Another Strong Call for an African Green Revolution

The call for an African green revolution was voiced from several quarters at the 2008 FAO regional conference for Africa. The meeting, held in Nairobi just two weeks after the food crisis conference in Rome, addressed the continents specific needs and challenges, with African leaders reminding each other of their own commitments and shortcomings in financing the revolution.

The 25^th FAO regional conference on Africa was held at the UN center at Gigiri, in the outskirts of the Kenyan capital, June 16–20, 2008. Parallel to the conference, more than 20 African civil society organizations met, urging African institutions to offer solidarity and provide technical support to civil society networks working on food security, and calling on African countries to fulfill the commitment of allocating a minimum of 10 per cent of their national budgets to agricultural development.

Lagging behind Maputo

The 10 per cent target was set during the African summit in Maputo, 2003, when the so-called Maputo Declaration on agricultural development was adopted. Since then, the progress toward allocating a tenth of national budgets to agriculture has been slow. According to figures presented by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), only vied countries have met the target: Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Malawi. Another country that may follow suit is Tanzania, where lawmakers in early June appealed for budget allocations for agriculture reaching 10 percent.

Among the countries falling short of the target is Kenya, spending about five per cent. At the opening of the FAO conference in Nairobi, Kenya’s president Mwai Kibaki called for urgent and decisive action to curb the rising food prices, challenging the participants to come up with practical recommendations that would help in permanently resolving the food crisis that has affected large parts of society in a number of African states. In particular, Kibaki pointed at the underutilized water resources of Africa, valuable both for crop production and the production of high-value freshwater fish.

Scaling up agricultural water management was one key topic at the conference; others were intra-Africa trade; sustainable land management; urbanization and food security; agrarian reform and rural development; knowledge exchange; global and regional emergency issues.

Kenya’s agriculture minister William Ruto said that donors and NGOs alike have underinvested in agriculture in Africa over the past three decades, also pointing fingers at African governments saying that agriculture is the engine of economic growth, yet failing to allocate sufficient funds or adopt appropriate policies. Ruto also appealed to the international community to increase support for agriculture research initiatives in developing countries to help the poor nations avert food crisis.

“Despite the efforts that have been made, African agriculture still faces many constraints, being undercapitalized, inefficient and uncompetitive,” the FAO Director-General, Jacques Diouf, said in his key address to the conference.

Among the factors inhibiting overall agricultural development in Africa, Diouf pointed at:

• Water control, with as much as 93 percent of arable land dependent on unpredictable rainfall, a high risk of drought and only 4 percent of available water reserves used for irrigation, compared to 14 percent in Asia.
• Land, with only 14 percent of Africa’s 184 million hectares of arable land under cultivation and some 21 million hectares in a state of accelerated degradation.
• Fertilizers, with Africa using only 23 kilos of fertilizer per hectare of arable land compared to 151 kilos in Asia. Fertilizer use is even lower in sub-Saharan Africa, at only 9 kilos per hectare.
• Scarcity of seeds, with access to improved seeds constrained by high costs and limited supplies on the local market.

Calling for a Revolution

The call for Africa’s own green revolution was voiced once again in Nairobi – and parallel with the conference. In an article printed in several African papers, Graca Machel shared her deep concern about the food situation, and how it may affect the struggle against poverty. Machel, a member of the Africa Progress Panel, which in mid-June presented its new report (“Africa’s Development: Promises and Prospects”), warned that recent years’ gains in African development is likely to be lost if the food crisis is not tackled. “If the scale of the emergency is not acknowledged, or the response to it is delayed, then we will see an increase in hunger and malnutrition. The cost of food will not only be measured in the price of wheat or rice, but also in the rising number of infant and child deaths across Africa."

“As Africans we must take responsibility for the fundamental, structural problems with agricultural productivity on our continent,” Machel writes, continuing: “With the lowest use of fertilisers in the world, average grain yield in Africa is less than one ton per hectare, equivalent to just one quarter of the global average. Our population has increased, yet African agricultural yields have stagnated since the early 1960s. We must, therefore, raise agricultural productivity and increase food production. This includes reforming outdated policies and investing in key inputs such as fertiliser, improved seeds, effective water management and new crop varieties, and linking farmers to markets via investments in basic infrastructure. Africa needs a green revolution. If the challenge seems daunting, then there is some comfort in knowing that the expertise and the experience exist.

The debate on an African green revolution heating up, Josh Ruxin, a development expert of Columbia university in Nairobi stated that: "What is clear is that if there's a green revolution in Africa, it's not going to look like the green revolution in Asia." "It will not be about exporting huge amounts of food, but it will be about millions of people in Africa being able to feed themselves and to afford things like health care, education for their kids. And that in itself would be revolutionary."