There are many methods to increase the sustainability of agriculture. When developing agriculture within sustainable food systems, it is important to develop flexible business process and farming practices.
Agriculture has an enormous environmental footprint, playing a significant role in causing climate change, water scarcity, land degradation, deforestation and other processes; it is simultaneously causing environmental changes and being impacted by these changes. Developing sustainable food systems, contributes to the sustainability of the human population. For example, one of the best ways to mitigate climate change is to create sustainable food systems based on sustainable agriculture. Sustainable agriculture provides a potential solution to enable agricultural systems to feed a growing population within the changing environmental conditions.
Africa has the ability to produce enough food to feed its population and beyond, and develop agribusiness that would offer decent employment to youth. There is a need to make sound investment to develop agro-processing so as to add value to farm produce and effectively linking primary producers to industries.
About 250 million Africans are hungry – almost 20 per cent of its 1.2 billion people – according to data from the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (UNFAO).
According to information from the World Bank, Africa's agribusiness (food and beverage) market is projected to reach $1 trillion per year by 2030 from $313 billion in 2013.
There is a huge market within Africa that is yet to be exploited, indicating that the Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) should be a mechanism to enable and ease the intra-Africa trade bottlenecks. The difficulties in trading in Africa are because of the colonial model, arguing that Africa was activated and motivated never to look to itself for self-reliance and relevance.
Indeed AfCFTA must really push Africa towards a mindset where it can build regional value chains; build research and development; invest in locally, nationally and regionally relevant technology for agricultural transformation—affordable, user friendly and accessible and durable .
Africa needs to improve market intelligence information and standards; in some countries, the danger is posed by middlemen that exploit primary producers; infrastructure, transportation, storage and logistics are as key as access to risk capital/finance and mentorship and support.
African businesspeople have been thinking that they cannot be successful without selling to Europe. There are Africans such as Nigerian businessman Aliko Dangote who became billionaires thanks to selling to Africa. This is a wake-up call in our thinking about the value of Africa in the agricultural value chain and also our consumption., encouraging intra-African trade and youth participation in developing agricultural value chain.
The future billionaires of Africa will not be coming from the oil and gas sector, but from the agriculture because food is critical and that is what Africa has a comparative advantage in. Youth as key drivers to sustainable food security just because if we don’t have enough food in Africa, we will be having a big problem therefore Africa calls for efforts to ensure food security on the continent. We need an education system that ensures that we have young people who are agriculture professionals because we are heading to technology-led agriculture.
_0.jpg?itok=QU87XW8D){kind=tracking}
.jpeg?itok=vCj6bCRe)
