A Call to Action: Working together to boost investment in African agriculture

By Steven Lang

An intricate array of interests is being woven together like fine Kente cloth at the African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) in Accra Ghana this week. At least half a dozen heads of African governments, numerous international financiers and a wide range of NGO heavy-hitters are among the 800 delegates working together to find ways of boosting investments in Africa’s agricultural sector.

The conference is based on the precept that until the African continent is able to feed itself, it will always lag behind the rest of the world. Farming is the backbone of the continental economy, but it still requires considerable support for it to be able to feed its people. The aim of the AGRF is that not only should Africa be able to feed itself but it should also become the bread basket of the world.

This objective was stated in various forms several times during the opening addresses of the first session, but it was treated with a touch of scepticism by panel moderator Tumi Makgabo, who asked, “How can Africa feed the world if more than 300 million Africans go to sleep hungry every night?”

President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Kanayo Nwanze, responded to the challenge saying that “Yes, we can – but the question is when”.

The conference is essentially about this – when can African small holder farmers turn the continent into the world’s breadbasket.
Almost all speakers in the opening sessions identified improving the “value chain” as central towards achieving this goal. This means that commercial value needs to be added at all stages along the extensive process of producing food.

In order for this to happen, governments need to create a policy environment conducive to attracting private investments. Private and institutional investors should be able to see realistic prospects of a return on their investments and the agricultural sector needs to change from subsistence to commercial farming. These goals and imperatives must be synchronised to work in harmony with each other so that all stakeholders can benefit. As Kofi Annan, chairman of the African Green Revolution Forum said, “Partnerships are crucial to success”.

There is broad recognition that Africa is not living up to its potential. Prime Minister of Tanzania Mizengo Kayanza Peter Pinda, described the continent as a sleeping giant. Quoting statistics from a report by the Sustainable Development Networks of the World Bank, he said that less than 10 percent of the 400 million hectares of the Guinea Savannah Zone is being utilised for agricultural purposes.

Peter Pinda stressed the importance of governments in creating the right environment for the Green Revolution and cited the example of Asia where increased food production played a critical role in driving the sustained economic growth of many countries in that region. He said, “Until African countries shape their own agricultural policies, based on their own realities, they will not be able to achieve a sustainable Green Revolution”.

The Tanzanian Prime Minister acknowledged the devastation caused by structural adjustment programmes in the late 1980s and early 1990s. International financial institutions imposed rigorous programmes on African governments in exchange for loans. He said that the result in Tanzania was a massive retrenchment of extension staff, the elimination of subsidies and curtailed funding for agricultural research and foundation seed farms. “The taps dried up, and so did performance of agriculture. The giant slept,” explained Peter Pinda.

Ghana’s Vice president, John Dramani Mahama, also referred to the damage caused by the structural adjustment programmes and described it as a tragedy “that it took us two decades to realise that we were wrong”.

Peter Pinda said that the abolition of input subsidies in the 1980s caused a collapse in fertiliser consumption in Tanzania from 142,676 metric tons in 1991/1992 to 77,557 metric tons in 2002/2003. His government took the decision to change this situation and in 2005/2006 introduced a voucher scheme that rapidly reversed the declining situation so that consumption increased to 260,000 metric tons in 2009/2010.

This dramatic increase in the use of fertilisers has resulted in a concomitant growth in food production so that even while facing serious drought in one third of the country, Tanzania is now able to feed itself and produce a surplus. Peter Pinda said, “The issue is now what to do with the bumper crops that we have produced this year”.

However, Kanayo Nwanze president of IFAD, made it very clear that simply increasing investments and making farmers more productive would not be enough to sustain the agricultural sector and enable the continent to feed the rest of the world. He said that farmers need storage capacity, access roads, means of transport, guidance on packaging and marketing as well as information systems to enable them to know about the best time to take their produce to market.

It is clear that all delegates at the African Green Revolution Forum have the same objective in mind – that is to vastly improve the production of the Agriculture sector in Africa. It is also apparent that there are few substantive differences on how to achieve this goal, therefore it should be reasonably easy to reach consensus at the meeting that Kofi Annan describes as “not a conference, but a call to action.”