But this Green Revolution will require a sense of a common goal and could be unleashed by innovative financing.
Of all the challenges that Africa faces, there is one that transcends and embraces all the others: I mean agriculture. Our continent today runs the risk of missing a unique opportunity to develop and offer its youth the jobs it has the obligation to provide if it wants to avoid social implosion.
Agriculture, which employs or provides livelihoods to 60% of the population while contributing 20-30% to Africa’s GDP, is the sector that could by itself enable to save the greatest number of Africans from extreme poverty while giving them their dignity back.
And yet, it typically attracts less than 5% of lending from financial institutions on the continent, leaving farmers and agricultural enterprises starved of the capital they need to operate and grow their businesses.
The scope for growth is all the more important that the situation is highly paradoxical: Africa imports the equivalent of $ 50 billion of food every year. Yet more than half of the arable land unexploited in the world are on the continent!
The 12th CAADP PP taking place in Ghana this week is organised around the theme “Accelerating Implementation of CAADP through Innovative Financing and Renewed Partnership”. The theme reflects the urgency being placed on implementation by the African Union and its members.
To solve the agricultural equation, we must join forces and continue our efforts to define a common agricultural policy.
In 2003, in Maputo, we really started to turn the corner in laying the foundations for pan-African agricultural initiatives. The Heads of State and Government of the African Union then decided to devote 10% of their national budgets to agriculture. In 2014, in Malabo, they reiterated their commitment to further increase investment, both public and private, in agriculture.
Innovative financing will be key in unlocking Africa’s Green Revolution. Innovative financing is a means of mobilizing additional resources for investment in agriculture or solving long-running market failures that can unlock private investment. Now we should aim at a growth model that is public-sector enabled, and private sector scaled.
Because of the rural and dispersed nature of agricultural production, where banks and formal financial institutions often lack a presence, mobile technology provides a convenient and low-cost distribution channel to reach farmers and agro-enterprises with electronic payments and information products, as well as savings, credit, and insurance products, among others. It can also help to transfer targeted financial support for small farmers and agribusiness.
Investments in infrastructure will also help drive increased private investment and production in the agriculture sector. Often resulting in public goods that benefit a broad base of economic activity, investments in irrigation, transport and market infrastructure in particular are critical to improving economic returns and productivity in the agriculture sector.
The next step is to put in place a system that ensures the prices and the flow (or storage) of production, combined with a system of variable levies at the external borders of Africa (taxes on imports) protecting productions potential competition from products from outside. This will require innovative financial mechanisms and technologies as well.
A proactive agricultural policy should be common because it requires us to share not only our resources, but also our minds and our wills. It should be common because it cannot be implemented without regional infrastructure, energy and logistics in particular, that will allow our farmers to compete and enter into a process of value creation.
We should harness the latest innovations and technologies because Africa has no other option but to leapfrog if it wants to realize its tremendous potential.
With the global population expected to increase to over 9 billion people in 2050, experts have been predicting dire food situations. In Africa, in particular, the population is projected to go from being home to 15 percent of the world population today to 25 percent in 2050.
However, it is also Africa that offers major solutions in feeding the world. While there’s no silver bullet to providing food for all, here are some examples of what can be (and is being) done to improve food production and distribution in Africa:
Three reasons why Africa can feed itself and the world
A Global Development extract
1. While other regions have reached the limits to agricultural yield per hectare of land, Africa can substantially increase yields with currently available technology.
In certain parts of Africa, farmer yields remain as low as 1-1.5 tons per hectare, compared to potential yields of 3.5 tons per hectare in other regions of the world. That current underperformance translates into future opportunity.
Some companies are recognizing African farmers’ potential, including IGD member Seed Co., Africa’s largest proprietary seed breeding, production, processing and distribution group.
Seed Co. is a founder of the Last Mile Alliance, an innovative model that brings together commercial partners (providers of high-quality farm inputs, financial services and insurance), existing agro-dealers, foundations and donors to create a cost-effective rural distribution network to reach smallholder farmers in Tanzania, delivering both commercial success and development impact at scale.
2. A lot of the added food needed to feed an expanding population already exists — we just need to reduce food spoilage and waste, and Africa is no exception.
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More than 30 percent of all food produced in the world for human consumption every year gets lost or wasted, and saving just a quarter of that food would allow us to feed an added 870 million hungry people. Where in the value chain is food wasted?
In medium- and high-income countries, quality standards that over-emphasize food’s appearance and consumer decisions to buy more food contribute heavily to massive food waste.
In contrast, food loss in Africa occurs almost entirely in the production and distribution stages, leading experts to call for investment in infrastructure, transportation, packaging facilities and processing in the developing world to fight food loss.
Through the IGD-Rockefeller Post-Harvest Loss Project, IGD has engaged more than 45 companies in Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria to identify scalable, market-led solutions to reduce waste and spoilage in several value chains.
For example, the Dutch Agricultural Development & Trading Co., a private company established in 2002 to drive poverty alleviation via business methods, is currently tackling the issue of food spoilage.
Through its autonomous mobile processing units, DADTCO brings processing directly to cassava farmers in Ghana, Mozambique and Nigeria, circumventing spoilage issues that arise during transportation of cassava to traditional processing plants.
3. Compared to other global regions, Africa’s potential for sheer expansion of cultivated land is huge.
We once grew or farmed enough to feed our families. Today most of us are net buyers of food. How can we better link food producers and consumers to ensure nutritious food for all?
Some 60 percent of Earth’s uncultivated land is located in Africa. That translates into 600 million hectares. While not all potential farmland should be converted given environmental and commercial considerations, the opportunity for sustainable expansion does exist. As the efficiency of land use increases through yields, less land will be needed for farms in the future.
While analysts are concerned about global population growth, signs of progress in food security persist. In Africa, with continued efforts in increasing yields, reducing waste and efficiently using land, the continent's agricultural potential will be part of the solution to feeding 9 billion people by 2050.
Dr Ibrahim Assane Mayaki CEO of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD).
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