In the Western imagination Africa now stands for the antithesis of our own modern economy: its authenticity contrasting with our own contrivance. More specifically, the dominant image of Africa is that of the peasant farmer. In contrast to the large, commercial organization in which most of us find employment, the African peasant is self-employed. In contrast to the global market into which we find ourselves integrated, the African peasant produces for subsistence. In place of our restless mobility characterized by frequent changes of job and home, the African peasant is rooted to the ancestral soil. In contrast to our industrialized destruction of the global environment, the African peasant preserves as custodian the natural world. In contrast to our atomistic isolation, the African peasant is bound to a local community by ties of kinship and reciprocity.

As the global crisis has made starkly apparent, the deficiencies of our own economy, so these contrary qualities of the African peasant economy look increasingly appealing. Indeed, the counter-culture in our own society: the new emphasis upon the consumption of local produce, on organic food, and on farmers’ markets, is a pallid version of a lifestyle of which that of the African peasant is the hallmark.

This is not how I see rural Africa: I see not a paradise but a prison. Peasant agriculture offers only a narrow range of economic activities with little scope for sustaining decent livelihoods. In other societies people have escaped poverty by moving out of agriculture. The same is true in Africa: young people want to leave the land; educated people want to work in the cities. Above all, people want jobs: peasants are unavoidably thrust into the role of risk-taking entrepreneurship, a role for which most people are unsuited. Globally, where people have the choice between the defined structure and safety of wage employment and the open-ended responsibilities of the entrepreneur, overwhelmingly they choose wage employment. Entrepreneurs are important, but in a well-functioning economy they are a small minority. The reality of peasant life is one of drudgery, precarious insecurity, and frustration of talent. Millions of young Africans live out the reality of the most apt epitaph on rural life, Grey’s Elegy: “many a flower is born to bloom unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air.” Free to choose, they would abandon the peasant lifestyle. People remain peasants not out of preference for a lifestyle but because in Africa the normal process of economic development by which industry creates productive urban wage employment, has yet to start: their choice is between scratching an inadequate living as a peasant farmer, or the squalor of urban marginality.

Of course, concerned individuals around the world recognize that African peasants are desperately poor, not just in terms of income, but also in health and education. Yet our remedies for the overwhelming poverty of African peasant farmers are palliative not structural. We seek to raise farm incomes by increasing crop yields, to improve health standards through rural clinics, and to improve education through village schools. Our aim is to reconcile peasant farming with greater prosperity. I am not hostile to these efforts: we should do whatever we can to ameliorate the conditions under which African peasants struggle to lead satisfying lives. But we should recognize these approaches for what they are: they are highly unlikely to be transformative. We know what brings about a transformation of opportunities and it is not this.

The Perils of Peasantry

The poverty of African peasants is not accidental: it is intrinsic to the peasant mode of economic organization. The very features that make the peasant mode of production appear attractive to jaded members of an industrialized society also make it unproductive. Large scale organization of specialized production, and integration into markets, are fundamental to the generation of income at a level that we now regard as necessary for a decent quality of life. We have been blinded to this evident fact by our own romantic attachment to the preservation of a society which is the antithesis of the modern.

The preservation of the peasant mode of organization has always been incompatible with economic development, but in Africa the issue is even starker than in other developing regions. Africa has the fastest population growth rate in the world, so that if the extra workforce is to be employed in peasant agriculture the average size of plot will continue to decline. Paradoxically, it is in Asia rather than Africa that peasant life may become viable because there the urban economy is now generating sufficient jobs for the rural population to be declining. This permits the average size of plot to increase, enabling peasant living standards to rise. The failure of Africa’s urban economy and the consequent continued rise in rural populations will tend to reduce labour productivity and so African agriculture will continue to struggle simply to hold rural incomes constant, let alone for them to rise in line with incomes elsewhere in the developing world.

Not only will peasant agriculture be stressed by rising population, it will be stressed by a deteriorating climate. Global warming is already adversely affecting African agriculture: in the large semi-arid areas of the continent average temperatures are rising and average rainfall is declining so that cultivation will become more difficult. Around this gradual long-term trend, climatic variation is becoming more pronounced. Crop yields can be severely reduced by brief episodes of flooding, drought, and intense heat. As a result of climate change it is, for example, possible that in Southern Africa the staple crop of maize may become unviable. This deterioration contrasts with climatic change in the Northern Hemisphere where most agricultural production is already concentrated. As temperatures rise, huge territories of Canada and Central Asia will become better-suited to agriculture. As a consequence, Africa will become both absolutely and relatively less suited to agriculture.

The Promise of GMOs

African agriculture needs to adapt in order to become more productive and for this it needs new technologies and new modes of organization. To cope with climate change new crop varieties need to be developed. This will not happen within peasant agriculture: the sector is chronically ill-suited to innovation. New varieties require the antithesis of the peasant economy: they need big science. Indeed, to the horror of European environmentalists, they need genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Genetically modified crops were promptly banned in Europe in 1996: the powerful lobby for agricultural protectionism astutely whipped up a combination of anti-Americanism (the research was done by US corporations) and health scares, portraying GMOs as “Frankenfoods.” Despite five decades of independence, Africa is still intellectually in thrall to Europe, and so virtually all African governments also banned GMOs. Because GMOs have been banned in Africa, there has been very little genetic modification (GM) research on the crops that are Africa-specific. As with much research, the lead time to the development of viable crops is long, around fifteen years. Ironically, the resulting lack of appropriate GM crops is used as an argument against the introduction of GM. Africa needs all the assistance with crop adaptation that it can muster. GM is not a panacea, but it offers the prospect of developing varieties that can not only cope with climate change but are resistant to the fungi and pests that currently destroy so much of harvested crops in storage. Any non-governmental organizational (NGO) movement that was truly supportive of African opportunities would be pro-GM. The widespread opposition of the Northern development NGOs to GM reflects their real priorities: Africa is to be preserved, not developed.