Disrupting Food Systems: Retrospective On Macro and Micro Effects of Hype

The challenge we set ourselves may seem so large that, at times, it is difficult to discern movement.

Confucious says: “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”

In Malawi, the year ends at the beginning of the typical farming calendar. This represents a natural switchover from irrigated crop husbandry to the predominantly rain-fed cycle for the farmers.

It is also a good time to summarise the year and index hope.

The agricultural discourse can be easily scoped as macro and micro-level concerns. The stratification is based on the granularity of available data. The data supports the formal observation that national or macro-level issues arouse fewer social concerns at the local level [1][2][3][4].

Know Thy Data! Data granularity is the level of detail considered in a model or decision-making process. The greater the granularity, the deeper the level of detail.

This top-level summary is based on our participation in the policy and development fora. 

The year-end marks the beginning of a deeper analysis to understand the previous cycle and its impact on the bottom line, setting the strategy for the next activity cycle. The outcomes determine whether or not to scale back production and which crops should follow.

The fundamental goal of producing and collecting data is putting it to use. The data collection exercise aims to make recommendations based on curated and good-quality data.

This article summarizes our learnings and perspectives on the state of the agricultural discourse in 2022. We cast a lens backward through the agricultural ecosystem and hope to chart a course forward. 

Let’s take a risk and provide a conclusion first: 2022 served to reinforce the fact that there is a dire need to educate and improve data collection practices all around to improve the resilience of the food systems. 

However, specifically in our case, the data captured during the previous cycle needs to be more precise. Due to current manual methods, the granularity, quality, and overall data agility could be better. 

Although manual methods are generally tried and trusted, they create a high error rate, increase risk, and fail to provide transformative insights.

The Need And Value Of Data

In general, the agricultural umwelt is created and shaped by the depth of knowledge contributing individuals have, the integrity of the discourse, the precision of farm activities, and the participation in the communities of practice. 

Farmers looking for solutions to a local problem must consult good-quality data sources. Herein lies a knowledge gap! 

{At the risk of putting too much emphasis on one-shot studies} In the 1970s, Tichenor et al. formally proposed the Knowledge Gap Hypothesis based on observations implicit in mass communication research. It predicts that “as the infusion of mass media information into a social system increases, segments of the population with higher socioeconomic status tend to acquire this information at a faster rate than the lower status segments, so that the gap in knowledge between these segments tends to increase rather than decrease.”

Implementors must localize macro policies to the local context and “hopefully” provide valuable feedback to the policymakers.

There is a need to increase the quality and agility of the data. Decision-support data must cover all observable dimensions that other effects cannot summarise. 

The increased data granularity enables fine-grained decisions. 

In our case, we identified several situations where the data was deliberately tampered with to hide untoward behaviors and activities. These deliberate sabotage instances are unfortunate but not uncommon across several initiatives, irrespective of industry.

There is a need to implement immutable ledgers and strengthen the level of monitoring [5]. Trust alone is not enough. There is a need to automatically assert the level of trust one has to invest in the systems. 

In threat analysis, “insider threats” are defined as individuals with malicious intent. The degree of trust one invests capitalizes on believing that the other party will enact its commitments without variation and with goodwill. 

In places where short-term gains are perceived to have higher utility value than long-term rewards, the level of investment, monitoring and management must match the size of the investment and risk appetite.

The Need To Upskill And A Mutually Beneficial Partner Ecosystems

Most of the staff have applied themselves to capacity, despite the few bad actors who act without integrity.  

Control measures must align with the organizational culture and belief systems, which are a function of organizational maturity. 

There is a need for more experience with emerging technologies. 

Sub-Saharan Africa’s emerging agricultural economies need a proactive hand-holding approach to landing Industry 4.0 technologies, including mechanization, blockchain ledgers, and Artificial Intelligence, in the agricultural sector. 

Agricultural technologies are rare, meaning introducing complex technologies risks overwhelming the community. A scaffolded effort is needed to enable the aspiring masses to cross the gap between reality and known solved hurdles. 

Only after that gap is closed can smallholder farmers start to innovate. 

Sub-Saharan Africa needs a technology partner ecosystem that is mutually beneficial and sensitive to the nuances of the environment. 

Trust As A Currency

Grass root partnerships with artisanal farming communities pay dividends when necessary knowledge is transferred and effectively embedded. The incoming party must be willing to integrate and get their fingers dirty alongside the local communities to help create meaningful bonds. 

