Africa’s Agricultural Potential Offers an Opportunity for India

A journey through Zimbabwe reveals Africa's agricultural potential & tragedy of land, politics & lost productivity.

Zimbabwe had once been known as the breadbasket of Africa. Now it was importing food.

(Photo: Akhil Bakshi/Altered by Aroop Mishra/The Quint)

Africa is a continent of immense agricultural promise, yet in parts of it, that promise has been squandered with devastating consequences.

I witnessed this painful reality while driving through Zimbabwe during the Gondwanaland Expedition, a scientific journey that took us over 25,000 kilometres from the Indian Himalayas to Cape Agulhas, the southernmost tip of Africa.

At the time, Zimbabwe was in the grip of a severe economic crisis. The black market price of petrol and diesel was sixteen times the normal price. The locals who had been given farmland of the whites were making a bigger buck selling their quota of diesel in the black market than they did in farming. On the way to Harare, we saw mile after mile of expropriated farmland infested with weeds, neglected by farmers profiteering from the fuel crisis, unconcerned about the hardships caused to the unemployed farm labour.

It was a particularly painful sight because Zimbabwe had once been known as the breadbasket of Africa. Now, it was importing food.

From Bread Basket to a Nation in Deficit

Zimbabwe seemed to have run short of almost everything except bad news. Inflation had reached an astonishing 1,041 per cent. The popular Zimbabwean joke of the time captured the absurdity better than any economic report.

An Englishman, a Frenchman and a World Bank economist are looking at a painting of Adam and Eve frolicking in the Garden of Eden.

“Look at their reserve, their calm,” says the Englishman. “They must be English.”

“Nonsense,” says the Frenchman. “They are both naked and beautiful. They must be French.”

“You are both wrong,” says the economist. “They have no clothes and no shelter. They have only an apple to eat and they are being told they are in Paradise. Clearly, they are Zimbabweans!”

Driving through the bougainvillea and jacaranda-lined streets of Mutare, we entered the rugged Eastern Highlands, a string of misty mountains that form a natural boundary between Zimbabwe and Mozambique. 

Author with camel herders in Sudan.

(Photo: Special Arrangement/The Quint)

The Immigration & Customs Officer, a chatty lady, whose daughter was undergoing some training in India, latched on to me and while our documents were being processed she engaged me in an endless monologue on the virtues of freedom. Pointing to a stout, white Zimbabwean taking a speedboat on a trailer to his newly-established beach resort in Mozambique, she said: “Good riddance.”

“But they say that because the whites are leaving, your industry and agriculture is in shambles. Is that correct?” I interjected.

“Of course they’ll say it! Oh yes, they will. We are suffering not because they are leaving. It is because of the economic sanctions that have been imposed on us. We can neither export to nor import from Europe and America. The white race has ganged up against us. Only because we took back the land that they stole from our forefathers. After centuries of exploiting us, discriminating against us in our own land, the whites now say that they are being discriminated against!. They want us carry out a land audit, give decent compensation, then arrange for leaseholds, management contracts, surety of tenure and individual title deeds. Did they do any of this when they took our land?”

Wishing the good people of Zimbabwe a less ruinous future, we crossed into Mozambique.

The Other Side of the Story

In the quaint town of Manica we stopped to change money and have lunch. Many charming colonial buildings on the main street were pockmarked with bullet holes, sad reminders of the ravages of a 16-year civil war that had busted Mozambique.

Two white men, massively featured, lounged on the restaurant’s colonial veranda energetically downing bottles of Manica beer. Dressed in shorts, their thighs were the size of my chest. I joined in their conversation, refusing offers to buy me a drink. 

They were both farmers ousted from Zimbabwe, now trying to rebuild their lives in Mozambique by establishing a new farm on leased land. 

I asked them if they had ever gone back to their seized property. One of them said he had and tears welled up in his eyes as he described the present ruinous state of his 70-acre farm. “Three generations of hard work had gone into our farm. My grandfather started from a scratch, living in tents made from fertiliser bags. The house, the barn, the cattle sheds – we built them all ourselves, with our own hands. They cleaned out the place. Took everything away. All the machines and irrigation pipes are gone. The entire poultry stock was eaten. Cows were killed for meat. The land has not been farmed and weeds have taken over. It was strewn with rubbish.” Tears rolled down the big man’s cheeks.

“Yes. It was bad,” continued the other farmer, without consoling his friend.

“Two years of nightmare. Mobs of ZANU-PF would scare us at night, making loud noises, cussing, lighting fires on our land. They humiliated my wife and children on way to school. It became so bad we had to move the kids to a boarding school in South Africa."

"My father, wife and I took turns keeping a watch at night. We slept with guns. When the government finally allotted our land to the ZANU-PF party workers, the settlers came and began constructing their hives here and there and generally came in our way, intimidating us. Our farmhands who protested were beaten up. One of them almost died. They hit him on his head with an axe. The police, instead of protecting us, warned us not to remove certain assets from the farm as we had received a Section 8—a final notice to quit farming. It was a only matter of time till they caused us physical harm. We decided to leave. I took a bag of soil from the farm—for it is sacred to us. My grandparents and my mother are buried there. Before leaving, we thanked all the workers, paid them off, and then, holding their hands, we bowed our heads and together we prayed. These guys had been with us for years. They were all sobbing as we said our goodbyes. We were crying too. Then we sat in our car and drove out of the gate—without looking back.”

Clearly distraught, he reached for the beer, taking a long swig. He wanted to break the empty bottle - but checked himself.

A Continent of Paradoxes

The two conversations I had in Zimbabwe could hardly have been more different. For the immigration officer, the departure of the white farmers was the fulfilment of a historical promise—the return of land stolen from her ancestors. For the farmer sitting opposite me, the loss of that same land represented the destruction of three generations of work, memories and livelihoods.

Both stories contained truth.

And yet there was another truth visible from the road: fields do not care about history. They either produce or they do not.

Land requires capital, machinery, irrigation, seeds, fertiliser, knowledge, markets and security of tenure. Remove enough of these ingredients and even the most fertile soil can become a field of weeds. That was perhaps the most disturbing sight of Zimbabwe. Not the poverty. Not the empty petrol stations. Not even the abandoned machinery. It was the sight of good agricultural land lying idle in a country that was importing food.

Zimbabwe was not short of land. It was short of productive agriculture. And that distinction stayed with me in later years as I travelled the length and breadth of 38 African countries. 

For if Africa possesses enormous quantities of potentially productive land, while millions of Africans remain poor and food imports continue to rise, perhaps the continent's agricultural problem is not simply one of land ownership. Perhaps it is also a problem of capital, technology, management and enterprise.

And that raises an intriguing question for India.

What if some of Africa's agricultural potential could be unlocked not by outsiders buying African land, but through long-term partnerships in which African countries retain ownership while Indian agricultural entrepreneurs bring capital, technology and expertise?

And that is where the story of India and African agriculture really begins.

(The author is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and Explorers Club USA, and Editor of ‘Indian Mountaineer’. He is also the founder of Bharatiya Yuva Shakti, an organisation that ensures good leadership at the village level. He tweets @AkhilBakshi1. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)