UN food chief urges African leaders to provide more resources for agriculture

Noting that agriculture supports 70 per cent of the people of Africa, the head of the United Nations agricultural agency has called on the continent’s leaders to give greater priority and allocate adequate resources to the sector in order to develop their economies and reduce poverty and hunger.

“There is now a growing recognition of the key role that the agriculture sector must play in economic development and poverty reduction and the need to reverse trends in resource allocations to agriculture,” UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Director-General Jacques Diouf told a conference of Ministers of Agriculture of the African Union in Maputo, Mozambique, yesterday.

Production and productivity in Africa has fallen substantially in recent years, with the average cereal yield as a whole totalling only about a third of Asia’s and less than half of Latin America’s, Mr. Diouf told the meeting, convened to discuss the agricultural programmes of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD).

“Approximately 200 million people, one third of the population of Africa, are chronically undernourished,” he said. “Around 40 million people are currently facing food emergencies caused by natural and man-made disasters. In addition, FAO estimates that in sub-Saharan Africa AIDS has already killed around 7 million agricultural workers since 1985 and that 16 million more may die before 2020.”

He noted that Africa uses only 1.6 percent of its available water compared to 14 percent in Asia. As a result only 3.8 percent of arable land in sub-Saharan Africa is irrigated compared to 14 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean and 40 percent in Asia.

“There is a need for a comprehensive programme, focusing on water harvesting and conservation and efficient use, irrigation and drainage,” Mr. Diouf he declared. "Such a programme would generate substantial and sustainable increases in farm production as well as reduce the vulnerability of rural communities to future crises."

Mr. Diouf urged swift implementation of NEPAD's Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), which calls for investment in water control and land management, expansion of rural infrastructure such as roads and storage facilities, an increase food supply through competitive production, and adoption of technologies for long-term productivity.

He compared the $19.3 billion annual cost of implementing CAADP to the $19.6 billion Africa spends annually to import agricultural products.