Africa can be world’s breadbasket

 NaijaAgroNet:

Paul Kagame, president, Republic of Rwanda and K Y Amoako, founder, African Center for Economic Transformation, a Ghana-based think tank have concurred that Africa can and should be the world’s breadbasket, NaijaAgroNet reports.

The two leaders took this stand in their contribution to Project Syndicate, an organisation that provides readers with original, engaging, and thought-provoking commentaries by global leaders and thinkers. By offering incisive perspectives from those who are shaping the world’s economics, politics, science, and culture, creating an unrivaled global venue for informed public debate.

They argued that to realise this vision – and to do it in an environmentally sustainable way – its agricultural sector must undergo a genuine transformation that entails higher capital investment, significant crop diversification, and improved linkages to burgeoning urban consumer markets.

Africa, NaijaAgroNet gathered, must start manufacturing more value-added food products for both internal consumption and export, especially to countries like India and China, where demand is growing.

From Europe and North America to East Asia and Latin America, agricultural advances have proved to be key precursors of industrial development and gains in living standards.  Africa has the added benefit of technologies that other regions lacked at this stage of their agricultural development, from cost-competitive off-grid solar power to mechanisms for mapping soil characteristics, regulating water use, and ensuring farmers’ access to accurate price information.

And innovation is already happening. Rwanda, for example, is working to link agriculture support with broader services like electricity and education. And the country’s farming communities are pioneering participatory decision-making structures for agricultural planning and conflict-resolution mechanisms to settle disputes among growers, NaijaAgroNet  learnt.

To bolster agricultural innovation and modernisation, governments must ensure that farmers have secure titles to their land, and thus an incentive to make the needed investments. The challenge lies in the fact that, in many parts of Africa, land is communally owned, with almost everyone in a village having traditional rights to some farming land – a system that has helped to prevent landlessness and destitution in rural areas.

Cyriacus Nnaji/ED,OPs

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 Pix: Paul Kagame and K Y Amoako,

China lifts 138m citizens out of chronic hunger

 NaijaAgroNet

The Republic of China has said the country effectively lifted 138 million citizens out of chronic hunger since 1990 and have reached the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the prevalence of hunger ahead of the 2015 deadline, NaijaAgroNet reports.

This revelation, NaijaAgroNet reports, was made during the signing of a $50 million, about N9.94 billion agreement between China and Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) to support developing countries in building sustainable food systems including agricultural value chains, recognizing the growing importance of collaboration between Southern countries in the fight against extreme hunger and poverty. 

Mr. Wang Yang, Vice Premier, China, NaijaAgroNet learnt, said, "China is the leading agricultural producer among the developing countries; FAO is the world's top agricultural organization. We are ready to enhance our cooperation with FAO, which will not only benefit agricultural development and progress toward hunger reduction targets, but also the poor and hungry people of the world."

NaijaAgroNet reports that China's new contribution to the FAO-China South-South Cooperation Trust Fund will support the exchange of Chinese agricultural experts with countries in the global South, particularly in low-income food-deficit areas of Central Asia, the Pacific Islands, Africa and Latin America, over a period of five years.

The Trust Fund has supported knowledge exchanges through 11 country projects and two global initiatives in areas such as irrigation, horticulture, livestock protection, and food processing and marketing. 

During the first phase, Chinese experts deployed to host countries will stay for two-to-three years, train local farmers in using adaptable and affordable technologies for crop, animal and water management, while the second phase will expand on the lessons learned so far, sharing best practices and supporting host countries in developing sound policies, building institutional capacities, facilitating the transfer of new technologies, working with research centres and other partners. 

Cyriacus Nnaji/ GEE

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