This is a great development for a number of reasons:
1. You've got high unemployment and a homegrown agriculture will put people to work.
2. Citizens diet is less dependent on a long supply chain
3. A local agriculture will drive down the cost of food. This will make a measurable difference in everyone's life. In America we pay 6.4% of our income for food, in Africa it's 60%. If the cost of food goes down people will have more money for other things.
From your linked article, the reason people spend a greater percentage of their incomes on food is not because of the cost of food, but that their incomes are much lower:
> The figures do not mean that food is more expensive in Nigeria than in the US. In fact, quite the reverse. The average American spends $2,392 per year on food, the average Nigerian half that: $1,132. The average Kenyan spends just $543 a year on food.
There are many benefits of Africa having the infrastructure/skills/industry to produce food in a more scalable way, but % of income is possibly not the metric to measure by.
Look at it this way: if the percentage income spent on food dropped from 60% to, say 20%, that would effectively double their remaining income! I don't see how that could not affect a local economy, regardless of the absolute scale.
I think the point is that actually doubling income is a better way to increase income than trying to optimize the price of one product.
What we do know is that food is already very cheap in Africa. It's not obvious that food could get much cheaper, let alone the 300% price reduction that you give in your example.
On the other hand, we do know there are huge gains to be had when it comes to increasing income and economic activity in general. That's where our effort would be best spent.
This is literally creating local jobs. A job equals more income than no job. So this is raising incomes. In addition, there's less capital leaving the country buying foreign produce. So the money that would be spent anyway creates a local job, and in return is again spent locally by a Ghanaian farmer, instead of spent in Europe by a Dutch farmer. This is literally a win all around. An economy is a system, you can't just one day create amazing jobs without an entire support system around them.
If they're importing a large amount of their food from Europe as the article states they very well can lower the cost by producing it locally. Even if they're less efficient than the Europeans in doing so.
I'm not sure they can, actually. The wheat fields of Kansas or the Ukraine are so vastly more productive than trying to grow crops in a tropical climate.
If food prices drop, won’t farmers make less too and hence lower income?
Maybe I am not understanding the math properly. Food is cheap in the USA because we import them from poorer countries where labour is cheap. And we also consume a lot. This benefits the exporting country. But if we were to produce our own food, the local production won’t be cheaper.
You can do that in two ways: Reduce cost of food by two thirds or double their income.
Both of these feats would be incredible. So yeah, if we could do incredible things, that would be amazing.
Let's get back to reality though: Food prices are more or less set by international markets. African farmers can't compete with other countries, because they work so inefficiently. Making more people work as farmers doesn't change that.
That's the reason why Africans import so much food. It's actually cheaper. You don't need more people working as farmers, you would need automation to be competitive, but then less people are actually employed. Even then, this wouldn't lower food prices below market price, because those farmers can now export instead of serving the domestic market.
The BLS reports an annual expenditure of $7,729/year per "consumer unit", and an average of 2.5 persons per consumer unit, so about $3,100/person/year in 2017. That number is probably a few years old.
I do wonder if this accounts for SNAP and other food expenses not directly paid with cash income.
> A local agriculture will drive down the cost of food
Is this true? In my experience the cheapest food is rarely almost never locally produced. It may be marketing and the demand for local food is higher.
Long supply chains have a lot of value add. Sure there is cost to transporting and storing the food, but the process has other efficiencies that more than make up for the cost. I've even read stories about Central American countries exporting their produce only to reimport it back for the locals to conusme.
It really depends. In high cost of labor countries, the long supply chain likely is cheaper due to many small compounding reasons.
In low cost of labor countries, I've seen the exact opposite. It's probably not very profitable in the US to setup a vegetable stand for 12 hours a day along a highway for $10/hr of sales. In many countries it is - you have a market garden and put one of the grandparents/children/cousins/etc. manning the retail operation. A single western tourist can make your entire day profitable (including opportunity costs) assuming no other sales.
In my experience you pay a huge premium in the US for locally grown (e.g. weekend farmers markets) - but in other countries it's the opposite - supermarkets are pretty expensive, and the "local farmer" markets are a quarter of the price.
It gets even more crazy, though. Very frequently there are weird market conditions that create massive losses for large suppliers. Random google link: https://www.freshplaza.com/article/9056981/india-tomato-whol... You can see that the price dropped as much as 74% These things happen around the world surprisingly frequently.
