The document discusses how smallholder farms in Africa can help feed the continent sustainably. It argues that high-tech, mechanized farming is capital intensive and provides few jobs, whereas small farms can employ many unemployed people but cannot compete globally on their own. The solution proposed is for small farms to work together in marketing cooperatives. Smallholder farms utilize land and labor more efficiently than large plantations. They are also more flexible, environmentally sustainable, and socially beneficial. The document concludes that small farm cooperatives can achieve price advantages, build local economies, create exports, and result in economic and social stability.

1. Practical Triple Bottom Line Development
Part 3

2. Feeding Africa sustainably
depends on …
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3. …small farmers
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4. For the last 50 years African rural economic
development has been stagnant.
Development agencies are trying to help
Africa feed itself by introducing “modern
agriculture”
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5. High tech mechanized farming is capital intensive, with
high productivity and a low labor component
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6. But Africa has little capital and millions of unemployed people
eager to work
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7. Small farms are capable of employing a great sum of
people but subsistence farmers in Africa cannot
compete in the global market
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8. GSR’s solution is small farms working together as
marketing cooperatives
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9. Small farm holders more productively utilize the land
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10. and use more marginal land productively, when
compared with large scale plantation
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11. smallholders understand the long-term importance of their
land as a productive asset, they tend to treat the land
better from an environmental management
standpoint
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12. This sustainability is enhanced by biodiversity—most
smallholders raise many plant species, often ones in
complementary relationships
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13. The small farm holder model is far more socially coherent and
provide more mutual assistance and “sense of community”
than plantation worker model—that is, more family values and
village solidarity, whereas plantations are plagued with
prostitution, substance abuse, STDs and many other social ills
derived from rapid displacement from traditional village life
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14. Because of their small size and high crop diversity, smallholders
are more flexible producers, able to “turn on a dime” by quickly
adapting to changing crops as the market shifts in terms of
demand; by contrast large scale farms are tied to technologies
of scale that are not flexible, like expensive machinery
dedicated to a single crop—this in turn means small farm
holders are less often caught in the situation of crops becoming
too cheap to harvest.
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15. Small farm cooperatives actually enjoy a
significant price advantage over mechanized
plantations
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16. GSR cooperatives stress building
local economies. Only surpluses
are exported.
This results in social stability,
phenomenal local economic growth
and massive surpluses for export.
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17. ©2009 Green Self Reliance 17

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