Kampala — IN the 50 years since the era of independence began, Africa has come a long way. Our freedom is enshrined in law. Embassies of African nations operate around the world but we are not fully free and cannot be until we end the chronic hunger that afflicts nearly 220 million Africans every day.

We must grow the food that will free us from hunger and from unsustainable food aid and imports. To do so, we need a policy revolution in Africa.

African smallholder farmers, who grow the majority of Africa's food, face enormous challenges which are now being compounded by the impacts of climate change. The impacts are not only in the future. They are now, in the floods that have devastated Burkina Faso and the droughts that have put nearly 20 million people at risk of famine in eastern Africa.

Africans cannot wait for solutions from outside to address these challenges.

Now is the time for Africa to lead its own development through home-grown policies that correspond to its priorities.

Only in this way can we achieve economic growth needed to lift millions out of poverty. Change must come from the halls of parliament from Abuja, Nairobi, Addis-Ababa, Kampala, Maputo and Dakar, all the way down to the small farms on the lush hills of Rwanda to the sweltering lands of the Sahel.

While the majority of our political leaders come from rural areas, including many of our ministers and heads of state, the misery of the African farmer has continued. It is time for African leaders to lead the way and they have begun to do so. They have committed to achieving 6% annual agricultural growth and to allocating 10% of national budgets to agriculture, under the Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Programme.

International partners are increasing their support for such efforts. But African governments remain handicapped by a policy-making infrastructure decimated by decades of neglect. Africa's policy-making capacity must be reinvigorated and revamped. Honing homegrown policies, no nation can develop unless it takes full control of the policy space and maps its own development.

To spark this effort, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) launched this week a major policy capacity-building initiative.

Its goals are straight forward. We must train a new generation of policy analysts for Africa to shape policy dialogues at national, regional and international levels.

We must strengthen the capacity of parliaments across Africa to engage on evidence-based policy dialogues that will help expand public investments for agriculture. We must strengthen the policy analytical capacity of ministries of agriculture, finance and environment. And we must build the capacity of farmers to engage on effective policy advocacy. We must implement concrete policies that will revitalise African agriculture.

This is the time to replace the old "Washington Consensus" with a new "African Consensus", one that puts the interest of African farmers and economies first. For too long, Africa's lack of internal capacity has kept it reliant on policy analysis generated outside of the continent and often imposed as conditions for receipt of development aid.

Well-intentioned outside advice often fails to respond to the realities of African farmers. Perhaps the most tragic example is the structural adjustment programmes, initiated in the 1980s, that eliminated support systems for African farmers. Today, African farmers are the least supported in the world.

AGRA is working with African and international partners to transform the subsistence farming of smallholders into a productive, efficient, economically viable and sustainable system that can lift millions out of poverty.

This will take comprehensive change, a key part of which is increasing farmers' access to new technologies, such as improved seeds of African staple crops, as well as fertilisers and other inputs.

But technology alone will not bring about food self-sufficiency. A bumper crop of maize is a good thing. But if there is no road to bring it to the market or the market is glutted with maize and prices crash, then it will rot in the fields.

Farmers need access to extension systems, markets and trade. They need access to finance to purchase agricultural technologies. They need tools to adapt to climate change and incentives to mitigate its effects. Women farmers need access to secure land and property rights. Farmers across the continent cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Many do not have boots to start with.

Africa desperately needs to replace policies of abandonment of farmers with comprehensive policies of support, including subsidies where appropriate. This is the only way to unlock the power of agriculture in Africa. And the time for action is now.

To drive the new African Consensus, AGRA will work closely with NEPAD, Economic Commission for Africa and the African Development Bank, regional economic communities and national and regional policy networks. Our goal is not to produce papers that collect dust on shelves. Farmers do not eat policy papers.

What they need, and what we will help them to achieve, are practical and sound policies that will change their lives and enable them to help turn Africa into a breadbasket for the world.

The writer is the vice-president of policy and partnerships at the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa