Why Africa’s agricultural crisis is a matter of race, class and epistemicide

Across Africa, modern industrial agriculture is celebrated as a triumph of scientific efficiency, technological progress, and global economic integration.

We are urged to embrace high-tech solutions – from satellite-guided tractors and autonomous drones to artificial intelligence and proprietary hybrid seeds – as the only path toward feeding a growing continent. Yet beneath this narrative of technological modernisation lies an unsettling reality: the systematic erasure of African agricultural history, the devaluation of indigenous knowledge, and the entrenchment of a racist, class-based agrarian structure that harms both human populations and the ecosystems that sustain them.   

Africa’s ongoing agricultural crisis is not simply a technical failure of yield optimisation or distribution. It is the living legacy of a capitalist-colonial-industrial system that treats soil as a commodity to be exploited rather than an ecosystem to be stewarded. Restoring Africa’s agricultural sovereignty requires confronting the structural inequalities of race and class that govern our land, dismantling the ongoing epistemicide of local ecological knowledge, and transitioning from extractive agriculture back to indigenous landculture.   

Erasure of African agrarian history and epistemicide

A foundational myth of European colonialism is that Africa lacked agricultural innovation prior to Western contact. Colonial and imperial discourses constructed a hierarchy in which non-white, non-Christian peasant knowledge was rendered invisible or dismissed as primitive folklore. Where sophisticated indigenous practices were acknowledged, they were frequently appropriated by Western institutions and rebranded as modern discoveries.   

This deliberate destruction, silencing and devaluation of indigenous knowledge systems – a process known as epistemicide – continues today. History tells a very different story about African agrarian capability:   

The Terraces of Bokoni: On the Mpumalanga escarpment in pre-colonial South Africa, the Bokoni civilization constructed massive, stone-walled terraced settlements between the 1500s and 1820s. Operating complex mixed farming systems of livestock, sorghum, and millet. Bokoni represents one of the most sophisticated historical examples of landscape urbanism and ecological engineering on the continent.   

Amílcar Cabral’s soil agronomy: While remembered primarily as an anti-colonial revolutionary, Cabo Verde’s Amílcar Cabral was a trained agronomist who surveyed soils across Guinea-Bissau alongside 2,200 peasant farmers. Decades before modern climate science, Cabral demonstrated that soil health directly mirrors national sovereignty, societal wellbeing, and climate stability. His assassination by colonial-imperial forces robbed Africa of a visionary who understood that liberating the land requires liberating the soil.   

Similar achievements span the Global South. 

In China, Neolithic peasants developed intensive composting and seed-drill technologies that preserved soil fertility over four millennia – work later documented by FH King as “permanent agriculture”. 

In the pre-Columbian Americas, intercropping systems like the “Three Sisters” (maize, beans, and squash) delivered exceptional caloric and protein yields while protecting soil structure without tillage. During the Islamic Golden Age, agronomists like Ibn al-’Awwām codified advanced irrigation, soil classification, and botanical science in the treatises Kitab al-Filaha. 

In India, indigenous organic methods inspired Sir Albert Howard, the credited father of modern Western organic farming.   

Despite this rich global heritage, modern agricultural institutions continue to programme the public to view Western industrial methods as superior, effectively severing indigenous communities from their ancestral land memories.

The failed promises of industrial agriculture

The industrial agricultural model relies on continuous chemical inputs, heavy mechanisation and monoculture crop production. Tracing its origin back to the early 20th-century Haber-Bosch process – which uses immense fossil energy to extract nitrogen for synthetic ammonia – industrial farming bypassed nature’s organic fertilisation cycles. Today, ammonia synthesis alone consumes up to 2% of total global energy and generates roughly 1.5% of global carbon emissions.   

This high-input, corporate-driven model inflicts severe ecological and human costs.

Ecological degradation and climate change: Over the last 200 years, two billion hectares of farmland have been abandoned worldwide due to soil degradation, while 1.5 billion are actively farmed. Land use change and soil degradation account for up to 50% of cumulative historical carbon dioxide emissions, demonstrating that fossil fuels represent only half of the climate crisis equation.   

Nutritional depletion: Industrial agriculture prioritises volume and farmgate profit over nutritional density. Monocultures of rice, maize, and wheat now provide 60% of human dietary energy, leaving populations calorie-satiated but nutrient-starved. Historical data from 1940 to 1991 reveals dramatic decline in essential minerals across farm produce – such as a 76% decline in copper and a 46% decline in calcium in vegetables. Comparative studies confirm that healthy, ecologically managed soils yield vastly higher units of protein, calcium, zinc, and vitamins per acre than chemical-fuelled monocultures.   

