Veg. Growing

Here’s a good news story, which blows the cover which Congolese seem to have cultivated of being feckless, ignorant and lazy, because (one suspects) that’s how they get more foreign aid. The fact is that there’s a love of growing things and a love of order which is completely different from what I have seen in Zambia, South Africa and Kenya.

The problem here is not will or skill but getting inputs (seed, fertiliser and pesticides), and markets. Poverty, bad roads, a lack of commercial infrastructure make food growing a difficult exercise which is made even worse in many parts of the country by bandits who rape the women and steal the crops.

Partly because life in the rural areas is so hard, the towns are growing day by day. Kinshasa, in particular, is now over 8 million, and is the third largest city in Africa.

So what do the newly-urbanised peasants do? They grow vegetables. For someone used to the sad efforts at food growing on the outskirts of cities like Johannesburg (a scattering of weakling maize plants) or Accra, (small clusters of peanut beds) what you see near Kinshasa is totally different. There’s an area we drive through quite regularly near a good strong river. On the small hills alongside this valley are tier upon tier of vegetable beds, each the same neat rectangle in size, just narrow enough to allow weeding. (That’s right, the same type of raised beds that the hapless missionary in the Poisonwood Bible decried as being ridiculous). On these beds are carrots, onions, spinach, radishes, cabbages, peppers, aubergines, tomatoes in various stages of growth. Clearly, they have access to irrigation and there has been some technical assistance in getting the scheme going. But the products are truly a delight, and are on sale along the road below the farm.

Recently I came across a report about an urban agriculture project, which is truly a success story. It showed that given an opportunity, and protected from harassment, people in the Congo can be very productive. Farmers who previously were scraping by with incomes of $500 a month are now getting between $2500 and $3500 a month. Some of the vegetables sell for $4 a kilo. The nutritional status of the families of these urban farmers has improved due to the consumption of vegetables, but they only consume ten percent of their production. The project in question cost the Belgian taxpayer about $2 million a year over five years, but produces 330,000 tons of vegetables annually, with a value of about $400 million. A total of 16,000 people are farming, and a further 60,000 are gaining from the project through linked activities.

Nature has been kind in some ways. The land around Kinshasa and Lubumbashi is relatively flat and the fact that it rains during ten months of the year helps enormously.

But this doesn’t explain this success which was to transpose the basic agricultural skills that rural people enjoy into an environment where they can use them productively. It has added to those skills by giving them a more sophisticated understanding of soils, fertilisers, crop rotation and marketing. And the result? BINGO!

If only we could do something similar in democracy and governance.