The African Development Bank (AfDB) has called on global partners to join hands to lift one-billion people globally out of hunger.
The finance institution said in a statement that it was leading the way by investing $24-billion in African agriculture over the next decade.
“We are not winning the war against global hunger,” AfDB president Akinwumi Adesina told delegates at an agriculture conference at Purdue University, in Indianapolis, earlier this week.
“We must not get carried away,” he added, referring to statistics showing a decline in the global population living on less than $2 a day.
Adesina lamented that, in reality, the number of hungry people in the world, had, according to the latest World Food Security and Nutrition data, had increased from 777-million in 2015 to 815-million in 2016.
Adesina told the audience that simple technical and scientific methods were already making a difference to farm yields and income in Africa.
While such technologies to deliver Africa’s green revolution exist, they are mostly just sitting on the shelves, he said.
“The release of water efficient maize varieties now allows farmers to harvest good yields in the face of moderate drought,” he noted.
“Today, rice varieties exist that can give yields of 8 t/ha. Cassava varieties exist with yields of up to 80 t/ha. Heat tolerant and disease resistant livestock and technologies for ramping up aquaculture exist.”
The AfDB stressed that what was urgently needed was the deployment of supportive policies to ensure technologies are cascaded down to millions of farmers.
“All Africa needs to do is to harness the available technologies with the right policies and rapidly raise agricultural productivity and incomes for farmers and assure lower food prices for consumers,” Adesina noted.
Additionally, AfDB has launched its $1-billion Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT) initiative to extend the use of farm technologies.
TAAT is currently engaging seed companies, public and private entities, and financial institutions in 27 countries to make technology available to 40-million African farmers.
Combining targeted subsidies for farmers with a market-based system for rapidly expanding access to financing for farmers and agricultural value chains is the fastest way to get many people out of poverty to a sustained pathway for economic growth, Adesina added.
Adesina further called for global partnerships to establish Staple Crop Processing Zones across Africa.
These zones, he explained, would provide several advantages for rural economies.
“They will create markets for farm produce. Raw materials will no longer be moved out of rural areas, but as finished value-added products. Post-harvest losses will be substantially reduced. Well integrated agricultural value chains will develop, with supportive logistics, especially warehousing and cold chains,” Adesina added.
The AfDB has already started investments to develop these zones in a number of African countries, including Ethiopia, Togo, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique.
It expects the processing zones to be active in about 15 countries in the near term.