of access to irrigation, how then can they even get to afford subscription AI services, or an account on a subscription marketplace for farmers, or Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies? Forget access to ChatGPT!
What has caused the climate crisis is not the cow, but centuries of hydrocarbon-fueled industrialization, which is almost non-existent in Africa. The African cow herd, in fact, Africa as a whole, has not made a dent to the total supply of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. If a natural cow emits greenhouse gases from natural processes, does that not mean that some of the greenhouse gases will naturally be there? My scientific understanding is that if the atmosphere was purely oxygen, there would be no human life.
Cultivated meat has too few benefits compared to real cow meat. A real cow on its own serves probably over 20 industries with something: leather, glue, food, medicines, dowry, money (as store of value), meat, payment, milk, jobs, manure, draught-power (better than diesel engines), transport, and more.
Growing cows in Africa is probably cheaper and more environmentally-friendly than exporting cultivated meats to Africa.
Here in Africa we will be waiting for the data, but we are not going to change our ways anytime soon. We also welcome well-meaning investment in our agriculture and agribusinesses.