Investing in African farmers is a moral necessity but also an economic imperative, according to the head of the Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa (Agra), who fears that recent progress in the continent’s agriculture sector could be eroded without further investment.
As she prepared to travel to Ethiopia to participate in the UN summit on financing for development, Dr Agnes Kalibata said climate change was the biggest challenge to the estimated 530 million Africans who rely on agriculture.
“[Climate change] is eroding the momentum we had gained in terms of getting farmers to use improved seeds and buy fertilisers,” she said. “If a farmer puts his small savings into seeds and fertilisers and loses the whole crop, that’s the end of his whole career.
“Even in countries that you would think are secure … climate change is real. Farmers are getting less rain, it’s more irregular and it’s beginning to affect their production and undermine the investment they are making.”
Agra was founded in 2006 through a partnership between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Gates Foundation, which also supports the Guardian’s Global development site. The potential of African agriculture remains untapped, according to Agra.
The value of agricultural output could triple from an estimated $280bn (£179bn) today to about $800bn by 2030, according to an Agra policy paper presented in Addis. It also noted that investment in this sector, which employs half to two-thirds of Africa’s population, needs to be substantially increased, especially considering that a threefold rise in the continent’s demand for food is expected by 2050.
Kalibata, who was previously Rwanda’s agriculture minister, said she wanted theAddis summit to acknowledge that “unless we finance agriculture, developing the African continent is going to be very difficult”.
The risks from climate change – including the migration of pests and diseases to new areas and increasingly sparse and irregular rainfall – demand more innovation and can sometimes drive modernisation, Kalibata said. For example,in the Sahel, the drought- and desert-prone region bordering the Sahara desert, farmers are ever more reliant on mechanisation to make the most of the planting season and capture every drop of increasingly scarce rain.
“As a continent, we need to start investing in stronger mechanisms of support systems, of insurance, so that crop loss can be looked at as something that is manageable at the farm level and at the country level,” Kalibata said.
Kalibata said she also hoped to see support for African smallholder farmers at aUN summit on climate change in Paris in December.
The theme of climate change-related insurance was discussed elsewhere in Addis, with the presentation of a new report on insurance regulation for sustainable development by Dr Ana Gonzalez Pelaez of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership.
The paper argued that appropriate regulatory frameworks were needed for insurance to protect people’s basic rights, and that access to insurance would enable people and countries to better withstand natural hazards, or climate-related disasters. Its authors called for access to insurance, via relevant regulation, to be included as an explicit commitment in the summit’s outcome document.
Kalibata said African farmers faced numerous challenges including poor access to markets, often because of bad roads or patchy transport links. She said an unwillingness on the part of private investors, or commercial banks, to back what is often perceived as a risky sector was also problematic, while investment in new technologies and research into boosting yields needed to be ratcheted higher.
Kalibata said governments and the private sector had roles to play in getting the most out of agriculture in Africa, where so far only about 6% of cultivated land is irrigated, for example. More investment in processing and manufacturing was also needed to cut the continent’s net food import bill, estimated by Agra at $45-50bn a year.
But climate change-related setbacks could make the private sector even warier of investing in agriculture, Kalibata said, adding that institutions and governments would have to be fleet of foot to cope.
“You have to move very quickly in terms of research and technology,” she said. “You have to be ready to move to the next step so that you don’t kill the industry.”
Although some African governments are putting more money into agriculture – according to Agra, agricultural public expenditure grew at an average of 7.4% a year in the decade from 2003 – they have many competing priorities, including health and education, all of which need to be addressed at the same time, said Kalibata.
“Agriculture is a huge public good even though it has the potential to become a private sector good. We just need to step up financing … the next thing is to do the right prioritisation. Where do you get the most bang for your money? Agriculture is one of those places where every penny you put in has high dividends to most of the population.
“We need to find financial tools that will help us all step up the game … prioritising agriculture is not just the moral thing to do. It’s an economic imperative.”
