Irrigation: Our (white) Saviour(s)?

 

 

According to McKinsey & Co., the agricultural industry in ‘sub-Saharan Africa’ accounts for 23% of its GDP and employs 60% of its population.  You et al. (2010) explain that unlike other regions in the world, 94% of food production in Africa depends on rainfed agriculture, leaving the region especially vulnerable to drought induced famine.  Touma et al. (2015) found that the climate change will increase the occurrence, duration and extent of drought in subtropical and tropical regions.  Therefore, as the majority of the African continent is located within the subtropics and tropics, the majority of the continent is at increased risk of drought and famine as a result of climate change.  This has created a push for a ‘New Green Revolution’ in Africa from many non-governmental developmental organisations, such as the World Bank. 

Irrigation is an agricultural practice that involves the artificial application of water onto cultivated land, thus removing the dependence on in-situ rainfall, improving the consistency and predictability of agricultural output.  You et al. claim that if irrigation is utilised to its full potential throughout Africa, agricultural productivity across the continent could be increased by at least 50%, through reduced reliance on increasingly unpredictable rains.  Therefore, it is unsurprising that a key ingredient of the proposed ‘New Green Revolution’ is the expansion of irrigated agriculture.

However, despite a multitude of irrigation techniques, Harrison (2018) claims that advocates for the expansion of irrigated agriculture in Africa primarily focus on the implementation of ‘modern’, high-tech irrigation schemes.  She goes onto explain how these schemes have been heavily criticised for pushing a neo-colonial agenda, through ‘welfare colonialism’, due to their ‘locking-in’ of power dynamics between Western donors and poor African recipients, whereby African’s are forced to continuously rely on Western financiers for implementation and maintenance of such schemes.  Daña (2007) even goes as far as saying: 

"No different from the colonial projects in Africa, this new revolution is created and most ardently advocated by white men claiming to fight for the emancipation of Africans from the clutches of hunger and poverty.”, 

as she recognises that the Western-led ‘Green Revolution’ in Asia – often seen as the blueprint for the ‘New Green Revolution in Africa – was as much to do with the fight against communism during the Cold War, as it was to do about concern for Asian well-being.  However extreme the criticisms of the advocates pushing for the ‘modernisation’ of African agriculture, there are some undeniable parallels between the proposed ‘New Green Revolution’, Western colonisation of Africa and the contemporary ‘white saviour complex’ – neo-colonialism manifest through philanthropic acts (succinctly explained here).

Officials working on the Shire Valley Transformation Project in 2020 from The Times, Malawi 

Not only are these schemes embedded within colonial and post-colonial contexts, but they are often known to fail, as Harrison explains.  She describes the repeated failings of the Shire Valley Project, Malawi – an irrigation scheme originally proposed by British colonial powers in the 1940s.  These initial failings were due to farmer resistance to colonial-enforced irrigation practices – often viewed as rigid and restrictive by local farmers – as well as the cost of the project, where plans were scrapped before construction began.  More recently, in 2017 the World Bank revitalised plans for the development of a large-scale, ‘modernised’ public-private partnership irrigation scheme in Shire Valley to alleviate poverty in Malawi, leading to amendments to Malawian law, supporting the private sector in irrigation projects within the country.  However, in the case of the new Shire Valley Transformation Project, the private sector refused to invest as the proposed crops – staple crops to feed Malawians – would not generate enough revenue to warrant investment, leaving the Malawian Government to fend for itself.  Most recently, the project has had been disrupted by COVID-19, another factor complicating development around the world.  Here, a failed irrigation project proposed by colonial powers has been revitalised by non-governmental development organisations (whose headquarters are in Washington D.C. - arguably the capital of the modern West), which has subsequently failed due to a lack of Western financial support for the cultivation of crops that would benefit local people, leaving Malawi in no better position than it would have been without Western intervention. Harrison says that this process of failure has been repeated throughout sub-Saharan Africa.  Nonetheless, these schemes remain central to the ‘New Green Revolution’ in Africa – but what are the alternatives?

I will be discussing some of the alternatives to industrial irrigation next week.