The rhetoric of Farm to Table must feature the story of the local farmers and not faceless agents. Partnering with local communities allows local farmers to scale their production capacity and extends and diversifies the product range. More importantly, we can establish the provenance of the food on the table and collectively start paying attention to the conditions under which the food is produced.

On the other hand, working collaboratively with local communities allows for measuring the direct impact of macro-level economic changes. 

The large farms provide economic activity anchors, including employment. By continuing to train and provide ongoing support for the out-growers and agribusiness partners to implement innovative solutions, the anchor farms become central to the local economy.

On the macro level, however, there is a blanket prescriptive silver-bullet approach to solving a whole host of nuanced agrarian problems, suggesting that collectively we are mostly guessing.

The Localised Cost Of Unchecked Hype

Unfortunately, the resurged focus on agriculture as a business in Malawi has created a self-perpetuating hype machine. Some mediocre solutions are blown out of proportion attracting uninformed seekers of quick wins, quacks, and woo merchants. 

The lack of shared vetted sources of truth has made it easy for some actors to take advantage of this hype at the expense of local farmers, promoting blatant falsehoods on social media.

The ambition to move organizations towards data fluency necessitates informed and empowered management. 

On the other hand, there is much noise from social media, occasionally resulting in staff and managers abandoning researched strategies midway in favor of the latest uninformed experiments on social media chatter. 

Due to the low levels of education and exposure, most task owners fail to sift fact from fiction, squandering time and production resources. 

The social media experiments are presented as absolutes despite a lack of corroborating evidence or situational adaptation. The net result is that researched strategies are corrupted with guesswork.

The social media detritus has a dangerous direct impact on communities where people are forced to blindly believe because they are not informed enough to evaluate the quality or merit of secondhand information.

The Macro Cost Of Unchecked Hype

The latest buzz in agriculture is growing crops for export, import substitution, and mega-farms. All noble causes and the fact that we are talking about it is good.

However, have you ever seen or experienced one hectare of virgin forest cleared for agriculture? A hectare is 1.2x to 1.6x of a FIFA football (soccer) pitch.

The MWAPATA Institute literature review reports that key informants indicated that a mega-farm should be at least 500 hectares. It must be located in suitable areas of the country, must support mechanized production, and include value addition, irrigation, and other infrastructure.

 Five hundred hectares is 600 to 800 football pitches if we ignore access.

For virgin territory, that is 600 football pitches of deforested (on virgin territory) based on what the paper acknowledges amounts to a hunch and hope of a potential market.

The paper acknowledges that some of the 17 informants would instead define a mega-farm based on productivity, the intensity of use of the farm, and the type of enterprise, not the landholding size. Additionally, those consulted proposed that the establishment of mega-farms should be a gradual process based on the availability of resources and the building of capacity. 

Researchers have shown agriculture to be both a cause and a victim of global warming in many situations.

Continued efforts to clear the forests for agriculture en mass are destroying some of the valuable carbon sinks in many parts of the world. Carbon sinks are forests that absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The large-scale deforestation, coupled with subsequent poor soil management, dwindling soil organic matter, and poor biodiversity, could cause catastrophic harm to any farm but more so when scaled to these mega-farms.

According to a panel of scientists, combined agriculture, deforestation, and other land use, such as harvesting peat and managing grasslands and wetlands, contribute about a third of human greenhouse gas emissions, including more than 40% of methane.

According to the United Nations, “when land is degraded, it impacts food security, water availability and ecosystem health, directly affecting half of humanity, and causing a loss of about US$40 trillion worth of ecosystem services each year — nearly half of the global GDP of $93 trillion in 2021.”

Learning the local environment and being grounded are vital to adapting industry 4.0 technologies to fit the nuances of agribusiness in Malawi and Sub-Saharan Africa. 

Plenty of discussions happen in closed forums, which range from freeform through moderated to personal fiefdoms. One of the topics that peeked a lot of people’s imaginations is the concept of mega-farms. In collaboration with Feed The Future, this is forming a substantial part of several nations’ agendas. 

Are mega-farms the path to efficient, regenerative farming? Yes, but...! 

The way to a sustainable, regenerative approach to mega-farm is a deliberate and carefully crafted one that does not seem to cut through the everyday rhetoric and agendas.

If we plan to use 800 football fields for agricultural purposes, we cannot gross over the fact that the proponents must address several important questions. The most critical ones are, of course, market access and inclusive policies.

There is an urgent requirement for agriscience researchers to uncover sustainable ways to support population growth. Explicit issues include soil degradation, nutrient deficiencies, and rising temperatures.

The policymakers must focus on promoting the methodologies and general know-how to access the commercial markets.

