Africa commits more to agriculture

The African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) 2014 -- the spirited gathering of more than 1,000 agriculture officials, farmers, entrepreneurs, scientists, civil society organisations and pioneers in agribusiness representing 60 countries --- concluded on Thursday, September 4 at the Nelson Mandela Hall of the African Union headquarters, with a forceful call for action to transform food production across Africa.

After four days of extensive consultations on implementation of the African Union’s recent Malabo Declaration to double food production and end hunger, former President John Kufour, who co-chairs the Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition, said he could sense an impatience to get on with the tasks ahead.

“The theme of this AGRF should be ‘less talk, more action,’” he said. “Africa is ready to catch up with the rest of the world.”

The Commissioner for Rural Economy and Agriculture of the African Union Commission (AUC), Tumusiime Rhoda Peace, thanked participants, facilitators, partners, and stakeholders, not excluding exhibitors and service providers, for their contribution toward the four-day conference’s success.

She observed that the lively discussions, the productive outcomes, and the sufficient consensus all give credit to the collective effort that she described as the spirit befitting the 2014 African Union (AU) Year of Agriculture and Food Security.

Tumusiime Peace Rhoda said the four-day event is a significant contribution to sustenance of the momentum in implementation of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) in the context of the Malabo Declaration on accelerated African Agricultural Growth and Transformation.

“I am really pleased that the AGFR 2014 has served as an avenue for elaborating on this,” she said.

“This is a turning point for us. We have the political will and the commitment to achieve sustainable food and nutritional security across the continent.

“We are developing the roadmap for countries to absorb, adjust and plan to meet those targets within the CAADP framework. Discussions at AGRF are an important step toward the actions we must take collectively to accelerate agricultural transformation in Africa,” Tumusiime added.

THE AU Commissioner for Rural Economy and Agriculture said, all along, there has been criticism about the nature and type of commitments and declarations that our leaders normally make -- and this criticism might have emanated from the lack of clarity and/or targets.

“This time round, as evidenced by the Malabo Declaration, the commitments there are more concrete: including enhancing investment finance in agriculture; ending hunger by 2025; halving poverty by 2025 through inclusive agricultural growth and transformation; boosting intra-African trade in agricultural commodities and services; enhancing resilience of livelihoods and production systems to climate variability and other shocks; and mutual accountability for actions and results.

“You must have noticed that the Heads of State and Government went further by commiting to measure and track results. Previously, we made progress but it was not against specific targets.

And, in this connection, I was impressed to see the discussions that took place during the plenary and parallel sessions, as well as side-events, focused not on business as usual but on best practices and success stories in agricultural production and productivity, modernising and commercialising agriculture through, among others, value chain development, and how to scale them up and replicate them.

“We have been informed that business as usual will not help us attain the targets we have set ourselves. We are therefore required and expected to engage in transformative efforts because the commitments are more ambitious, more realistic and achievable.

“This responsibility falls, first and foremost, on African citizens and our governments, civil society and private sector -- and, fortunately, Africa has all it takes: from human resources to natural and material endowments as well as our partnerships, and also the fact that agriculture has regained its rightful position in Africa’s development paradigm.
“As the Commission of the African Union, we commit to providing the necessary political leadership in coordinating the different efforts and interventions to make sure delivery of the commitments taken by our Heads of State and Government are fully and timely honored.”

Galvanising reforms

CAADP has been instrumental in galvanising African countries to reform, modernise and achieve economic growth through agriculture-led development. Ten years after its adoption, almost every AUC member-state is using the CAADP framework in their agricultural transformation.

Over the next ten years, it will be critical to measure and report on progress so governments are accountable for their commitments.

Ten years is not far from now, and so we must keep conscious of the urgency to extricate our population from hunger, malnutrition and poverty -- and also tap the emerging opportunities within Africa and across the globe given the demographic and urbanisation mega trends.

“If agricultural transformation is to be realised as a tenet of pan-Africanism and African Renaissance, time is now, it is in our hands,” she concluded.

Ethiopia’s State Minister of Agriculture, Ato Mitiku Kassa said: “AGRF 2014 comes at an important time. The government of Ethiopia and governments across Africa mark ten years since initiation of the CAADP and embrace the new commitments that emerged in Malabo. I invite Ethiopian citizens and friends of Ethiopia to hold us accountable for the realisation of this vision,” he said.

The call to action from AGFR 2014 was manifest in a wide array of discussions during the meeting. Delegates revealed the many ways that transformation is already happening across Africa’s agriculture sector. They asserted that with proper investment, guidance and leadership it can unfurl on a much larger scale.
A common conference theme was the role of governments in stimulating more investment from the private sector in agriculture-oriented enterprises.

Daniel Gad, an Ethiopian-born entrepreneur and commercial farmer, said government incentives are the crucial factor that lured him back to Ethiopia from the United States to develop a floral company and export-focused commercial vegetable farms.

He said Africa’s agriculture sector is rich with business opportunities that can provide jobs and income, but governments need a “focused plan for attracting investment”.

Gad said the policies that attracted him to Ethiopia included tax incentives, access to financing and removal of bureaucratic obstacles to hiring foreign nationals, who are needed to train the domestic staff. “The government thought through a series of obstacles to investing in agriculture, and that is a model that can be repeated throughout Africa,” he said.

But while good governance was cited as essential to progress, several leaders including former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan cautioned that “governments can’t do everything. What [governments] can and need to do is to release entrepreneurial skills”.

Access to credit by smallholder farmers was identified as a key obstacle holding farmers back. Deputy Director General of the South African Ministry of Agriculture Elaine Alexander indicated that the call to action can quickly stall if there is not a way to solve the dearth of farm to fork capital available to farmers and other enterprises.

“How do we encourage the private sector to invest when our own banks don’t?” This is indirectly calling for foreign investment, which we know can have dangerous implications for our food sovereignty.

Other discussions focused on the importance of addressing land rights, soil health, seed production policies, climate change adaption; post-harvest processing, and the lack of basic farm machinery.

For many delegates, the hoe symbolises lack of progress on smallholder farm: Dyborn Chibonga, CEO of the National Smallholder Farmers Association of Malawi (NASFAM), called for “the UN to declare the hand-hoe a weapon of mass urbanisation”.

Delegates had innovative strategies to beat corruption and provide credit to farmers in Nigeria. Nigeria’s Minister of Agriculture, Akinwumi Adesina, shared his country’s experience with e-credit schemes for seed and fertiliser purchases sent to farmers’ mobile phones.

According to Adesina, this programme has ended decades of an inefficient and ineffective-yet critically important government subsidies programme.

By Konrad Kodjo Djaisi | B&FT Online | Ghana