Moja’s Systemic Agricultural Strategy: Tightening the Digital Loop in the African Circular Economy

Analog Agricultural Producer

In many parts of the world, including Africa, stagnant economies, rising inequality, widespread youth unemployment, increasing food insecurity, and sluggish regional growth have renewed interest in and experimentation with iterations of industrial policy. This reflects a longstanding trend in recent economic history, where economic downturns have prompted state-sponsored macroeconomic revivals through policy initiatives, usually in response to some type of shock. In southern Africa right now, the governments of South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi have placed significant sectorial attention on agriculture because of the outsize role it plays in those national economies, and because of the severity of the drought that has led to food insecurity, decreases in agricultural output, and financial fragility on the part of the small share-holder farmer.

Record amounts of international aid aimed at increasing agricultural productivity and commercialization has entered those countries in the last few years (think of AGCOM in Malawi), and the national plan and vision documents of South Africa, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Malawi reflect an iteration of national industrial policy in agriculture (shorthand: “agricultural strategy”) that has been formulated to counter the negative economic ramifications of climate change and low productivity on this leading sector of the economy. Historically speaking, industrial policy has almost always done double duty either to manage the effects of macroeconomic flux or to achieve some other political or economic objective.

Far from “picking winners” or “promoting national champions” in agriculture, these governments’ ad hoc “vertical” or “selective” policy interventions in various aspects of the agricultural ecosystem to stimulate increases in productivity, commercialization, and industrialization, as well as to support farmers directly, can be thought of as “National Agricultural Strategy.” As such, these interventions are a means, but not an end unto themselves. These practices are construed instead as tactical gestures that encompass a “set of measures taken by the state to influence/enhance the performance of firms, sectors, industries, and clusters toward a desired objective (such as inclusive growth)” and which also recognize (and support) “sectorial interdependencies between manufacturing and services, and even agriculture” (Pitelis, 2015, 18). This is why agricultural strategy is not about picking winners, but in addressing systemic and market failures due to climate shocks and other externalities; the national objective is to create an environment (or stable/seedbed) out of which “winners” may arise.

This is the point at which Moja’s digital infrastructure enters the conversation about southern Africa agricultural strategy due to the drivers of climate change and food insecurity. Moja’s value proposition is to catalyze agricultural productivity and commercialization through the enabling and accelerating capability of its digital infrastructure for farmers, agribusiness hubs and consortiums, Ministry of Agriculture extension services, and industrial value chain digitalization. Moja Academy provides access to high quality, in-demand climate smart agriculture training produced by vetted, partnering organizations, such as the Centre for Ecological Intelligence at the University of Johannesburg, customizable for delivery to local agribusiness hubs and at scale across the region to millions of small share-holder farmers. Moja Market enables new and existing MSMEs to create market linkages, to create a sustainable, digitized circular economy of producers, distributors, and consumers that increase and recycle value through the digital loop of Moja’s infrastructure without “transaction leakage” in which value is lost or diminished.

How Moja Digitalizes Value Chains

Moja aims to create a self-contained micro-economy of relevant stakeholders, producers, processors, special service providers for AgriHub clients, individual and enterprise buyers, authorized sellers of inputs to farmers, and other key players in the agribusiness value chain. Moja, in cooperation with other financial partners, intends to offer access to capital for farmers and other stakeholders in the value chain to purchase inputs from authorized B2B sellers in the form of tokens or credits that can only be used within the Moja ecosystem to power the growing micro-economy of the value chain. Tokenization of credits as the basic unit of economic value within the digitized Moja micro-economy is the means to prevent “transaction leakage” and to obtain sought after data about what is working or not working within the micro-economy.

The agricultural strategy of the current administrations of southern African governments is poised to integrate seamlessly with the technological transformation occurring in agriculture with the arrival of applications of artificial intelligence, automation, m-learning, and machine learning. These new technologies require technical integrations into multi-function platforms such as Moja that utilize big data analytics to identify and enable new business opportunities and facilitate more significant interaction between producers and consumers in the process of customizing products. African governments are just now beginning to develop smart specialization strategies (S3) when it comes to agriculture, and Moja’s digitalization of the Agri-Circular Economy is especially timely.

The basic premise of S3 revolves around public-private partnerships in which state funds and influence are prioritized and allocated to specific “activities” in particular technological fields in uncharted technologies, and fields or domains that have the potential for “entrepreneurial discovery,” knowledge spillovers, innovation, scale, agglomeration, and commercial exploitation (Foray, 2015). Hence, S3 is a return to a more vertical and selective mode of policy intervention. The emphasis upon “entrepreneurial discovery” reflects Rodrik’s (2004) view that private actors, such as Moja, are best placed in the market to identify new opportunities for commercial exploitation. Moja’s role in southern Africa agricultural strategy is a catalyst to reviving economies and enhancing growth in a sustained way.

References

Bailey, D., Glasmeier, A., Tomlinson, P. R., and Tyler, P. (2019) “Editorial: Industrial Policy: New Technologies and Transformative Innovation Policies?” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 12, 169-77.

Foray, D. (2015) Smart Specialisation: Opportunities and Challenges for Regional Innovation Policy. London: Routledge.

Pitelis, C. (2015) “DIP-ly Speaking: Debunking Ten Myths, and a Business Strategy-Informed Developmental Industrial Policy.” In D. Bailey, K. Cowling and P. R. Tomlinson (eds), New Perspectives on Industrial Policy for a Modern Britain, pp. 17–40. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rodrik, D. (2004) Industrial Policy for the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: John F. Kennedy School of Government.