Apr
23
Improve agriculture to solve food crisis in Africa
April 23, 2008 | | Leave a Comment
By Meryam
The ongoing 12th session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Ghana has placed hunger and food as its top priority. Rising food prices over the past months and the subsequent riots breaking out from Africa to Asia, led UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon to state that UNCTAD “could not have come at a more crucial time.”
“Ghanaian President John Kufuor, whose country is among the worst affected West African countries by rising food prices, expressed the hope that the conference would allow developing countries to strengthen economic cooperation and trade, and increase pressure on rich countries to end agricultural subsidies which worsened poverty in Africa.”
In fact, most of the 3000 delegates from 193 countries attending the conference believe that cooperation among countries in efforts to increase aid for agriculture and abolish rich-nation subsidies is of vital importance to finding a long term solution to the food price crisis.
According to UNCTAD’s secretary general Supachai Panitchpakdi, “A disproportionate amount of aid had been spent on governance initiatives in the developing world in recent decades while agriculture had been neglected.”
Although there have been many calls for increasing food production and developing agriculture, there are many obstacles to this, particularly in Africa. These include a lack of government investment and a scarcity of fertilizers, good irrigation and access to markets.
Said Lawrence Haddad, an economist and director of Britain’s Institute of Development Studies, “Many African farmers are very entrepreneurial, but they simply aren’t connected to markets. They find there are no chilling plants for milk and no grinding mills for coffee.”
Speaking Tuesday at a London summit on the global food crisis, the UN World Food Program’s executive director Josette Sheeran said, “a ’silent tsunami’ of hunger is sweeping the world’s most desperate nations”. According to Sheeran, African governments would need to allocate at least 10 per cent of their future budgets to agriculture.
Ghana, Kenya and Uganda have been singled out as countries doing well to meet the millennium development goals. There are worries however, that the global food crisis will derail this development, and make it even more difficult for African countries to meet the necessary targets.
