Rwandan farmer Ezechias Rurahinyuza joined thousands of his neighbors in reshaping their steeply sloped fields this summer. Using hand tools, they crafted wide terraces to increase their arable space and create a water management system to slow the relentless erosion of their valuable top soil. Taking a brief break from his labor, Rurahinyuza surveyed the hills—and the future.
He envisioned crops flourishing on the terraces. Rain water would stay on his fields nurturing his seeds and aiding the fertilizer instead of carrying it all down to the bottom of the valley. With even better seeds and fertilizer, he calculated that he may be able to triple or quadruple his harvest of corn and potatoes and expand his grove of passion fruit trees. For once, he said, his harvest may yield enough to both feed his family and earn a decent sum of money from sales at the market.
“That,” he said, “will be wonderful.”
Ezechias’ vision and the hopes of his neighbors are being aided by the commitment of their own government and international leaders to end hunger through agriculture development. Since 2007, Rwanda has been sharply increasing its spending on agriculture, determined to cut its reliance on food aid and to have its own farmers feed the country. In 2009, the leaders of the world’s largest industrial countries pledged $22 billion to support agriculture development in the world’s poorest countries. In 2010, a multi-donor trust fund—the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, or GAFSP—was created to finance larger rural development projects that have been neglected for decades.
Rwanda has emerged as the model country for the global food security initiative—called Feed the Future by the U.S. administration—because it was the first to challenge the international community to make good on its pledges. The donors had said they were interested in country-led agriculture investment strategies, and Rwanda had a plan ready to go, with priorities such as irrigation, soil conservation, local seed research and extension services to advise farmers.
This tiny nation in east-central Africa—known as the “land of 1,000 hills”—was pushing ahead with an ambitious Land Husbandry, Water Harvesting and Hillsides Irrigation project, a $200 million initiative that would initially include more than 40,000 hectares. To begin work earlier this year, Rwanda had committed up to $25 million of its own money and had received $34 million from the World Bank, $14 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development and about $8 million from the Canadians. Another $50 million came in the first allocation of GAFSP funding. When the corn harvest was in, Ezechias and a legion of other farmers went to work terracing their land.
Rwanda illustrates the consequences of the neglect of agriculture development over the past three decades, and the potential for a reversal, which is a goal of Feed the Future. Typical of sub-Saharan Africa, about three-quarters of Rwanda’s population depends on farming for its own food and a bit of income. Agriculture provides one-third of the national income. Yet Rwanda’s rural infrastructure is underdeveloped. Markets are weak, transport is difficult, seed research is scarce, proper post-harvest storage facilities are rare. Hunger has stalked the country.
The government’s recent push to improve its agriculture has yielded early successes. A crop intensification program made fertilizer and higher quality seeds available to the farmers, who have enthusiastically reaped bigger harvests. This year’s corn harvest, for instance, was four times greater than in 2006. In the eastern region of Kirehe, corn production soared to about 40,000 tons from 12,000 just four years ago. Farmers’ surpluses filled the kitchens and bedrooms of their little houses.
This brought Agriculture Minister Agnes Kalibata for a visit. “We need to build warehouses! We need markets!” she said emphatically and urgently. Like her country’s farmers, she too has big dreams. She would like to see the corn harvests continue to grow so that Rwanda can one day soon be an export country. But she worried that a surplus that couldn’t be stored properly (in Africa, one-third of the harvest typically is spoiled by the climate or lost to pests and disease) or absorbed by the markets would undermine farmer enthusiasm. It is an oft-repeated tragedy of Africa: surpluses overwhelm storage and markets, prices collapse below the cost of production, farmers lose incentive.
“How can I tell the farmers to plant more maize?” Minister Kalibata asked. “Unless we sell this, how we can we get them to grow more? We need to keep moving, we need to keep the farmers interested. That’s the challenge of creating food security.”
In this she is gaining international allies: Feed the Future, the GAFSP funding, the World Food Program’s Purchase for Progress program which buys up surpluses from small farmers.
“We want to have partnerships with all those who can help us,” says Evariste Tugurinshuti, the president of one of the farmers’ cooperatives in the Kirehe region.
He and his fellow cooperative members quickly filled out a grant request to tap some of the Feed the Future funding from the United States; the Obama administration pledged $27 million for Rwanda for fiscal year 2010 and has requested more than $50 million for 2011. Among the cooperative’s priorities: five collection centers where farmers can store their harvests; 2,000 plastic sheets on which they can dry the maize and better prepare it for the market; two stitching machines to seal the storage bags and keep out pests and mold.
In response to the application question, “Is there any way to scale up your business,” the cooperative replied: “Since we now are producing surpluses, if we can get the markets our business can grow very fast.”
The name of the cooperative? The Future Will Be Bright.
Roger Thurow is a Senior Fellow on Global Agriculture and Food Policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He is co-author (with Scott Kilman) of Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty. Before joining the Chicago Council in January 2010, he worked for three decades as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, including many years covering Africa.
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