Posted on May, 22, 2025 at 11:32 pm
Feeding Africa is no longer a matter of moral persuasion, but rather, it is an economic, security and sovereignty imperative.
The African Union’s new Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP) Strategy and Action Plan, endorsed at the Kampala Summit in January 2025 and officially launched in early May in Johannesburg, South Africa, sets ambitious targets for the continent's agriculture sector.
The CAADP strategy calls for a 45 per cent increase in agrifood output, a 50 per cent cut in post-harvest losses, a tripling of intra-African food trade and a rise in locally processed production to 35 per cent of agrifood GDP — each to be met by 2035.
If those numbers sound daunting, consider the cost of failure, which would exacerbate the already substantial food import bill, exceeding USD 50 billion. Failure will also widen trade deficits, and almost a billion Africans will be unable to access a healthy diet.
The Strategy and action plan targets flow directly from Agenda 2063’s pledge to modernise African agriculture and eliminate hunger. It is predicted that Africa’s population will reach 2.5 billion by 2050, climate shocks will intensify, and external supply chains will grow more precarious, making the need for the continent to feed itself even more urgent.
Consider how food prices and suppliers were disrupted at the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war and the Covid-19 crisis. Hunger currently affects one in five citizens; half the continent’s households are food-insecure; and stunting, wasting, and obesity now coexist in the same communities.
Against this backdrop, “business as usual” is a guarantee of a recurring crisis. What makes the CAADP strategy bankable is its unmistakably systems-wide logic. Food security is not a tap to be opened with a bigger fertiliser subsidy; it is a spider’s web in which inputs, production, processing, logistics, finance, and diets reinforce or weaken each other.
A fertiliser shortage in Morocco raises costs for maize growers in Malawi, which tightens supply for millers in Johannesburg. Equally, secure land rights for Ghanaian women lift yields, generate surpluses for regional trade, expand local processing, and improve household nutrition from Accra to Ouagadougou.
These feedback loops are why the CAADP strategy weds its production goal to loss-reduction, trade facilitation and value-addition objectives instead of chasing them in isolation. It also calls for all African nations to get involved.
Roughly 60 per cent of Africa’s soils suffer medium-to-severe degradation, yet high-resolution soil maps, climate-smart seed and precision-blended fertilisers already exist.
The plan mandates functional seed laws, revitalised research networks and digital advisory services that reach women and young farmers as a priority—an essential correction when female producers still harvest barely two-thirds of the yields their male counterparts achieve.
The Maputo and Malabo declarations asked national treasuries to allocate at least 10 per cent of public budgets to agriculture. Two decades on, only a handful of states have complied.
Consequently, the CAADP strategy proposes USD 100 billion in fresh public and private capital by 2035. This ring-fences 15 per cent of agrifood GDP for annual reinvestment and instructs states to deploy blended finance guarantees that lower risk for commercial lenders.
The plan calls on policymakers to be more intentional and innovative in financing agriculture on the continent. They cannot, for example, treat green irrigation bonds and warehouse-receipt facilities as social projects; they are now tools of macro-stability and critical in spurring increased agricultural productivity.
In addition, processing and storage represent the next frontier. Post-harvest losses average almost a third of output across sub-Saharan Africa. Halving those losses is equivalent to opening new cropland the size of Côte d’Ivoire without clearing a single additional hectare. However, aggregators, cold-chain operators, and food-park developers will not invest unless logistics corridors are functional.
The CAADP strategy pairs its loss target with commitments to build regional “food baskets” and trade corridors capable of moving surplus grain from production centres into deficit urban markets as quickly as price signals demand.
Ultimately, trade is where the continental vision will live or die. Intra-African food trade hovers below twenty percent of total food commerce, largely because trucks spend more time at border posts than on tarmac. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) offers the legal framework to dismantle those barriers, but protocols alone do not lift border gates.
Customs agencies must share data, ports must honour a 48-hour turnaround norm, and regional courts must penalise ad-hoc export bans. Under CAADP’s new scorecard, governments will face a biennial public ranking on trade facilitation—an instrument that could do for freight what mobile-money rankings did for telecom reform.
To achieve this goal, the citizens of Africa must hold their governments to their spending pledges, expose border gridlocks that obstruct grain flows, champion women-led agribusinesses breaking export ceilings, and demand that every finance bill is audited against Kampala’s metric.
Finally, development partners, on their part, must retire boutique pilot projects and align portfolios with the continental roadmap. Agenda 2063 envisions an Africa that feeds itself and trades confidently with the world.
The blueprint is on the table, the targets are inked, and the finance pathways are mapped. The decisive question is whether national leaders, regional blocs and citizens will insist on execution with the same zeal they devoted to drafting the plan. A continent that nourishes its people is not a development cliché; it is the foundation of prosperity, stability and self-determination.
Source: Nation