Competing Macro and Micro Imperatives

All things being equal, most families in Malawi have the potential to feed themselves, and there is enough landholding to scale to commercial farming. The issues are not the ability to scale capacity but rather the availability of structured markets for unsubscribed produce. Farmers are discouraged by this lack of structure and the increased risk of exposure.

Agriculture primarily continues to be considered in isolation by policymakers. Without Systems Thinking, agricultural transformation remains a myopic exercise.

Agriculture and the supporting sectors do not exist in a vacuum! How do we reexamine the entire chain and remove inefficiencies and unscrupulous elements? Removing self-saving interests locally and harmful protectionist policies hurting smallholder farmers would be prudent.

From the discussions, it is clear that there is a flawed belief that the issue of scaling agricultural productivity is singularly about building capacity. There often needs to be more transparent and concise commercialization strategies. The proceeds of farm sales rarely make it back into the local on and off-farm economic activities. As agricultural producers, Sub-Sahara Africa primarily exports raw materials and misses out on the rest of the value chain.

The macro in-country economy is a sum of many micro-economies. 

On the other hand, if the story of the local farmer only goes as far as the local aggregator who has no incentive to feed the proceeds back into the local economies, there will always be a disconnect between the producers and the real benefactors.

It is evident that such a disconnected system approach cannot self-sustain. Myopia lies in the fact that if farmers are shielded from market data by agents who not only garner large profits from exploiting growers but also have no incentive to inject that cash to aid production, there will always be disenchanted farmers. 

Do mega-farms introduce an inclusive alternative?

In all contexts, mega-farms cannot be inclusive in a population where most depends on agriculture and has unit landholdings of approximately 2.5 acres. 

Smallholder farmers cannot graduate from 2.5 acres to suddenly being able to cultivate 30 hectares or, in extreme cases, 500 hectares. Even when banded together, the required knowledge base means that the typical Malawian family unit is left behind. Those with the experience are typically unavailable or have a different economic incentive.

Whom are the mega-farms serving, and how does the local economy benefit? If the aim is to feed the world in the future, we need to acknowledge that the world comprises many diverse local communities, including ours. We Are The World! 

We may need to graduate towards the theoretical unsubscribed capacity sustainably. We enable the world to feed itself and co-exist with nature simultaneously. Instead of a 500-hectare mega-farm, how about we solve the logistics problem of coordinating the mechanized production, sustainable irrigation, and access to the infrastructure? 

Instead of chaperoned into believing they are intrinsically incapable, would it not be prudent to empower the communities to meet the demand proactively? With 80% having a career in agriculture, I wonder if single centralized points of failure are the answer. They, too, are the world. Agriculture is not just a hobby.

We need efficient production processes on farms of any size to determine the total capacity of the current landholdings. Until then, a 500-hectare mega-farm will need external consultants or skills build-up on the job. Both would be ridiculously expensive without a clear route to market! 

Suppose we accept that the mega-farms are about feeding the macro population and that the sacrifice the local farmers are making is paid in other ways. In that case, we would need to change the methods for accounting for value and benefit.

Promote smallholder farmers to form powerful cooperatives which may eventually graduate to regenerative mega-farming. Suppose we continue to refrain from genuinely empowering and implementing performance-based tenure for functions responsible for executing macro policies and enabling foreign trade. How can we guarantee the best outcomes?

There Is Hope, And We Are Cautiously Excited

Overall, it is an exciting time to be involved in the food systems in Malawi and Africa in general.

The new market, created under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement, is estimated to be as large as 1.3 billion people across Africa, with a combined gross domestic product (GDP) of $3.4 trillion. According to the World Bank, this could lift 30 million Africans out of extreme poverty. How will that change the dynamics of partnerships?

The AfCFTA is mandated to harmonize trade rules and empower African countries to trade efficiently. There is hope that in implementing this 3 trillion dollar market, data-driven best practices will be at its core. Malawi is an active signatory.

So while progress towards a coordinated whole may appear slow, the direction is positive.

In the words of Pope John XXIII:

“Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do.”

Conflict of Interest: The context of the Disrupting Food System series is primarily a data-driven commentary on first-hand experiences researching, implementing large-scale socio-technical solutions to locally-relevant issues, and venturing into large-scale commercial Regenerative Precision Agriculture, trading, and ethical off-taking in Malawi, Tanzania, and South Africa.

Precision Agriculture integrates Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things (IoT) devices to adjust for many variables affecting yield. On the other hand, regenerative agriculture is a conservation and rehabilitation approach to food and farming systems.