Africa’s Farmers Deserve Policies That Work – Not Experiments

By Juwon Akin-Olotu

In 1973, Tanzania’s cashew farmers produced 145,000 tonnes. By 1984, that number had collapsed to just 18,000. There was no drought, no pest, no war. There was only a government policy with a beautiful name.

Ujamaa – meaning “fraternity” in Swahili – was the brainchild of President Julius Nyerere, a man of genuine moral conviction. He wanted equity, dignity, and community for his people. So he did what well-meaning leaders so often do: he designed a solution from the top, skipped the pilot, and imposed it on 13 million farmers almost overnight.

The plan was elegant on paper. Relocate rural families into centrally organized villages. Farm together. Share the output. The state would provide the rest. What actually unfolded was something else entirely.

Farmers were uprooted from land they had worked for generations – land they had chosen precisely because they understood its soil composition, its water table, its microclimate. They were resettled onto standardized plots that bore no relationship to ecological reality.

On collective farms, the link between effort and reward was severed. When output is shared equally regardless of individual contribution, the incentive to work harder dissolves.

Productivity cratered. The state promised schools, clinics, and agricultural inputs in exchange for compliance. It failed to deliver most of them.

Tanzania – a country with over 40 million hectares of arable land – became a food importer. Before leaving office in 1985, Nyerere offered one of the most candid self-assessments in African political history: “I failed. Let’s admit it.”

The Famine That Didn’t Have to Happen

In 1984, roughly one million Ethiopians starved to death. There was no invasion. There was no biblical plague. There was a government that was absolutely certain it knew better than its farmers.

A decade earlier, the Derg military junta had seized power in Addis Ababa and declared Ethiopia a Marxist state. Then it went to work dismantling the agricultural foundations of the country.

Rural land was nationalized overnight. Farmers who had worked, inherited, and invested in their plots for generations lost every legal claim to them in a single decree.

Individual holdings were merged into collective farms modeled on Soviet templates. The state determined what was planted, what was harvested, and at what price grain would change hands.

That price was set at 60 to 70 percent below open-market rates, with farmers compelled to sell fixed quotas at a loss. The rational response was entirely predictable: farmers grew only enough to feed their own families. Why produce a surplus for a government that would confiscate it at below-cost prices?

Then the drought of 1983 arrived.

What is so often overlooked about the Ethiopian famine is that drought was not an unfamiliar visitor. Significant dry spells had struck in 1965 and again in 1973.

They were damaging. They were not this. What transformed a severe drought into a catastrophe that killed nearly a million people was the systematic demolition of the agricultural infrastructure that had preceded it.

There were no grain reserves. There were no functioning markets. There was no surplus. The drought arrived and found a food system with nothing left to give.

The Derg did not set out to engineer a famine. It set out to build African socialism. But it nationalized land without understanding the psychology of tenure. It collectivized farming without understanding incentive structures. It set prices without understanding market behavior. And then the rains stopped.

The Pattern Persists

Here is the uncomfortable question that African policymakers must confront: how many versions of Ujamaa – how many quiet replicas of the Derg’s agricultural system – are being designed in government offices across the continent today?

The branding has changed. The structure has not.

Blanket input subsidies are announced with fanfare, with no last-mile delivery mechanism to ensure they reach smallholder farmers. National crop mandates are applied uniformly across ecologically diverse regions that demand differentiated approaches.

State grain monopolies pay farmers below the cost of production – and then express puzzlement when output stagnates. Agricultural banks exist in legislation but hold no capital. Digital agricultural platforms are launched at press conferences and quietly abandoned within two years.

The pattern is consistent: good intention, grand announcement, no pilot, no feedback loop, irreversible implementation. And the people who bear the cost are never the planners. They are the farmers.

This is not a counsel of despair or an argument against state intervention in agriculture. Markets alone have never been sufficient to drive food security in developing economies.

The case being made here is far narrower and more actionable: test before you scale.

A policy piloted across three local governments before national rollout can save a generation. A policy imposed across an entire country before it has been stress-tested can destroy one.

The evidence for this principle is not theoretical. It is written in the agricultural production data of the 1970s and 1980s, and in the mortality records of 1984.

Farmers as Partners, Not Subjects

Africa does not lack agricultural ideas. The continent’s research institutions, development banks, and government ministries generate policy proposals with impressive regularity. What is in shorter supply is the institutional discipline to test those proposals rigorously before they are scaled – and the political humility to abandon them when evidence suggests they are failing.

The cashew farmers of Tanzania in 1984 deserved a government that would have tried Ujamaa in one region, measured the results honestly, and adjusted course before consigning an entire agricultural sector to collapse. The farmers of Ethiopia deserved leaders who would have asked, before nationalizing every plot of land in the country, what incentive structures sustain agricultural production – and what happens when those structures are removed.

Those farmers had no vote on the systems built around them. They simply lived, and died, inside them.

The farmers across Africa today deserve something better than that inheritance. Africa will feed the world – but only when its governments stop treating farmers as subjects of policy and start engaging them as partners in designing it.

Juwon Akin-Olotu is the founder and CEO of Forthwith Global Limited, an agribusiness and consultancy advancing sustainable farming and modern agricultural solutions across Africa. A recognized voice in the continent’s agricultural sector, he champions technology adoption, human-capital development, and leadership grounded in service. Akin-Olotu is also a frequent speaker and moderator at international forums, where he addresses sustainable agriculture, agri-technology, and entrepreneurial education.