Posted on August, 15, 2022 at 08:38 am
From 5-9 September, African and global business leaders will meet in Kigali, Rwanda, for the Africa Green Revolution Forum (AGRF), the continent’s most influential gathering around Africa’s largest economic sector – agriculture and food systems.
This year’s AGRF is probably the most significant since the Covid-19 pandemic, which not only heavily affected the 2020 and 2021 editions of the AGRF, but also the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit. Covid-19 has confirmed that we need to reform our food systems. “Building back better” will not be enough; we need to rethink how we produce, distribute and eat food, and to do this, African political and business leaders must think and act differently, and be willing to set different agendas that transform their food systems.
The 2022 State of Food Security and Nutrition report paints an alarming picture of Africa’s agri-food systems transformation efforts. Despite unprecedented efforts by African heads of state and government to drive regional change through country Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programmes (CAADP), the report indicates that 35m more people were affected by hunger in 2020 compared with 2019, before the Covid-19 outbreak, with an additional 15m in 2021.
The report further shows that 20% of Africa’s population was facing hunger in 2021, compared with 9.1% in Asia. It is in Africa where the population affected by hunger has increased the most compared to other continents. This is of major concern and should worry anyone.
Amid the onslaught of the Covid-19 outbreak, Africa has to battle other crises:
First:Increasing temperatures and changing precipitation patterns threaten Africa’s food and water security. The El Niño-induced drought during the 2015-16 cropping seasons across the Southern African countries led to higher-than-normal temperatures and erratic and low rainfall. The 2019 devastating floods in the greater Horn of Africa, the 2019-20 invasion of desert locusts in Eastern Africa, and the current looming climate-induced famine in the Horn of Africa, for example, have made Africa an exposure and vulnerability hot spot for climate variability and climate impacts.
Second: Around 2019, there came the rise in oil and gas prices – that saw a surge in crucial food commodity prices that saw an over 89% increase in price of major cereals and about a 109% in rise in fertiliser prices all just in 2 years.
Third: And now the Russia-Ukraine crisis is further exacerbating oil and gas prices and increasing global food prices.
The implications for these crises are more severe and Africa and its leaders need to act differently. We are now witnessing the largest cost-of-living crisis in a generation, and people’s capacity to cope is diminishing.
Real incomes are falling and the countries’ revenues and ability to respond are declining. Without robust actions, these changes are pushing citizens and could potentially result in social and political unrest in many countries.
Source: Africa Business