Working towards feeding Africa’s many hungers

One of the ironies is the fact that while Africa has one of the largest arable and fertile land in the world, its population suffers the most hunger and starvation. Africa’s agricultural output is way below its massive potential, making it a net importer, rather than a net exporter of food.

According to the African Development Bank (AfDB), the continent accounts for a third of the people suffering from hunger worldwide, which is an equivalent of 249 million out of 828 million people.

The Pan-African bank also says that with 65 percent of the remaining of arable land, Africa has potential to feed nine billion people globally by 2050. Its vast savanna areas alone are estimated at 400 million hectares, of which only 10 percent is cultivated.

The perpetual lack of food security has denied the continent a healthy and thus more productive population. Moreover, Africa loses billions of dollars every year both by importing food from other continents, and lost opportunities to sell agricultural produce and various foodstuffs in overseas markets.

This growing realization has in recent years jolted players in Africa’s agricultural sector to seek practical solutions to restore the continent’s food security. It forms the backdrop in which heads of State and non-State actors like development partners and the private sector are currently meeting in Dakar, Senegal from January 25 to 27 for the Dakar 2 Summit dubbed, “Feed Africa: Food Sovereignty and Resilience”.

The Dakar 2 Summit is the second edition after the first one was held in 2015, during which the Feed Africa: Strategy for Agricultural Transformation in Africa (2016-2025) of the African Development Bank Group was proposed.

Organized by the AfDB, Senegal and the African Union Commission, the forum comes at a time when Africa is undergoing grave food security challenges due to both man-made and natural reasons. The high-level participants are out to create strategies on how the continent can exploit its agricultural potential by scaling up production in the farms.

The work in Dakar is cut out for the participants. Experts say that Africa's underdeveloped agriculture is characterized by over-reliance on primary or subsistence agriculture, low fertility soils, significant food crop loss both pre- and post-harvest, minimal value addition and product differentiation, and inadequate food storage and preservation. These result in significant commodity price fluctuation.

Africa is also currently reeling from the unprecedented rise in the cost of food. Like elsewhere in the world, inflation has led to the doubling of food prices, mainly as a result of the almost one-year Russia-Ukraine war. This has been as a result of the economic sanctions facing Russia’s grain exports, and the inability to import grain, fertilizer and vegetable oils from both of the warring countries.

However, Africa is not sitting helplessly and waiting for help, both at national and continental levels. One of the best success stories involves agricultural cooperation with China, which has become a leading partner in several other sectors.  

In 2017, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) unveiled its China-Africa Agricultural Cooperation Strategy under the direction of the Board, and its Partnership for Inclusive Agricultural Transformation in Africa.

AGRA states that the objective is to collaborate with partners in China and Africa to assist, ignite, scale, and sustain the transformation of inclusive agriculture in Africa by utilizing China's public and commercial resources - financing, knowledge, product and technology.

AGRA has already recorded huge gains in this partnership in five key areas which include rice, mechanization and agricultural value chain development, youth capacity building and agricultural extension and, digitization for agriculture.

In the last 10 years, China has actively helped Africa to build systematic and industrialized supply chains to boost agriculture in the continent, a field in which China has great expertise and experience.

Through the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), China-Africa agricultural cooperation has yielded fruitful results and delivered tangible benefits to the African people. For instance, the millet processing factory built by Zhongdi Overseas Agricultural Development Company in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso's capital, has helped increase market demand for millet, thus motivating farmers to grow more plants.

The Chinese company has helped in value addition by building a factory to process millet into cookies, doughnuts, and other foods. With the processing plant, millet is collected from local farmers, which in turn can promote upstream cultivation. The millet yield in Burkina Faso also increased from 0.65 tons to 0.82 tons per hectare, increasing the crop’s output by a total of 200,000 tons.

The "Small Technology, Big Harvest" project, a collaboration between the China Agricultural University and Tanzania's Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania, has helped Tanzanian farmers triple their maize production by providing planting techniques.

As of mid-November, 2021 the project had covered more than 1,000 local farmers and over 10,000 mu (666.7 hectares) of land. Previously, Tanzanian farmers could only grow 1,000 to 2,000 maize plants per mu. A large number of unregistered farmers were also using the new technology.

Ultimately, with China helping to build infrastructure such as roads and railways in Africa, improved transport will help to link demand and supply of agricultural products, which will greatly motivate farmers to increase their food output.

The writer is the Executive Director of South-South Dialogues and a PhD student in International Relations at USIU-Africa.