By Abdi Ali
Published August 10, 2018
Africa has no reason to continue spending US$35 Billion annually on food importation.
Akinwumi Adesina, President of the African Development Bank (AfDB), says all the continent ‘needs to do is to harness the available technologies with the right policies and rapidly raise agricultural productivity and incomes for farmers, and assure lower food prices for consumers’.
Adesina spoke in the US capital, Washington, DC, during a keynote speech delivered at the 2018 Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA) Annual Meeting on August 5, 2018.
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Adesina, a former Minister for Agriculture in Nigeria and winner of the World Food Prize in 2017, not only called for technologies to be made available to farmers across Africa but also for proactive policies to be put in place.
Adesina cited the case of Nigeria, where policy during his tenure as the country’s Minister of Agriculture, resulted in a rice production revolution in three years.
“All it took was sheer political will, supported by science, technology and pragmatic policies…Just like in the case of rice, the same can be said of a myriad of technologies, including high-yielding water efficient maize, high-yielding cassava varieties, animal and fisheries technologies,” he said.
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AfDB says it is currently working with the World Bank, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to mobilize US$1 Billion to scale up agricultural technologies across Africa under an initiative called Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT) that is said to be bringing down some of the barriers preventing farmers from accessing latest seed varieties and technologies to improve their productivity.
“With the rapid pace of growth of the use of drones, automated tractors, artificial intelligence, robotics and block chains, agriculture as we know it today will change,” Adesina said. “It is more likely that the future farmers will be sitting in their homes with computer applications using drone to determine the size of their farms, monitor and guide the applications of farm inputs, and with driverless combine harvesters bringing in the harvest.”
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Adesina used the opportunity to advocate for African universities to adapt their curriculum to enable technology-driven farmers and to focus on agribusiness entrepreneurship for young people, emphasizing the need to rise beyond theories to application.
Adesina, an advocate for the creation of staple crops processing zones across Africa (SCPZs), said, “I am convinced that just like industrial parks helped China, so will the SCPZs help to create new economic zones in rural areas that will help lift hundreds of millions out of poverty through the transformation of agriculture- the main source of their livelihoods- from a way of life into a viable profitable business that will unleash new sources of wealth,” he said.
To help Africa transform its agriculture, Adesina says AfDB is investing US$ 24 billion over the next ten years to implement its Feed Africa Strategy.
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