Amy Musgrave
20 May 2008
Johannesburg — SOARING food prices will be under the spotlight at an African Union-New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad) workshop starting in Pretoria today.
Organisers said on Friday that the high level pan-African regional workshop would identify short-term and long-term food security interventions.
Food prices are continuing to escalate across the globe.
There have been protests against the rapid increases worldwide, with thousands participating in demonstrations in SA's cities last week.
Policy makers have had to start placing food prices on the top of their agendas and the World Bank has warned that 33 countries face potential social unrest caused by the acute hike in food and energy prices.
" Rising food prices threaten to erode the gains made in addressing poverty and food and nutrition security issues in many African countries," organisers said.
Jakob Christensen, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Africa chief, said last week the shock of rocketing food prices should focus attention on improving farming on the world's poorest continent.
Christensen was in SA to present the IMF's regional economic outlook. It predicts growth of about 6,5% this year, mainly driven by oil exporting countries such as Nigeria and Angola.
Louis Napo Gnagbe, Nepad's media manager, said it was recognised that high food prices would have an effect on food and nutrition security of the most vulnerable groups as it would reduce food access for the poorest people.
The ultimate goal of the workshop was thus to help individual countries to formulate specific frameworks for food security interventions. These programmes would be based on an approach to boost production, availability and access to food for the most vulnerable, and how to cope with higher and more volatile food prices.
Gnagbe said the workshop would put the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme of "increasing food supply, reducing hunger and improving responses to food emergency crises" into action. The framework seeks to increase resilience by decreasing food insecurity and linking the vulnerable people to opportunities for agricultural growth.
Gnagbe said the meeting would also contribute to the Nepad-AU commitment to food security and agricultural development goals, and the achievement of targets and resolutions as set at the Abuja food security summit in December 2006.
The workshop will be held in Centurion from today to Friday.
Participants include Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Swaziland, Uganda, Zambia, Egypt, Nigeria and SA.
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