Neels Blom
4 September 2008
Johannesburg — WHILE farmers around the world are enjoying a demand-driven price bonanza, African farmers are the victims of a nearly 50% increase in the price of staple foods over the past year.
In his keynote address on Tuesday at the start of the academic year at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, Nobel Prize winner and former United Nations (UN) secretary-general Kofi Annan drew attention to the fact that food production in Africa has fallen by 12% since 1980 and that the region was the only one in the world where per-capita food output was in decline.
Wageningen University is the foremost agricultural university in the Netherlands and one of the world's leading agri-science institutions.
Annan said that of the 37 countries worst hit by the food-price crisis, 21 were in Africa. "Far from being a bonanza for African smallholder farmers, higher food prices mean yet more hunger.
"Farmers with poor soil, who cannot afford fertiliser or high-yielding seed, and who have no way of getting their harvest to market, cannot benefit from higher food prices. Instead, when their own food stores run out, they must spend even more of their money on even less food."
Although the crisis arrived quickly, it had been in the making for a long time, Annan said. "Africa has faced widespread hunger for decades. Even before the current crisis, 200-million Africans were hungry. In the past five years, the number of underweight children has increased by 12%."
Underdevelopment affects every aspect of food production in Africa, from research and development to the construction of roads connecting rural areas to markets and basic services available to farmers elsewhere. With the exception of large-scale commercial farmers, such as those in SA, most African farmers take all the risks themselves and make do without capital, insurance, price supports and with very little help from their governments.
The root causes of the crisis in Africa have been blamed chiefly on surging fuel prices, an increase in the demand for food (mostly grains), the diversion of food crops to biofuel production (notably US maize production) and extended droughts.
Although SA is the leading maize producer in Africa, with this year's estimate of a bumper crop at about 12-million tons, the demographics of production and the distribution of food between large-scale commercial operations and smallholders mirror that of the rest of Africa.
Annan said the direct causes were worsened by the long-term neglect of agriculture. "This neglect followed a dramatic decline in official development assistance dedicated to agriculture, which fell from 16% in 1980 to less than 4% in 2004.
"Simultaneously, African governments neglected agricultural development, often in efforts to comply with misguided policies of multilateral funders, such as the structural adjustment programmes of the World Bank."
But that may be changing with the founding of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra), Annan said.
The alliance consists of the New Partnership for African Development , the African Development Bank, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the World Food Programme, the US's Millennium Challenge Corporation and the Japan International Co-operation Agency.
Agra aims to achieve an annual increase of agricultural production of 6%. For Africa again to feed itself, the continent needed a green revolution, such as that envisaged by Agra, and one that would require "one of the largest efforts in human history", Annan said.
Most African smallholders work on less than a hectare, facing depleted soils, crop pests, disease and generally low and unreliable rainfall. Only 5% of the arable land in Africa is under irrigation, only 20% of rural people have access to electricity and most farmers can neither afford nor gain access to high-yield seed and fertiliser.
Annan highlighted agricultural education and soil fertility as two areas that require immediate attention, and which were central to Agra's efforts. He pointed out that an average yield of 10 tons per hectare was possible, but that the average in Africa was one ton per hectare.
Soil fertility experts are profoundly lacking in Africa, with 2000 in Nigeria at the high end, while countries such as Malawi, Sierra Leone and Mozambique have about four each. African farmers' use of fertiliser was about a 10th of the world average, Annan said, and they often paid up to six times the world price at a time when that price has tripled.
He called on the international community to take decisive action to help those who were hungry today, but said they should also reinvest in long-term agricultural development now to avoid "hunger tomorrow".
"Only in this way will we speed up Africa's overall economic development, foster rural investment, create jobs and restore the dignity in farming."
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