Large supermarkets, etc, can get access to these ridiculous prices and so it can cause prices to stay fairly low. However, it is not really healthy for the farmers. If you live in a really rural area that doesn't have access to a large world-wide market, the local food will be a lot cheaper because the only outside food you have access to is super expensive.
For me, buying local is about agricultural sustainability. It's about making sure that my neighbours can grow food, sell it and live comfortably. I'd also rather have many small farmers producing the best quality produce they can, than 1 super farmer that is trying to produce the cheapest produce they can. This all adds up to higher prices, of course.
I often feel that we should have "fair trade" in food everywhere. I can buy a pound of raisons from California for less than $2. The same grapes would be 4 pounds. $2000 of raisons at a retail price is 4000 pounds of grapes... And you think for those tonnes of grapes... how much is the farmer getting? It gets a bit crazy.
Maybe it's cheaper to transport raisins than grapes? They are smaller so you could fit more of them on a truck. Also they are already dried out, so they may be less sensitive to shipping conditions.
In Kazakhstan local food is not cheap as well. Yes, human labor is cheap. But that means that it's cheap for supply chain as well. I live in Astana and a lot of fruits are imported from Uzbekistan, even those that could be grown locally like apples. There are people who grow apples, potatoes and other vegetables in their gardens, mainly for themselves but they also sell what they don't need. And that price is not low. On the other side, imported vegetables usually don't have good taste, probably because they are optimized for export, so that high price vegetables have their buyers.
As someone who lives in Africa, I can assure you that the cheapest food around is locally grown. My guess for why is that import duties make a sizable chunk portion of the cost and that the infrastructure for keeping things cold/fresh is expensive or non-existent, driving up the risks and costs of importing fresh items.
In a country with a less developed transportation network local food will be cheaper than transported food. Keep in mind that lowering food prices for a developed country is a much different optimization game than lowering food costs for an undeveloped country. Not every country has a freight rail network as effective as the US.
Thanks for those stats and the link. One issue I have with that though is it doesn't seem to take into account farm subsidies and trade barriers restricting food imports. One makes the true cost of food much higher than it appears to be, while the other makes that cost much higher than it needs to be. Then there's general government spending on rural areas and the rural economy on top of that, which make it very difficult to make neat parallels between their economic situations.
To add more information to the article. I have been slowly trying to build up a hydroponics shaded structure. I have to finance this myself so this will take a few years. There a few reasons I am doing this. I want an alternative to an office job. Sometimes just sitting in front of a computer drains the soul. I don't trust the financial systems in my home country and have my doubts if my pension will support me later in life. I do think there is a profit to be made. A fare amount of food is imported.
The weird thing is that small scale farming will only be viable as long as Africa is not attractive to big farmers. The moment big farmers can get going I think it will be the end of small scale farming.
What is up with the Millenials Do X, Millenials do Y? I don't remember reading this kind of stories for previous generations. Why are things attributed to a collective like this, it's weird.
On the contrary, it's not weird at all. It's incorrect, but such thinking in collectives is entirely natural. It's seeing past such things and recognizing that one should not to attribute things to collectives like this that is unusual.
>Why are things attributed to a collective like this, it's weird.
Because when you look at broad trends you can see patterns among cohorts, and sometimes those patterns are important in economic and government policy.
Is there such a thing as an "African millennial"? Are there Gen-Xers in Africa? Was there a baby boom to produce Baby Boomers? Aren't these generational terms relevant to the USA only? NYTimes recently covered the distinctions between Millennials and Gen-Xers, and none of those cultural touchpoints or characteristics of Millennials seem to be appropriate for describing any generation in Ghana.
Millennials are typically defined as an age-cohort. So yes, you could apply that term to denote a certain generation of Africans, no problem. It may not be useful or confusing, but there's technically nothing wrong with it.
One of the key traits (stereo)typically discussed in the media w.r.t. millennials is a sense of entitlement, growing up with technology. And to a lesser extent, millennials tend to be more understanding of the importance of the environment and diet.
That happens to reflect exactly the article's premise: agriculture is seen as something that poor, illiterate rural people do. Whereas millennials in Africa are urbanising, have mobile phones, are literate and went to school and are looking for a manufacturing or services job, not an agricultural one. The concept of the millennial translates just fine to the African context, in the case of this article.
The average age in Africa is 24, yet the average farmer is 60. That's where millennials come in, reshaping the idea of farming, and giving it a modern touch. That's what the article is about.
> Aren't these generational terms relevant to the USA only?
