[xyzzyz]

> Smallholder farms across Africa are quite productive if you measure inputs (labor, energy, capital, fertilizer, water, land use) against outputs (calories, nutrition).

This sounds intelligent, but is extremely wrong perspective.

For example, most of these farms are well known to underuse fertilizer. There is no good reason for it, except in some relatively snall amount of cases where extreme poverty doesn’t leave farmers with enough capital to buy fertilizer (even though ROI is ridiculously high). This severe under capitalization is already a reason why we shouldn’t imitate their example. Anyway, all the development agencies run very active program to promote use of fertilizer, with very limited effect.

If you consider insufficient fertilizer use, then yeah, maybe they get good yields in the context. But that’s like saying “sure I got very meager crop because I didn’t water my crops in the drought even though I could, but if you consider my inputs (very little water and energy spent on watering), I actually did pretty well”, which is ridiculous: we shouldn’t imitate that.

> They are certainly comparable with industrialized agriculture (large-scale monoculture)

No. Their yields are horrible, and in no way comparable to modern industrialized agriculture.

> And for the last 150 years or so no "starvation" anywhere in the world has been due to a lack of calories that could have reasonably been made available for the people starving.

This is true if you define “starvation” as “literal famine involving mass death”, but if you are trying to say that there has been no severe, persistent, widespread malnutrition due to insufficient caloric intake, then you are extremely wrong. Up until last couple of decades, overwhelming majority of Africans have been seriously malnourished, and this was caused by the inefficiency of their agricultural sector. It was only alleviated (and only in some places) by modern, western style development.

[navane]

Seeing like a state (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State) is quite a famous book that has a whole chapter on this, and it does argue that the small holders of Africa have a lot to teach to us. Many have tried western style agriculture in Africa, and many have failed.

[tfourb]

Nowhere did I say that we should just transplant African smallholder farms and their underlying (and often deficient) systems worldwide. That would obviously be stupid. Just as stupid as arguing that there is nothing to learn from people who have mostly succeeded (because most of them are still alive and their populations are growing) feeding themselves from their own land despite having the worst starting position imaginable.

> For example, most of these farms are well known to underuse fertilizer. There is no good reason for it, except in some relatively snall amount of cases where extreme poverty doesn’t leave farmers with enough capital to buy fertilizer (even though ROI is ridiculously high).

Capital constraints are an extremely common problem for African farmers, not "a small amount of cases". It could easily be remedied with the right support. Or simply by regulating international trade in a way that does not allow excessive subsidies in the E.U., U.S. and elsewhere completely destroy the local market for agricultural products on the continent.

At the same time, fertilizer overuse is extremely well documented in "modern agriculture" across the world. It has extremely bad externalities, from CO2 emissions to over saturating local water reserves, which of course Big Ag usually does not have to pick up the tap for.

If you internalize the costs of fertilizer use, "modern" agriculture quickly becomes uncompetitive. You can see this in many European countries (i.e. Netherlands, Ireland), where the enforcement of nitrate regulations has basically put whole sectors of the agricultural industry out of business.

> But that’s like saying “sure I got very meager crop because I didn’t water my crops in the drought even though I could, but if you consider my inputs (very little water and energy spent on watering), I actually did pretty well”, which is ridiculous: we shouldn’t imitate that.

No, but we should learn from it what we can. Especially with climate change rapidly leading to less availability of water and restrictions on using fertilizers.

> Up until last couple of decades, overwhelming majority of Africans have been seriously malnourished, and this was caused by the inefficiency of their agricultural sector.

Again: both the calories and the nutrition to adequately feed the entire population of the world is easily available, including in most cases locally or regionally. If it doesn't reach specific people, it is not an availability problem, but a distribution problem.

Most emergency aid organizations have long since started sourcing both calories and nutrition for disaster relief regionally because they can.

Is Africa's agricultural sector terribly inefficient? Yes, of course. Is there nothing to learn from African smallholders? Hell no!. Will "modern agriculture" have to change radically, including by incorporating lessons and practices from smallholders from around the world if we want agriculture to stop messing up the climate and literally killing the lion's share of natural diversity? You bet!