During a recent UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) meeting, the spokesman for the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) said that the current global recession was simply ‘masking the next storm’. Akinwumi Adesina reported that global food supplies were far from secure and that market speculation, climate change and crop diversity were all major threats in the near future. While global grain reserves had been replenished in the last couple of years, this was simply a short-term achievement, but global food security, he said ‘remains a goal, not a reality’.
Food protests decline but food security doesn’t improve
Staple crop prices have declined rapidly from the 2008 peaks, which saw protests across the developing world at the unaffordable prices being charged for necessary foodstuffs, but this hasn’t solved an underlying problem which AGRA says is the lack of investment, infrastructure and markets for African farmers. The ‘green revolution’ they seek is one that has already happened in Europe and America and is happening in Asia and Latin America where crop yields have become higher, but Africa continues to produce a quarter of the world’s global crops – an average that has been maintained for more than thirty years.
Investors need to help farmers preserve variety
AGRA called for international agencies and financiers to increase their investment in Africa, especially in providing small loans to small farmers. Maintaining the diversity of African crops would be important, AGRA says, in preventing plant diseases such as the potato blight that historically caused famine in Ireland—such diseases, if they affected wheat or rice on a global scale, could cause global famine in our increasingly integrated world. Africa mainly has small farmers who use crop rotation, growing corn, peanuts, rice, cowpeas and sweet potato in rotation, saving their own seed and often growing very localised varieties that are adapted to specific geographic or soil conditions. This means there is vast diversity, but such variability in crops is not rewarded by a global market that wants vast amounts of a single crop which all conform to specifics on appearance, weight, colour and taste. AGRA agreed with the International Food Policy Research Institute’s figures, which say that between $32 billion and $39 billion annually will be needed to achieve a sustainable agricultural transformation.
African roadside harvest courtesy of whiteafrican at Flickr under a creative commons licence
[...] 16 and 18 November 2009, a World Summit to consider issues of food security will take place at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in [...]