Big bet on agriculture pays off for African nations

6th September 2016

By: African News Agency

  

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A decade of paying intense attention to farming has generated “the most successful development effort” in African history, according to a report released by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) at the UN’s African headquarters on Tuesday.

Analysis of AGRA’s 2016 African agriculture status report, Progress towards an Agriculture Transformation of sub-Saharan Africa, served as a curtain raiser for the African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF), which is drawing heads of state, leading business people and other high-level officials from around the world to Nairobi this week.

The report builds a strong case for focusing resources on African farmers, big and small, while bluntly warning that many challenges lie ahead.

“The last ten years have made a strong case for agriculture as the surest path to producing sustainable economic growth that is felt in all sectors of society – and particularly among poor Africans,” AGRA’s president Agnes Kalibata said.

She said that the track record was “far from perfect” and noted that far too many farming families continued to lack such basic inputs as improved seeds and fertilizers.

“But,” Kalibata said, “the evidence is clear: When we invest in our farmers and in the all the things they need to succeed, good things happen across the economy.”

The report found that after decades of stagnation, much of Africa had enjoyed sustained agricultural productivity growth since 2005. As a result, poverty rates had declined in various countries, notably Ghana, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Burkina Faso.

The report notes that the biggest impact had been achieved in countries that moved quickly to embrace the African Union’s Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme or CAADP, which was created in 2003.

Among other things, CAADP called on African governments to allocate 10% of national budgets to agriculture, and to aim for a 6% annual growth rate in the sector.

Early adopters of the CAADP goals had seen productivity on existing farmlands rise by between 5.9% and 6.7% per year, according to the report. Also, this growth helped to spur an annual increase in overall GDP of 4.3% on average.

Those who started later achieved an improvement of between 3 and 5.7% in farm productivity and a 2.4% to 3.5% increase in GDP. And countries that did not embrace CAADP at all saw farm productivity rise by less than 3% and GDP increase by an average of only 2.2%.

The trend is similar for declines in malnutrition, with countries that embraced the CAADP process experiencing annual declines ranging from 2.4 to 5.7% against an average of only 1.2% for those that didn’t.

“It’s clear that with agriculture now back at the top of Africa’s development agenda, the foundations have been laid for a renaissance in African agriculture that could quickly deliver benefits to the broader economy,” said David Ameyaw, head of monitoring and evaluation for AGRA and a lead author on the report.

But African agriculture experts who contributed to the report made it clear that there were many challenges ahead.

The report points out that Africa remained “the world’s most food insecure continent, with relatively low levels of agricultural productivity, low rural incomes, high rates of malnutrition and a worsening of the food trade balance”.

“Despite the unprecedented decade of impressive growth across the continent, much more remains to be done to sustain these gains and truly drive the agricultural transformation needed for Africa’s development and ensure a better life for all,” the authors note.

“The good news is that a vibrant agricultural sector, while not the solution to all of our problems, will clearly promote food security and economic opportunities for all Africans.”

Former AGRA president Dr Namanga Ngongi, who chairs the board of trustees for the African Fertilizer and Agribusiness Partnership, said the report should set the stage for a productive meeting when political leaders and agriculture experts converge on Nairobi this week.

“My hope is that this incisive analysis of the current state of African agriculture will stimulate a more profound and impassioned debate about the kinds of investments and initiatives now required to make transformation of this sector a reality,” Ngongi said.

Edited by African News Agency

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