Geneva, 1 July 2009 - The African farming sector has been neglected for years, contributing to a much-publicized 2008 food crisis that now persists out of the headlines, agricultural experts said Tuesday at a meeting on "Food security in Africa: lessons from the recent global crisis." They stressed that future, more severe crises very likely will occur unless extensive, long-term efforts are made to prevent them.
"We cannot let history repeat itself. We cannot once again allow Africa´s farmers to be abandoned," said the gathering´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."
Addressing an executive session of UNCTAD´s Trade and Development Board (TDB), Mr. Adesina and others said a massive, well-coordinated, well-funded programme is needed to support the small farmers who produce the large majority of Africa´s food.
"Only when millions of small-holder farmers have access to tools such as drought-resistant crops -- using conventional breeding and tools of biotechnology -- improved technologies for water and soil management, and affordable weather-indexed crop insurance, will these tools truly make a difference," Mr. Adesina said.
Agricultural trade barriers must be lowered and more official development assistance (ODA) must be allocated to the African farming sector, he added. 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.
The result in recent decades is that "while yields across the globe, especially in Asia and Latin America, have steadily increased, the yields of Africa have remained constant, sitting at about one-quarter of the global average," Mr. Adesina said. He warned, "What we are witnessing today in the Horn of Africa - 17 million people affected by drought and poor rains who must depend on food aid - is but a glimpse of things to come."
The executive session was chaired by TDB President Dian Triansyah Djani.
Statistics indicate that more than 300 million Africans currently are chronically hungry - about a third of the continent´s population. Africa was a net food exporter as recently as 1988, but now is a net food importer. Some 21 African countries now depend on food imports, leaving their populations highly vulnerable to increases in the global prices of such staples as rice, wheat, corn, and cooking oil. Responses have included the Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP), adopted in 2003, in which African Governments set the aim of achieving 6% annual agricultural growth.
"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. I´m afraid that in spite of much attention and several summits, because of the global financial and economic crisis, the negative effects on African agriculture will be quite severe. There may be much less financing just when African farmers need to plant and harvest more. I´ve heard that in some regions, farmers can´t plant because they can´t get credit. And financing for trade has been lacking. All this has to be remedied."
Donor countries that have pledged increased agricultural aid to Africa in recent years must keep their word and provide the funding despite the current economic crisis, and "this must happen this year, because later will be too late," Mr. Supachai said. Some US$22 billion has been pledged, but so far "only a few billion have been delivered," he said.
"There is a need to provide adequate inputs, such as seeds and fertilizers," he said. "We need more research work to create the right seeds, the right inputs. We need a green revolution for Africa of the sort that has occurred in Asia."
United Nations efforts in response to the food crisis are under the overall management of the Coordinator for the Global Food Security Crisis and Avian and Pandemic Influenza (UNSIC). The Coordinator, Assistant Secretary-General David Nabarro, told the meeting that the conditions that created the 2008 food crisis are still present. With effective, well-funded policies, Africa not only can feed itself, he said, but can contribute to defeating hunger elsewhere in the world. But currently the continent is a net food importer - food systems on the continent are dysfunctional, prices are volatile, and the trading environment keeps African farmers from competing effectively on world markets.
John Gyetuah, Deputy Minister of Trade of Ghana, said "The time to address the food crisis is now, before conditions worsen." Practical measures are needed to increase crop yields, he said, and African governments should set aside 20% of their budgets to programmes to boost agriculture even under the current strains caused by the global economic crisis. Funding also must be channelled to agro-processing, agro-business activities, and transport infrastructure. The international community "should provide appropriate support," he said.
Marcel Mazoyer, Emeritus Professor of Comparative Agriculture and Agricultural Development of the French National Agricultural Institute, said food, agriculture, and poverty are linked to the current economic and financial crisis. In 2008, there was a trebling of the prices of a number of staple foods; the increases meant that tens of millions were exposed to chronic food shortages. "They were suddenly thrown into poverty." Fluctuating agricultural prices are not new, Mr. Mazoyer said: "Every twenty or thirty years, something like this occurs." 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 subsidies 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. While problems with hunger have continued and periodically increased in recent decades, aid for agriculture in poor countries fell from 13% of ODA in the 1980s to 3.4% in 2004, he noted.
The TDB governs UNCTAD´s operations year to year in the intervals between UNCTAD quadrennial conferences.