Public health and toxic contamination: The massive application of synthetic pesticides exposes farmworkers and consumers to dangerous endocrine disruptors, driving elevated rates of cancers, reproductive anomalies, and developmental delays in children. Agricultural runoff containing high nitrate levels contaminates groundwater, causing dead marine zones and conditions like “blue baby syndrome” in infants.   

A personal case study: the trap of agri-business

The real-world trap of industrial farming is illustrated by my own experience as a smallholder in Cape Town’s 3,000-hectare Philippi Horticultural Area (PHA). Encouraged by government agencies and corporate advisers to measure success against large-scale commercial operators, I adopted intensive hydroponic tomato farming. I invested my savings, achieved high product quality, and supplied a major retail chain with a tonne of produce weekly.   

Yet, the operation imploded within two years. Escalating costs for liquid fertilisers (tied to global oil prices), proprietary hybrid seeds, and electricity – combined with low farmgate prices imposed by corporate retail buyers – extracted all economic value from the farm. 

The experience proved that state start-up grants often function as conduits to funnel public funds into agribusiness monopolies, leaving emerging black farmers impoverished while corporate retail chains capture the profits.   

Class war, land dispossession, and the South African crisis

In South Africa, agrarian conflict remains the primary arena of unaddressed class and race warfare. Decades after the formal end of apartheid, post-apartheid land reform based on the neoliberal “willing-seller, willing-buyer” model has failed fundamentally. The primary beneficiaries of land transfers have been black politically connected elites, white farmers, established corporate agribusinesses, and commercial entities capable of securing heavy bank financing.  

Globally, small farms (under 2 hectares) account for 84% of all farms and produce 50% of food calories on just 30% of agricultural land, demonstrating higher productivity per hectare and superior agro-biodiversity compared with massive corporate estates. In South Africa, however, land concentration remains extreme.   

This structural inequality drives devastating socioeconomic consequences:   

Farmworker exploitation: Agricultural labourers endure appalling living conditions, low wages, and regular illegal evictions. Landowners frequently cut off basic water and electricity services to force farm dwellers into informal settlements.   

Wealth extraction: Agribusiness corporations extract billions of rand annually from South African soil – including R138.2-billion in farm inputs (seeds, chemicals, feed), R208.3-billion in primary production, R391.9-billion in food processing, and R519.4-billion in retail distribution.   

Child malnutrition and stunting: While corporate value chains generate massive revenues, between 23% and 28.8% of South African children under the age of five suffer from severe food poverty and chronic stunting due to long-term malnutrition. Acute malnutrition accounts for nearly one-third of all in-hospital child deaths, representing a silent violence in a nation that exports commercial produce.   

Reclaiming indigenous regenerative ‘landculture’

To escape the ecological and social dead end of industrial agribusiness, Africa must transition from agriculture to landculture.   

Agriculture operates as an extractive tool of empire and capital. It views soil as an inert medium to be manipulated with synthetic chemicals, squeezes smallholders out of value chains, replaces diverse food systems with monoculture export crops and concentrates ownership among elites.   

Landculture represents local, indigenous relationships deeply rooted in ecological stewardship. Under landculture, the farmer acts as a keystone species who cultivates the land while being cultivated by it. Grounded in ethics of care, kinship and indigenous regenerative ecosystem design, landculture prioritises nutrition per acre and ecosystem health over commodity yield per acre.   

At Vegkop Polyculture Farm – a 1-hectare learning hub in Cape Town’s Philippi Horticultural Area – we are actively building a practical model of landculture. By rewilding 40% of the land and integrating fruit trees, nuts, berries, cover crops, chicken, sheep, ducks and aquaculture, the farm eliminates synthetic agrochemicals, recharges the local Cape Flats Aquifer, and restores soil biology. 

The work of the farm involves addressing three key challenges: degraded soil, ecosystem and biodiversity, agrochemical-contaminated groundwater, and nitrate build-up in the soil, by using indigenous regenerative strategies.

Soil health as the measure of sovereignty

Amílcar Cabral’s enduring insight was that a nation’s freedom cannot be separated from the health of its soil and the relationship its people have with the land. A nation where 35,000 commercial entities control the food supply while one in four children suffers from severe food poverty cannot claim true sovereignty. 

True decolonisation demands more than political titles; it requires restoring land to the people, honouring indigenous ecological science, and dismantling the corporate monopolies that profit from hunger. By rejecting the industrial paradigm and healing our connection to the Earth through landculture, Africa can secure an egalitarian future built on food security, ecological balance, and genuine self-determination. DM