ECA's Janneh says agric programme CAADP holds key to Africa's food

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Abdoulie Janneh

The Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), Abdoulie Janneh believes that the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) championed by the?African Union (AU) could help Africa achieve food security.

According to the ECA boss, in order to achieve food security, Africa?s agriculture needs to be transformed through an integrated approach to ?more productive, competitive and market-oriented agricultural systems grounded on sustainable farming systems and business models.?

And the AU?s CAADP could help Africa achieve this transformation, Mr Janneh said during a side event on ?Green growth and sustainable development: regional perspectives? organized by the five UN Regional Commissions at the margins of the just ended Rio+20 in Brazil.

CAADP is a coherent African-led and African-owned framework targeted at achieving an annual growth rate of 6 percent in agriculture, ?developing dynamic domestic and regional agricultural markets making Africa an exporter of agricultural products and strategic player in agricultural science and technology development and ensuring sustainable management of the natural resource base.

In a statement issued by the ECA, Janneh said the CAADP offers a sound road map to achieving food security while greening the agricultural sector, through the extension of agricultural area under sustainable land management and water reliable water control systems; improving rural infrastructure and trade related capacities; increasing food supply through improved policies and improving agricultural research, technology dissemination and adoption.

About 30 African countries have signed the CAADP compact which calls for aligning national agricultural development strategies with the CAADP framework, while 24 have prepared an investment plan to implement the compact.

Janneh said that in order for Africa to realize the CAADP promise and its full potential of greening agriculture for enhanced food security, the continent?s farmers should be ?linked backward to agricultural input markets and forward to product markets which, with rapid urbanization, are increasingly demanding for processed food and agricultural products?.

Decisive political, policy and institutional ?actions, according to him are also required to address the current high degree of fragmentation and weak integration of the African agricultural market space along too many national and subregional lines, which, Janneh said, does not provide the incentives for private-sector investment and intra-regional production and trade.

The UN official indicated that fewer than 10 African countries had, themselves allocated 10% of their budget to agriculture as agreed at the African Union Summit in Maputo almost ten years ago.

He observed that that due to years of neglect, African agriculture is still marked by smallholder subsistence farms, low technology agricultural production systems and poor infrastructure while private investment in the sector had been impeded by a lack of enabling policy and institutional environments.

By Ekow Quandzie

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