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Will Rwanda’s big food play hit or miss?
Tanzania’s President Samia Suluhu Hassan and Rwandan President Paul Kagame . The two leaders met in Dar es Salaam on April 27, 2023 where they discussed ways of expanding trade between the two countries. PHOTO | STATE HOUSE
Who goes to bed with a full stomach, and who is condemned to go hungry in Africa? How does Africa, the continent with most of the world’s arable land, end its dangerous food-import dependency? How does a country fed by peasants get into the big-league agro-business? When is farming about crops and cows, and when is it a social and cultural process? And what can African nations teach one another about how to be well-fed?
In the first stab at some of these issues, “Food lesson from East African neighbours” (Daily Nation, February 23, 2023), we looked at social farming and collective irrigation in Rwanda. At how the “small” men and women in Nasho, in the country’s eastern region, are going to the “next level” (to use the cliché) to produce for a growing population and climate-challenged times.
However, several hundred kilometres away, off the highway to the Rwanda-Uganda border town of Kagitumba, there is a very different take on the business of food. Here, an extremely ambitious agribusiness and irrigation project in Gabiro, looking to create modern-age-rich farmers, takes a very different approach. Whether it succeeds or fails, both will be consequential for Africa—either as something worthy of imitation or a tale of what to avoid.
In 2019, the Rwandan government and Netafim, an Israeli manufacturer of irrigation equipment, partnered to establish the Gabiro Agribusiness Hub Project (GAHP). The goal is to create a vast modern commercial agricultural mini-universe over 15,600 hectares (38, 548 acres) of land—in the first phase. This phase is budgeted to cost $49 million (Sh6.8 billion), most of it for bulk water supply. On the optimistic end, GAHP expects to raise land utilisation to 93 per cent and reduce water use by 40 per cent. The project aims to offer 60 per cent of its produce for local consumption and export 40 per cent of primarily agricultural value-added products.
Workers were sweating on Saturday afternoon on a gigantic plant that will tap water from the Akagera River. Across the river, barely 200 metres away, is Tanzania’s Akagera National Park, its hillsides scorched by bushfire. The workers are chasing a late September 2023 deadline for completing the plant. It’s being built to disperse 40,000 cubic metres of water per hour. When the first phase fires up, it will provide 14,000 cubic metres of water per hour.
Water plant
The water plant is the last part of the project. One of the most striking features is the 21-kilometre-long cement canal, which has already been completed, with a dirt road built alongside it. Six pumps and terminals along the canals that will distribute water to the farms have also been completed. On top of a hill near the plant, fed by temporary pumps, the 120,000 water storage that feeds the canal is half-filled. The water is being used down the canals for stress tests.
Africa is a graveyard of big irrigation projects. Since the early 1900s, more than 100 have been launched but only a handful operate at full capacity. Rwanda seems to have taken the view that part of the success formula is social and political. It chose the usual path to the messy issue of compensation for the farming families, mostly cattle keepers, who have been displaced by the project. The minimum farm size allowed is 200 hectares. The farmers who could grow their holdings to 200 hectares are enabled to stay.
The state then leased (not bought out) the land of those who couldn’t afford it. They will earn lease income over the years with the money obtained from the fees paid by the investors. The farmers have also been given free homes. Two of the bigger settlements have 30 blocks, each with four houses (mostly three-bedroomed). In Akayange estate, the streetlights were being installed, the walkways were already paved and the drives were about to be tarmacked. The farmers will also get free cowsheds built for them nearby.
Besides, the farmers will get back 30 per cent of the value of their land—the goal being to provide them with start-up funds to pool into a cooperative, allowing them to establish 200-hectare farms.
What could go wrong? Jacques Nsengiyumva, an enthusiastic nerdy Rwandan engineer who is the technical adviser to the project, brims with confidence talking about its prospects. A demonstration near the plant teaches farmers how to farm and raise cattle scientifically. Nearly 1,000 have been through there in the eight months that it has been operational.
There was a call in the media for Rwandans to come together and take up allotments, and 11 foreign investors have already snapped up farms. A new tarmac road will soon be built for the farmers to evacuate their produce on. A typical engineer who is clearly in love with the canal that snakes its way through the landscape, Mr Nsengiyumva doesn’t see big bumps ahead. If he’s right, Gabiro could soon be the site of one of Africa’s most significant agricultural pilgrimages.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. @cobbo3