I mean, even if you disagreed that an African millennial made sense as a concept... there's hundreds of millions of people living in countries with very similar concepts. (e.g. much of Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan etc). It's not a term exclusive to the US.
There are absolutely differences between different cultures, so an American millennial or Gen-Xer might be totally different from a European one, and countries that weren't involved in WW2 probably didn't experience the baby boom at the end of the war, but at the same time, thanks to the internet, culture is getting more global, and if there's any generation that's likely to be a global generation, it's the millennials.
So it is absolutely and obviously not true that generational terms like 'millenial' and 'Gen-X' only apply to the USA, because the same characteristics apply (and are used) in all of Europe, most of Asia, Australia, New Zealand, South America, and so on.
Africa is a very big place, though, in varying stages of development. Several places have burgeoning middle classes, with access to similar amounts of consumer goods as the rest of the world. Is there any reason to think that these middle classes don't face similar generational shifts?
From a long line of farmers...this is just one of the first steps of industrialization. It took two generations to eradicate family farming in America (at least where I am from), and it will happen faster for Africa. It's great that people have better and more effective local food production, but when the real economics kick in, and these people are competing with corporate farming, their way of life will change, sadly, for the worse, as it did in America. Enjoy the sense of freedom and pride now, and defend it as long as you can, because there are serious doubts as to whether this will be feasible in 50 years.
You hit the nail on the head! See my second paragraph in a sibling comment[0]. I will just expand on the point here. Investing in Africa is not for the faint of heart and your stand a good chance of losing your money. You also have to be prepared to pay some bribes to ensure that you can do business. This makes mining and oil about the only places external investors will invest in Africa. This is what has left a gap for the small farmer. We are small farmers because getting a loan isn't easy so we self fund.
South Africa on the other hand, the country I work in is very different from other parts of Africa. There are large commercial farms which produce most of the food for the country. Suppliers are not interested in small scale farmers. Animal medicines only sold through vets or in quantities of 10 000. Suppliers of shade cloth and other farming materials largely ignore you when you want to buy a handful of stock. It is very different to my home country where everyone has a few animals and you can buy whatever you want in small quantities. South Africa represents what Africa will be in the next generation or two. I full agree with your comment and I would like to enjoy the small scale farming while it is possible.
I live in Kenya and this has already happened. The 'make farming cool' movement is very emotionally driven and ill advised. Small scale farming is just not sustainable any more.
Try finding capital, infrastructure, stable and non-corrupt government, and competent legal system in most of Africa (it is a large continent - not just Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa). Going much beyond sustenance in Africa is still a massive challenge.
To add to that, Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa are "easy mode". Those countries are far more developed than people imagine, despite massive corruption.
At the end of the day, people need food to eat. If farming can provide a decent living (in this case, it looks as though Ghana is under-served in this sector), people will fill that gap.
Even more than that, farming is an essential human activity and we could use another green revolution.
True. I think Ghana has it s bit easier than other places, because they haven’t suffered a prolonged disaster. Weak countries affected by ongoing disasters get international aid which can have “dumping” effect by undercutting the native farmers and making their enterprise less viable. In countries where this happens they (aid) have to be careful they don’t end up undercutting local economies when they try to “help”,
Do economies really need to go through that "farming phase" to grow? I don't see the connection. Modern farming employs less than 1% of the population. Non-modern farming can not compete at all except in tiny niches.
So how are those "native farmers" going to bring their societies from poverty to prosperity, by being completely uncompetitive, but protected at the same time?
As someone who has family that still farms: the amount of equipment required to allow only 1% of the population to grow food is enormous. Are you seriously suggesting that it will be a trivial thing for farms that currently rely on manual labor to switch to large-scale mechanized practices? Most farmers I know have >1M USD in equipment, along with the required infrastructure to handle shipping/storing the crop.
So I don't see how they can avoid a process similar to what occurred for western farmers starting ~1900. They don't need to be competitive on a global scale, they need to find a profitable niche in their own countries. Additionally, increasing employment seems far preferable; likely developing local economies is the best way to increase standards of living rather than relying on foreign aid.
Also note that there are many crops even in the US that heavily rely on hand labor (typically fruit/vegetables). While it may not be feasible to compete with imported grains, I can certainly see how local farmers could effectively compete for these crops- which would likely also increase the diversity of foods avaliable in local markets.
How is it anything but a net positive for them to develop local industries; the increased economic output is likely to improve the entire local economies and doesn't rely on foreign aid (which can suppress long-term economic development).
