Benefits of African Agriculture
100% Who Benefits Much of African Agriculture? Benefits of African Agri-business. Agriculture is life. Agriculture defines the life of a human person. Almost everything that a human person eats comes from agri-business. It is land indeed that produces what a human person needs to feed his body everyday. Agri-business is life and much more. We really need agri to bring about development. The manufacturing sector depends on agri-business to process and produce what it does best.
Importance of agriculture
In gorural, we know and understand that agri-business offers the highest number of employment opportunities to people in the continent of Africa, and more especially in the rural areas where you have most of the population living, even though, there is evidence of shift rural – urban migration. However, it is sad that the type of agriculture in most African countries with the exception of only a few countries such as South Africa is only subsistence done for survival. The African agriculture is practiced by people with very little skills, or those with skills without capital.
Thus, most people carry out agricultural activities mainly to satisfy their food needs; it is alright for people to meet their food needs, but they need to go steps further. Africa should mechanize its agriculture and see the rural people gets well paid by his work. Let the rural produce be processed in Africa itself, we can sell outside Africa only as excess.
Agriculture and Industries
Moreover, Gorural believes as well that agriculture even if it is done at a highly mechanized level, if it is done for selling to other nations, it will not be able to help develop the developing economies. Underdeveloped economies need to establish a link between agriculture and the manufacturing sector.
The food and cash crops produced in the countries should be processed and even packed for both consumption and export. As countries in the continent want to mechanize their agri-business, which is a good thing to do, let them as well think seriously of investing in agri-business which will be directed to work as a feeder sector; it will feed our food needs, but also feed our industries with raw materials to realize the idea of mechanized industries.
Cash crop processing
African countries should stop exporting their cash crops while still in the raw state to developed countries. They lose a lot of products that could be obtained in the course of processing the raw materials. Exporting raw materials, raw crops as they are such as cashew nuts, cotton, coffee, tobacco, and others. Continuing with this practice is indeed losing alot of other by products from those raw produce.
In fact what African states are doing today is no better than it was done during colonialism. During colonialism, raw cash crops and other materials were transported to Europe and other developed destinations for processing before coming back home as processed goods of high values. Transporting raw material to Europe is the same thing as sending job opportunities to the developed world. The continent send job opportunities that Africa itself needs so badly.
Conclusion
In the course of processing the raw material bought from Africa alot of other products are obtained from the same. We can take crude oil as an example that we can learn from it; there are several by products produced from one item that we sold as raw material. Selling raw materials to developed economies is in other words the creation of employment opportunities to European countries. If that thinking is known by the continent’s leaders and yet they continue with the same practice, then one wonders if our agriculture is still tied up by colonial thinking?
