The food crisis that began in 2008 is still present in Africa, and the causes have yet to be addressed, a series of experts told UNCTAD's Trade and Development Board. They said a major effort is needed to avoid worsening hunger on the continent.

The African farming sector has been neglected for years, and a well-coordinated, well-funded response is needed - and must begin soon, speakers said at a meeting on "Food security in Africa: lessons from the recent global crisis".

Some 300 million Africans currently suffer from hunger, and the continent has gone from a net food exporter in the 1980s to a net food importer.

"We cannot let history repeat itself. We cannot once again allow Africa's farmers to be abandoned," said the meeting's keynote speaker, Akinwumi Adesina, Vice President of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. "I have never seen farmers so abandoned. They have had no help with seeds, no fertilizers, no financing, no price stability, and they have to pray for rain. They do not have the supports you see in Asia, in Europe, in the United States. They are locked in a poverty trap."

Agricultural trade barriers must be lowered and more official development assistance (ODA) must be allocated to the African farming sector, he said. He traced a long history of declining attention to agriculture by some African governments and donor nations; structural adjustment policies that removed farming supports in the name of neoliberal economics; and international attention to other African problems while funding for agriculture declined.

Then the 2008 food crisis struck and climate change added to the continent's difficulties with such effects as droughts and floods, he said.

"Africa has been hit very hard by several crises - food, finance, fuel - without causing these crises," UNCTAD Secretary-General Supachai Panitchpakdi said in opening the meeting. "Africa is an innocent bystander. Food is absolutely critical. There is a need to provide adequate inputs, such as seeds and fertilizers. We need a green revolution for Africa of the sort that has occurred in Asia."

The United Nations Coordinator for the Global Food Security Crisis and Avian and Pandemic Influenza (UNSIC), Assistant Secretary-General David Nabarro, told the meeting that the conditions that created the 2008 food crisis are still present. Currently, food systems on the continent are dysfunctional, prices are volatile, and the trading environment keeps African farmers from competing effectively on world markets, he said.

John Gyetuah, Deputy Minister of Trade of Ghana, said "The time to address the food crisis is now, before conditions worsen." He called for rapid practical measures to increase crop yields.

Marcel Mazoyer, Emeritus Professor of Comparative Agriculture and Agricultural Development of the French National Agricultural Institute, said countries with many small-holder farmers must be able to protect those farmers so that production and prices are more stable and domestic populations are better protected from hunger, he said. He added that peasant farmers in places such as Africa are increasingly threatened by large-scale farming and by agricultural price supports in other countries.

And Jean Feyder, Ambassador of Luxembourg to the United Nations Office at Geneva, told the meeting that while United Nations Millennium Development Goal No. 1 calls for halving the number of those suffering from hunger and malnutrition by 2015, the trend is now in the other direction. Since the food crisis struck last year, the number has grown from 840 million to nearly 1 billion. "We already had a crisis before there was a crisis," Mr. Feyder said.

The executive session was chaired by TDB President Dian Triansyah Djani.