> Are you seriously suggesting that it will be a trivial thing for farms that currently rely on manual labor to switch to large-scale mechanized practices?
Of course not. I'm suggesting the opposite: That they have no chance of competing with manual farm labor, so there's no point in trying.
> So I don't see how they can avoid a process similar to what occurred for western farmers starting ~1900.
I don't see how a development process that may have happened in the West over a hundred years ago, under completely different circumstances, can be repeated in Africa in 2019. That's literally the question I am posing: How could this kind of development possibly work through farming?
> They don't need to be competitive on a global scale, they need to find a profitable niche in their own countries.
You can't ignore the global market. The whole reason why many farmers can't make a living in Africa is because foreign produce is cheaper, due to automation. So you would have to restrict foreign produce, raising its prices and therefore making everyone poorer (except the farmers).
> Additionally, increasing employment seems far preferable; likely developing local economies is the best way to increase standards of living rather than relying on foreign aid.
Developing local economies is fine, doing it through farming is completely misguided. In farming, a massive amount of labor can be automated away and will be automated away if economic development actually takes place, so any employment here would be temporary at best.
Instead of farming, let's take the manufacturing of clothes. Some of it can be automated away, but not necessarily to the point to make 99% of workers redundant. As a result, you can see many emerging economies producing clothes for international markets.
> Also note that there are many crops even in the US that heavily rely on hand labor (typically fruit/vegetables). While it may not be feasible to compete with imported grains, I can certainly see how local farmers could effectively compete for these crops- which would likely also increase the diversity of foods avaliable in local markets.
I did note as much, specialized farming may well be a profitable niche for exporting. Except those misguided western do-gooders aren't helping them build supply chains to western markets for valuable produce, they're telling them that raising rats and snails for the domestic market is totally the right thing to do for economic development. Utter nonsense!
> How is it anything but a net positive for them to develop local industries; the increased economic output is likely to improve the entire local economies and doesn't rely on foreign aid (which can suppress long-term economic development).
Because of comparative advantage. Making domestic farming sustainable would require protectionism. We figured out hundreds of years ago that protectionism doesn't work and effectively makes everyone poorer, yet somehow it's still popular among politicians (like Mr. Trump).
Who says they don't have incomes? Let's say they don't have incomes, who says the solution is becoming a farmer as opposed to performing any other form of work?
In 2019, being a farmer without modern machinery is pretty much the least valuable form of labor one could perform, unless we're talking about very specific foods that need special care, i.e. not the kind of food that actually feeds a population.
Only narrow-minded "back-to-the-roots" westerners who idealize farming could come up with such a non-solution. Thankfully, the Chinese who idealize money are building factories in Africa to turn that labor into real economic value.
In Holland, land of many onions, being a farmer usually means having over a million in assets. it's not a career choice for young people without significant assets. things will go in that direction everywhere and it means small farmers will go the way of the dodo. so they are in fact wrong in trying to get a lot of people to choose farming. you only need a few rich guys.
One thing that shocked me is they breeding "giant rats" (Cricetomys gambianus). These are known vectors of monkeypox. Also, snails usually carry very harmful parasites to both humans and plants.
Because of the associations to pre-existing intense controversy. Those act like magnets pulling discussion in their direction, away from the topic at hand.
On HN, we're trying to open up a space to discuss new things, unexpected things, curious things. Those exert a weaker force on attention than the sensationalized hot topics that already exist in people's minds. When comments hop from a new topic to an intense pre-existing topic, that creates a path to flamewar hell. It's moderation's job to restrain and undo that, so that the more curious, weaker topic can get attention again. Does that answer your question?
It's not about silencing wrongthing so much as allowing other topics not to get drowned out by the ragey usual. Snail farming in Ghana is surely not as important as murder in South Africa, but what attracts curiosity more? That's the core question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In the unlikely event that Congress or the Whitehouse take an interest in HN moderation, I'll be happy to share with them how we approach this.
> In the unlikely event that Congress or the Whitehouse take an interest in HN moderation, I'll be happy to share with them how we approach this.
“I’m doing the same things that triggered Congressional and Presidential investigations, and plan to continue until they harass me directly.”
You’re such an upstanding member of society.
I sincerely hope they do investigate you, because I believe your authoritarian censorship has infected other technology websites, and is the place many people at Google et al learned to censor for “civility”.
The exact thing that is under investigation.
