Africa spent about $35 billion on food imports in 2016, and projections show that if left unchecked, the continent’s food import bill could to surge to $110 billion by 2025.
It’s a perplexing situation, given the continent’s stature as home to 50% of the world’s cultivatable land. How can the continent address its food security woes with such a hefty import bill? The Rockefeller Foundation’s Africa regional office MD Mamadou Biteye argues that now is the time to address tough issues. “This year we need to review leadership, how we are measuring growth, and overall, if we are growing at all,” Biteye said at the 2018 African Green Revolution Forum.
In 2017, the Rockefeller Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) committed to jointly providing up to US$280 million towards agricultural transformation in at least 11 countries in Africa, which would in turn increase incomes and improve the food security of 30 million smallholder households.
In the past two decades, the agricultural sector has seen countless investment commitments with hardly any implementation mechanism to follow suit. Since the establishment of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) in 2003, there has been lax implementation of the pillars of the CAADP. A key pillar was member states committing to increase public investments in agriculture to at least 10% of their annual national budgets by 2008, but many member states fell short.
The Rockefeller Foundation has taken on a different investment approach in 2018, focusing primarily on production in the agriculture sector away from distribution and consumption. “What is important is to ‘take it to the farmer,’” Biteye says, echoing the ideas of Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, a central figure in the green revolution. However, and despite past efforts, the African Development Bank estimates that untapped agricultural potential has contributed to persistent poverty and deteriorating food security in Africa and projects an increase in the number of undernourished people from around 240 million in 2015 to some 320 million by 2025.
The Rockefeller Foundation reasons that poverty and food insecurity are linked, and that solving both calls for a multi-layered process involving multiple actors coming from various perspectives. The foundation has embarked on some unconventional approaches such as supporting the researchers and systems that created the Green Revolution in Asia and Latin America, which helped pull nearly one billion people from the brink of famine.
Although the foundation’s commitments continue to influence an agricultural revolution, the sector must be able to lure the youthful population on the continent. A link between small farms and agribusinesses is essential, creating extended food supply chains, jobs and economic opportunities for large segments of the population. In the words of Econet founder Strive Masiyiwa: “If agriculture is to attract the next generation it must be profitable, competitive and dynamic. Smallholder agriculture, rather than being synonymous with poverty, needs to be profitable enough to attract the young generation.”
With Africa’s agribusiness sector projected to reach $1 trillion in 2025 supported by a rapidly growing middle-income class and the establishment of the African Continental Free Trade Area, agriculture is still the best bet for African economic growth and poverty reduction.
