African Union (AU) chair Bingu wa Mutharika announced a plan to make Africa food secure in the next five years, according to IRIN.
The plan, detailed in a document entitled The African Food Basket, “Requires countries to allocate a substantial portion of their budget to agriculture, provide farming input subsidies, and make available affordable information and communications technology.”
Specifically, the plan impels African nations to invest 10% of their national budgets into agriculture per year, a number that comes from the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme, or CAADP. The CAADP was established in 2003 as a program of the AU and focuses on, “improving food security, nutrition, and increasing incomes in Africa’s largely farming based economies.”
So far, the 10% number has been difficult to achieve.
Input subsidies for farming are also important, since according to the article, “Underuse of fertilizers has often been cited as a major cause of low production in Africa…Fertilizer use in Africa accounts for less than 10 percent of the world average of 100 kg per hectare.”
But Ousmane Badiane, the director for Africa at the U.S.-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), sounded a note of caution in how subsidy policy is implemented. He cited the case of Senegal, where the government heavily subsidized fertilizer in the 1960’s. “It had a dramatic effect on agriculture, but by 1979 one of its [agriculture] agencies had worked up a deficit amounting to 98 percent of the national budget.” Badiane said that short term subsidies aimed at strengthening existing markets and agricultural infrastructure were a lot more effective, citing post-1994 Rwanda as a successful public-private example.
In addition to science and technology, the article also highlighted regional support and partnerships to help Africa achieve food security. Calestous Juma, professor of international development at Harvard University, wrote in his recently released book “The New Harvest,” that regions could become food secure “by capitalizing on the different growing seasons in different countries and making products available in all areas for longer periods of time.”
Other areas which the AU is focusing on in order to increase food security include,
“Irrigation (only four percent of Africa’s crop area is irrigated, compared to 39 percent in South Asia); improving soil fertility (more than three percent of agricultural GDP in Africa is lost annually as a direct result of soil and nutrient loss); post-harvest storage loss (sub-Saharan Africa loses about 40 percent of its harvest per year, against one percent in Europe); [and] setting up databanks to share early warning information and energy.”
Do you think Africa’s route towards food security will be achieved? Are the strategies in place the best ones? Let us know by posting your comments below.
Posted by Rishi Sidhu.
Photo credit: UN FAO.
