Page 42 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 16

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How will climate change impact African agriculture?

Climate models are still not able to provide a detailed picture of the impacts that climate change will have on
African agriculture. The latest science does, however, concur that rising temperatures, erratic weather, changes
to rainfall patterns and an increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events will negatively impact
food production across most of the continent. Scientists also agree that African food production is particularly
at risk because of the dominance of rain-fed farming and pastoral livestock systems, which are highly vulner-
able to the rainfall variability and heat waves generated by climate change. They predict that climate change
will cause shorter growing seasons, reduced soil fertility, new pest and disease pressures, lower crop yields and
animal productivity and a reduction in farming and grazing lands over large parts of Africa. They also agree that
food production will be more frequently and adversely affected by extreme weather events.

Such impacts are already in evidence with this year’s floods and cyclones in Malawi, Mozambique and Zimba-
bwe or the drought that began in Somalia and Somaliland in June this year.[1] As noted by La Via Campesina
Southern and Eastern Africa: “While the discussion on climate change at the global level often revolves around
predictions on future consequences and the perceived threat of increasing migration, the effects are already very
much a present lived experience of Africa’s peasants, rural women, landless peoples and indigenous communi-
ties, who feel the impacts of climate change everyday.”

Climate, food and the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA)

The central and guiding priority of the AfCFTA is to create a single, completely liberalised market for goods
and services across Africa.[1] The text of the agreement, which was formally adopted in March 2018, commits
all member countries to a rapid, deep and comprehensive liberalisation process, with only a small window avail-
able for countries to exclude sensitive items or to delay their tariff liberalisation.
No special treatment is provided for agricultural products and foods, despite the critical importance of the food
and agricultural sector to Africa. No mention is made of climate change either, despite the enormous impacts
this will have on Africa over the coming decades. Rather, AfCFTA severely constrains the trade measures and
domestic programmes that governments can implement to protect their local food systems and to take action
against climate change. On the other hand, the AfCFTA contains a specific article that sanctifies “Special Eco-
nomic Arrangements/Zones”, in which corporations are freed from tax obligations and other national laws and
regulations (land laws, labour laws, etc.).

Further advantages for agribusiness will be on the table in Phase II of the negotiations, when a chapter on
intellectual property rights will be negotiated that will cover seeds. The tendency in neoliberal trade agreements
is to harmonise “upwards” toward international standards on patents and plant breeders’ rights that criminalise
farmers for saving seeds and that do not allow for diversity and alternatives (which, like small farmer support
programmes, require aggressive domestic agendas). In the planned second phase of negotiations, therefore, Af-
CFTA will likely bring forward some form of obligation on governments to implement strict patent and plant
breeders’ rights legislation on seeds, along the lines of UPOV.

AfCFTA’s emphasis on liberalisation and corporate privileges undermines and pre-empts domestic policies and
programmes that could strengthen the small-scale food producers and informal traders and street food sellers
who are currently the main actors in African food systems. It will inevitably concentrate more power within the
formal agribusiness and food sector-- which is dominated by foreign corporations and a handful of national
and multinational African companies. This is already happening under the existing trade frameworks and it will
get worse through increased liberalisation under AfCFTA, not better. As is simply stated by Dr Ndongo Samba
Sylla of the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation in Senegal: “Agriculture is generally not a sector that should be liber-
alised.”

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