Africa must focus on creating markets for farmers, taking a whole value chain, and investing in new product development to add value to crops.
By Anthony Muchoki, Addis Ababa
Innovative, spot on, out of box and large scale solutions are needed for lifting Africa’s agriculture from great potential to profitable outputs for the continent’s children to sing “better at last, better at last, thank God Almighty our lives are better at last.”
Minister-of-Agriculture-and-Rural-Development-Dr.-Akinwumi-Adesina
Making a keynote speech at the High Policy Dialogue on “Research to Feed Africa”, September 1, 2014, Sheraton Hotel, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, Honourable Minister of Agriculture of Nigeria, said it was the responsibility of African government, the private sector, civil society and academia to support farmers and ensure a food secure and prosperous Africa.
The minister told the pre event conference for Africa Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) that the population of Africa is estimated to reach 2.4 billion by 2050 and so the demand for food will keep going up.
“Africa has enormous agricultural potential. About 65% of the arable lands left to feed the 9 billion people in the world by 2050 are in Africa. We must unlock this potential,” he noted.
For this to happen it calls for fundamental shift in how Africa sees agriculture. “Agriculture must not be seen as a development program. Agriculture is a business. And agricultural research must take this business perspective. Policy makers too must change and develop policies to take technologies to scale for farmers,” he noted.
“The challenge will be how to raise agricultural productivity, feed this population, while not degrading the environment. The challenge is enormous: Sub-Saharan Africa will need to increase crop production by 260% in order to feed this projected population. This cannot be achieved unless there are significantly higher levels of investment i n agricultural research, science and technology,” he said.
Giving an example how researchers get it wrong at times in addressing needs of the farmers, he narrated how in the early 1990s, he was a part of a team of scientists charged with promoting high yielding short statured varieties of sorghum to farmers.
“Convinced we had a solution for farmers, we went to Southern Mali to promote the new high yielding varieties.” The head of the village took them on a tour around the village, and opened after granary were filled to the brim with sorghum!
“What mattered here was not the supply driven technical change but the development of markets for sorghum,” he noted.
He said Africa must focus on creating markets for farmers, taking a whole value chain, and investing in new product development to add value to crops.
“Unless this is given priority farmers will take up new technologies and price for their farm products will decline,” he said.
He gave the examples of creating new markets saying in Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya sorghum was being used to replace malt in the brewery industry, for animal feed, as well as for production of ethanol.
He also said Nigeria was championing for use of cassava flour in making of bread and confectioneries instead of wheat which was more expensive.
“Africa is the largest producer of cassava in the world but is surpassed by Thailand in terms of global value added to cassava,” he noted.
Calling for more investments in agricultural research, he said it pays. “The challenge is always how to ensure that poor farmers benefit from technical change. This is where I believe that public policies are needed to reduce adoption costs faced by farmers,” he noted.
Asked why he was champing for subsidies for farmers which have been proved to be a source of corruption, he said subsidies were not the problem, the problem was corruption.
“ While developed countries support their farmers with massive subsidies, African farmers, who are poor, are barely supported,” he lamented.
He called for more agriculture financing recalling that as a Vice President at the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, he led a team that made innovative financing instruments to leverage banks in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ghana and Mozambique to lend over $100 million to small farmers and input retailers.
Greater focus should be put into the use of innovative finance instruments to reduce the risks financial institutions face in lending to agriculture, he noted.
Realistically, he lamented that despite many gains made malnutrition remains a perennial problem. “Eighty percent of the world’s stunted children live in just 14 countries, of which eight are in Africa,” he said.
Calling on African nation to ensure no child goes hungry, he noted that hungry children cannot learn after they are malnourished, they become brain impaired, with low-income earnings in the future.
He asserted that greater farm harvests, new markets will raise incomes of farmers and Africa’s rural economies will boom.
“Millions of people will be lifted out of poverty into wealth,” he said.