United Nations says Chinese-style rural reforms can cut Africa’s illicit migration

The world's poorest countries can stem migration by emulating China's rural reforms, and should ditch any get-rich-quick ideas about exposing their farmers to the glare of the global market, the UN economic agency UNCTAD said on Wednesday.

Taffere Tesfachew, head of the Least Developed Countries division at UNCTAD, said China's rural reforms had twinned privatisation with promoting the emergence of non-farm enterprises in rural areas.

But that was not happening in many African economies today because countries were failing to develop non-farming rural enterprises, and as farm productivity increased people were being forced to move away because of lack of jobs.

“Migrants coming out of Africa, for example, are in the majority displaced because of the inability of agriculture to accommodate them, to give them decent livelihoods,” said UNCTAD Secretary-General Mukhisa Kituyi, also speaking at a news conference.

“A sustainable solution to Africa's contribution to illicit migration is not to be dealt with by declarations in Malta or in Addis Ababa that we should be humane and stem the migration. It's to be addressed by creating viable livelihoods for the populations that are being disgorged by unviable agriculture.”

He blamed policies pushed by international institutions such as the World Bank in the 1990s for encouraging national governments to embrace “the panacea of the marketplace” while cutting back on social and infrastructure investment, but said it was now clear that had been a mistaken policy.