Can technology disrupt subsistence farmer?

Mercy Corps, a giant global humanitarian organisation with offices in Kenya, is on a mission. They are betting on technology to disrupt subsistence farming in Africa.

Their key theme of this year's Annual Learning Event that was held at the Radisson Blu hotel on December 3 was “Driving Active Use in a Digital World.”

They argue that with the advancements of ubiquitous computing power, connectivity, and the advancement of analytical technologies, it is possible to deliver tailored products to a wide range of customers. The difficult question is how to deliver these solutions to the farmer. By their own admission, “appropriate solutions tailored for smallholder farmers have yet to concretely emerge.”

They hoped the conference could come up with concrete suggestions. However, conferences rarely come up with tangible proposals due to their diversity in opinion. A small, specialised team could leverage conference outcomes and develop specific interventions.

They are, however, not alone in thinking that emerging Fourth Industrial Revolution 4IR technologies would drive the African farmer towards food security.

There is overwhelming evidence that technologies such as advance data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning have a positive effect on farm productivity. Productivity aside, whatever the farmer is doing has to make economic sense. They have to meet all the costs as it relates to revenue. In other words, the farmer has to break even.

Several studies however estimate that the land under which smallholder farmers grow crops or raise livestock is often less than two hectares.

Per capita usable land size in many counties, such as Kisii, Vihiga, Muranga, Meru and many others is less than .25 hectares that no matter what technology is employed, these farmers won't benefit from their land.Smallholder farmers want to satisfy their immediate food requirement as well as meet other economic needs from the surplus.

Even at times when they have surplus, they often have problems with the market. Other problems relate to poor quality production as a result of lacking the necessary inputs and general lack of knowledge. That is why many non-profit organizations started to build capacity and finance the farmers.

These experiments have not produced the desired outcomes. The smallholder farmer still faces the same problems. It is perhaps time to rethink new strategies that incorporate the emerging technologies.

For a start, there is rich knowledge that Africa can learn from India, which had a food crisis in the 1960s. The problem then was that 80 percent of the farmers were smallholder farmers with land size of less than 1.4 hectares. Indeed, 60 percent of them owned less than .35 hectares.

With land reforms that included a movement whose motto was “land should belong to tillers” and extensive use of technology, the changes led to what is referred to as “The Green Revolution” in Asia, which succeeded in producing enough food. Closer to home, Rwanda has increased productivity through land use consolidation.

Therefore, parallel to digital farming, we should be dealing with strategies for land use consolidation to complement technology if we have to effectively emancipate the African farmer. Other considerations include: land policy interventions with respect to halting excessive land sub-divisions, sanctity of the title, strengthening of rural security, taxation of speculative land ownership, re-instatement of agricultural extension services leaning towards digital farming, human resource capacity development especially in data analytics, begin to encourage urbanization in order to free up land for food security and streamlining of supply chains to limit farmer losses as a result of lack of markets.

It is possible to use technology to disrupt the smallholder farmer in Africa but we must reform land use in Africa, stop speculative land acquisitions and build capacity both to farmers and cadres around the emerging technology.

There is also need for policy makers to encourage ownership of land in a digital format.