Food and Agriculture
We need a new conversation about Africa’s food production. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
– There are concerns that, while Africa is growing more crops than ever before, these are not for food. According to the current trajectory, Africa’s food import costs, currently estimated at 55 billion US Dollars per year, could double by 2030.
Three crop species-maize, wheat and rice meet an estimated 50 percent of the global requirements for proteins and calories, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Yet despite Africa’s expensive agricultural sector, the continent’s maize, rice, and wheat account for 7, 5, and 4 percent of the world’s production, respectively. Experts warn that it is wrong to compare food crops with cash crops.
“The most productive conversation should be firmly centered on how to support farmers to produce more food for everyone and to export even more as this will improve the farmer’s quality of life and get themselves out of poverty,” says Hafez Ghanem, former regional Vice President of the World Bank Group and a current nonresident senior fellow in the Global Economy and Development Program at the Brookings Institution.
IPS asked him about the mistake that many countries made after independence. He said that they tried to make cheap food available to the city dwellers by keeping farmgate prices low and forcing farmers to produce certain food crops. The farmer was left poor. The farmer who is poor cannot produce and, in the end, everyone becomes poor and hungry.
“No country can produce all the foods that it needs. We will need to export some and make some. If we start increasing yields for cereals, for instance, through increased use of quality seeds, fertilizer, and irrigation, farmers can produce more food crops without interfering with cash crops production, and the farmer will be richer.”
According to the Africa Agriculture Status Report 2022, “for Africa, accelerating the transformation of our food systems is more vital than ever. Africa has other incentives to transform its food system: Africa has one of the most severely degraded agricultural soils on the planet and is experiencing increasing droughts. Africa will be exposed to water-related climate risk in the future.
At least 90 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s rural population depends on agriculture as its primary source of income. According to the report, more that 95 percent of agriculture relies on rainfall.
The report finds that the consequences of unpredictable rainfall, rising temperatures, extreme drought, and low soil carbon will further lower crop yields exposing Africa’s poorest communities to increasingly intense climate- and water-related hazards with disastrous results.
Ghanem doesn’t believe that Africa’s food security problem is due to too many cash crops. He believes that there is a two-fold problem.
“The first part of the issue is that, in general, the productivity of land under cultivation for both cash and food crops is low. We need to increase land yields both for cash and food crops. The solution, I do not believe, is to stop exporting cash crops to produce more food,” he explains.
The second part of the issue, he says, is the challenge presented by climate change, and “we need to do much more to make agriculture more resilient to climate change.”
He says that concerns that there is the prioritization of cash crops over food crops are misplaced, “think about the profile of farmers in Africa. These are smallholder farmers. In countries such as Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, farmers are making much more profits producing cocoa or coffee than producing rice, for example.“We cannot ask our farmers to produce crops that are lower yielding and therefore less profitable.”
He cautions that any solution we propose to ensure food security must remember that the rural areas are the most food insecure, and the poorest, in Africa.
Ghanem, an expert on the topic, says there is no conflict between food production and cash crop production. Africa has vast land to produce both. He says that the rest of Africa has vast arable land, with the exception of Egypt and other North African countries.
Data by FAO shows Africa is home to an estimated 60 percent of the world’s uncultivated arable land. Ghanem believes that the solution is to make it easier for farmers to irrigate their land and access high-quality fertilizer and seeds.
According to Africa Agriculture Status Report (AFR), Africa needs $40 to $70 billion annually in public sector investment, and another $80 billion annually from the private sector to sustain its food production.
Ghanem claims that technology that can produce essential inputs such as fertilizer or climate-resilient high quality seeds will prove to be very productive in the future.
For example, fertilizer that is imported is more expensive than domestic. He lauds the establishment of some of the world’s largest fertilizer-producing companies in Nigeria and Morocco, calling for such investments in other parts of the continent.
Ghanem states that subsidies for inputs like fertilizer are not the answer and that the sector will be able to produce the inputs they need in-country or on the continent. This will allow the sector to become more resilient and increase productivity, food for all, as well as profitability.
IPS UN Bureau Report
Source: ipsnews