And to anyone who feels silenced by dang, I suggest you reach out to your congressional representatives — and report the instances of censorship for narrative control you observe. This is an issue, and dang’s pretenses aside, it is being investigated as a serious social problem.
It’s time to standup to leftwing bullies silencing people who don’t agree as “offensive”, because those same leftwing bullies devolve into angry shouting when confronted by opposing views.
Africa is a fairly large continent and its countries are varied in their cultures, languages, government institutions and politics. Ghana is among the safer, more developed and faster growing African nations, and is far, far safer than SA.
Since you're clearly not interested in using HN as intended, we've banned this account. If you change your mind, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
The article doesn't really seem to back that up. Lots of the people pushing that theory are definitely alt-right types, but when the article doesn't present any facts to contradict them it doesn't make it seem like they're actually wrong. For some "conspiracy theories" it can be impossible to prove someone wrong, but there should be some pretty straightforward statistics to help figure out if this is bogus or not. FWIW it seems to be a commonly held belief by South Africans. The ones I know told me that in SA they won't stop at a red stoplight ("robot") in certain areas. The risk of getting carjacked and murdered is higher (or perceived to be higher) than the risk of getting in a deadly car crash when running a red light.
Even supposing that it's not happening in South Africa (ANC leaders are just singing about doing it [1]), land appropriation very much happened in neighboring Zimbabwe: "By 2013, every white-owned farm in Zimbabwe had been either expropriated or confirmed for future redistribution." [2]
To bring us back to OP's question, property rights in Ghana are listed here [3] as "weak".
"Since the early 1990s, there has been a marked increase in assaults and murders of the owners and managers of commercial farms and their families, disproportionate to general crime trends in South Africa." [1]
Which does not say farmers, or white farmers specifically, are targeted disproportionately - I was unable to find statistics on this. But they are targeted:
"Yet the available research shows that most crime against white farmers is criminally motivated, the perpetrators seeking firearms, money, or vehicles, and that the violence used is instrumental to these purposes. Farms, remote and scattered, are seen as easy targets. In a small number of cases, the motive may be revenge for eviction or past ill-treatment." [1]
Note that South Africa has 6x the murder rate of the USA, so saying farmers are under attack is certainly true, even if they're not disproportionately under attack.
Edit: I looked around some more, and there does not appear to be very reliable data, but depending on how you slice the numbers, farmers may be disproportionately under attack by a factor as high as 6 [2].
Let me also remark on how curious it is that the media would so confidently call this theory 'debunked' (and racist!), when by their own admission, there is insufficient official data (gathered by the majority black government) to conclude either way [2]. I do not recall this level of skepticism being so widely applied to the Black Lives Matters movement.
Edit 2: User angersock (whose post is dead) did find what looks to be official statistics: "According to the South African Institute for Race Relations, commercial farmers, who are predominantly white, were twice as likely to be killed as the average citizen." [3]
I am confident that, should this be brought to the BBCs attention, they will run a front-page story correcting their earlier claims that this is a racist myth.
I’m reading this thread with no context or agenda and I don’t see the first commenter saying anything about white farmers.
When you say “started this thread” that seems misleading because you brought an interesting perspective about allegations regarding the victimizations of white farmers in to this. But it didn’t seem to be at all what the original commented was elucidating.
Actually the vulnerability of farmers to violent depredation in contrast to hunters or herders has been proposed as a huge factor throughout history and prehistory guiding physical and social evolution.
That was my first association.
So, I don’t know what the original commenter meant but I’m not certain you do either.
> Unsubstantiated claims that such attacks on farmers disproportionately target whites are a key element of the white genocide conspiracy theory and have become a common talking point among white nationalists worldwide.[11][12][13][14][15][16] However, there are no reliable figures that suggest that white farmers are being targeted in particular or that they are at a disproportionate risk of being killed.[1][4][12][17][18][19][16] In fact, while South Africa has more white farmers overall, black farm workers are more likely to be killed.[2][3] Fact-checkers have widely identified the notion of a "white genocide" in South Africa as a falsehood or myth.[12][17]
""Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.""
1. You've got high unemployment and a homegrown agriculture will put people to work.
2. Citizens diet is less dependent on a long supply chain
3. A local agriculture will drive down the cost of food. This will make a measurable difference in everyone's life. In America we pay 6.4% of our income for food, in Africa it's 60%. If the cost of food goes down people will have more money for other things.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/this-map-shows-how-mu...