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African agriculture is no doubt experiencing irregular growth due to some factors such as lack of technology, poor quality seeds, non-implementation of government policies expected to drive the sector and generally lack of political will by governments on the continent to invest in the sector.
Several organisations have been articulating various solutions aimed at addressing and positioning agriculture on the continent as the main hub of Africa’s transformation. The recent introduction by African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) to engage various stakeholders on the identification and possible solution is worthy of focus.
AATF has just birth KIKAO, an interactive agricultural talk show that identify, analysis, and proffer practical solutions to the mirage of crisis that had bedeviled the continent efforts to make agriculture one of the mainstays of her economy.
Kikao is anchored by AATF Executive Director, Dr Canisius Kanangire, and rallied experts to discuss how the African continent can advance its agriculture from the largely practiced subsistence farming to commercial farming.
During the show, Kanangire gave an overview of agriculture on the continent and why it had remained undeveloped. He noted that there is an age long belief that agriculture is the hub of which sub-Saharan Africa development will evolve but that the biggest question remains on whether the present form of agriculture in the continent will be able to simulate that development.
According to him, agricultural transformation will lead to increased agricultural productivity and diversification, and this in turn will give rise to improved food and nutrition security and job creation through expanded commercialisation and industrialization.
“But the transition from traditional rural societies towards more diversified urban centred societies with high productivity is a complex process that depends on the country’s resource in domains, institutions and other factors on Kikao this week, we will examine the central role of agricultural transformation in development”, he said.
Arch. Kabir Ibrahim, the President of All Farmers Association of Nigeria (AFAN) featured on KIKAO said Africa needs to change the way it does things, especially from a farming perspective. He said hoes and cut losses can never take Africa anywhere.
“We need to do mechanization, we need to deploy technology. We need to have an educated mass that produces for people and we need to add value, we need to process, we need to sell what we produce after value addition, if we sell anything in its primary form, we get nothing. Now, we have a very large population of young people in Africa who hitherto had looked upon agriculture as a drudgery that they have to do to just subsist.
“Today, I think the world knows that the population of Africa and the arable land in Africa are something to look into in terms of providing food security for the whole world. The thing that Africa should do to take advantage of that is to enhance what it does, deploy technology, farm year round, use irrigation, because if you just farm like we do in Nigeria, the rain fed agriculture is not enough. We need to do it year round”, Ibrahim stated.
Arch Ibrahim further stated that economic prosperity is not government have a lot of money in his kitty, he said it’s the people having enhanced purchasing power, being able to do what they want to do at the time they want to do it, and then you get what is called food security and food security really means eating what you want at the time you want and that what you eat is also balanced nutritiously.
He said what Africa should do in order to get a population that is well fed, that has good nutrition and then has good food security, and then from there, the continent will be able to have a population that thinks even outside the box to get to the moon.
“You will need to do climate smart agriculture; you need to do a lot of mechanization, a lot of innovation. You need to be focused on policy implementation. You need to have transparency; you need to attract the private sector. You need to be fair, or to treat fairly, the gender issue and youth,” Arc. Ibrahim added.
The Director CIMMTY’s Global Maize Project, Dr Boddupalli Maruthi, another guest on KIKAO, said agricultural transformation is actually not the end result, he said it is also a process by which Africans improve on productivity.
“We make farming more commercially viable, and also strengthen the inter linkages with several sectors that contribute to the economy. Three essential components here: first of all, the technologies or innovations that we bring in have to improve farm productivity but also at the same time they need to strengthen the social and environmental footprint at every stage of transformation.
“Secondly, farmers, especially in Africa, need much stronger access to modern tools, modern technologies, inputs, output markets to access as well as financial resources that help them shift from subsistence oriented farming to more commercially oriented farming, and in all these governments have a very important role to play.
“We need a much stronger political will and commitment to promote, to support and to invest in partnerships, including partnerships with a large area of public as well as private sector institutions that contribute to this transformation”, Maruthi noted.
Maruthi maintained that more than 120 million people are presently out of jobs in Sub Saharan Africa, and this would have been further exacerbated by the recent COVID-19 crisis. He added that more than 400 million people in Africa are still living with less than $1.25 per day.
“We need to reduce this extreme poverty through agricultural transformation. Agriculture has to play a very critical role in job creation. And Job Creation is extremely important for the youth to be attracted towards agriculture and make it even more commercially viable.
“I’m impressed by the African development bank’s vision on four different elements. They talk about the targeted investments in specific value chains, and the agro ecological zones to make this happen. We need self-sufficiency in certain important crops, for example, rice or wheat, or fish, or horticultural crops, we need to make Secondly, for those crops where there are strong value chain opportunities, we need to move towards the example of cocoa or coffee.
“Third, we need to make the Sahel region food secure for Sorghum millets, livestock and the guinea region much more in terms of productivity and realize the full potential, maize for instance, soybean, livestock, so this targeted approach towards agricultural transformation with investments by appropriate agencies is very critical.
“And if we do that, we can create an estimated $110 to $115 billion annually within the next few years, that is the power of uplifting the economy”, he stated.
He further stated that there are a multitude of uncoordinated initiatives funded by the local agencies, international funding organizations. He said these initiatives are somewhat competing with each other in terms of limited investments or private investments, which gives room for lack of Pan African focus or coordination.
“Secondly, there are several good ideas, there are hundreds of publications that have come out, but not enough implementation, ideas are there, excellent articles written on how to bring the agricultural transformation, but we need much better implementation at the local level.
“The third aspect is that there is insufficiently developed ecosystem in general for agricultural market developments and that is perhaps limiting the potential of Africa’s agricultural transformation”, he added.
“We need to help prioritize and differentiate strategies for Africa. We don’t treat Africa as a homogeneous entity. There are multiple countries with different levels of capacity, multiple regions with different needs, farming communities with diverse interests and needs, so prioritised and differentiated strategies.
“Market driven opportunities for the farmers is critical, that’s the second most important aspect. We need to have change agents, those change agents could be institutions, those change agents could be farmer organizations, those change agents could be international organizations that contribute to agricultural growth in Africa.
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“So we need to identify those specific change agents which can help implement those strategies in a targeted manner. Fourth, we need to identify what technologies are working, which can be scaled up easily in those particular value chains, and we need to make progress on enabling policies, policies, and creation of enabling environment for private sector investment is utmost crucial for agricultural transformation”
Maruthi maintained that agricultural transformation plans need to make African countries much more resilient and adaptive to the changes that are happening in the climates and implications in terms of increasing frequency of abiotic stresses as well as biotic stresses.
He said in the last one decade, there have been six devastating epidemics of invasive pests in the continent, and those things will continue to happen.
“How well positioned are we to tackle the changes that are happening there? That’s the number one aspect we need to look into.
“The second aspect is about malnutrition, out of over 800 million people who are malnourished in the world, almost 230 million people in this continent. This is almost 23.2 percent, this is an alarming fact. It’s not just about agriculture transformation is about food security.
“The disabilities and the capacities to make agriculture vibrant in Africa are not happening because there are large sectors of pockets of malnourishment. So this is where I think we need to focus on not just the food security lens, but also nutritional security and environmental security”, he noted.
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