Marrakech — The Fourth annual Conference on Cli-mate Change and Development in Africa (CCDA-IV) opened here in Marrakech, Morocco yesterday with a strong focus on how the continent can feed itself.
Addressing the opening ceremony, the Direc-tor, Special Initiatives Division of the UN Eco-nomic Commission for Africa (ECA), Ms. Fatima Denton, told participants that to date agriculture had not served as a transformational hub in fuelling economic growth and propelling industrialization.
Denton said that pre-industrial agricultural in the developed world had largely been predicated on three variables: climate, culture, and the deploy-ment of smart technologies.
"With agricultural transformation, came migra-tion and industrialization, which enabled countries such as Britain to increase both population growth and improving living standards. No industrialized country has achieved sustainable economic growth without a solid agricultural foundation," said Ms. Denton.
She pointed out that the focus of CCDA-IV was driven by the need to ensure that agriculture was embedded into a 'solution space' that would serve not only a risk amplifier but also an opportunity to shift the current modes of production into a viable entrepreneurial activity.
Ms. Denton said climate change remained a double-edged sword and constituted the greatest challenge of our times. "It is also Africa's great-est opportunity to widen out ripples of prosper-ity across our continent", she insisted, adding that
Africa was already defying the rest of world and showing great potential in terms of its macroeconomic growth.
The continent was well poised, asserted the ECA official, to use its resources towards achiev-ing structural transformation and severing ties with poverty for good.
"A two-degree warming will make a mockery of all our efforts to combat poverty, and instead of embalming our stride towards sustainable development, it will reduce the scope we have to make pov-erty a thing of the past", she said.
Africa was one of the few regions where hun-ger and undernourishment continued to claim lives and rob productive sectors of their most basic tools - healthy women and men able to replenish their human and physical capital to stimulate growth in the agricultural sector.
