Press. voanews.com
As Africa
grapples with a severe drought, and famine threatens millions of people,
experts at the World Economic Forum on Africa this week in the South African
city of Durban say food security needs to be a major part of discussions on
advancing the continent economically. The annual World Economic Forum in
Switzerland is usually a high-powered event, but at this week’s Africa meeting
of the international organization, the continent’s big players are welcoming
the humble farmer, now known as the “agripreneur.”
Agricultural
economist Paul Makube, with South Africa’s First National Bank, told VOA it
makes sense to talk about farming when discussing building competitive markets,
and boosting innovation and technology. “For business to prosper, you need a
situation where there is stability, and in terms of food supply, and also
production, for the various regions of Southern Africa and Africa as a whole,”
he said.
Economists and
agricultural experts say, Africa’s current food crisis cannot be blamed solely
on a drought that has devastated large swaths of the continent. Drought, along
with serious conflict, has doomed millions of people to dire hunger in Somalia,
South Sudan and the Lake Chad Basin of West Africa. But, experts say, there are
serious problems in African farming — mainly the inability of subsistence
farmers to make the leap into making a profit.
Their obstacles
include a lack of infrastructure to get goods to markets, competition from
cheap imported food, government policies that do not offer enough support,
unavailability of farmers’ insurance, and limited access to technology. The
Grow Africa partnership works to increase private sector investment in agriculture,
and its executive director, William Asiko, said he has seen the success of
farming cooperatives in his native Kenya.
“Supporting
smallholder commercial farmers has got much more benefit for countries,
certainly it has worked in East Africa, where you have a lot of subsistence
farming and you are now producing surplus with all the work that has been done
with productivity. It is about making sure the cooperative system is working
well so that farmers can aggregate their produce, get a better price at the
market, and then working with processors and making sure the policies are in
place for them to invest and work with these farmers,” he said.
And the problem
is demographic, said Birju Patel of the South Africa-based Export Trading
Group. “The average age of small-scale farmers in Africa is between 60 to 65
years. That is retirement age for everyone in this room, right? Now, how do you
engage the youth to get involved in farming? So that is the big challenge for
us now. And, obviously moving ahead with how the rest of the world is
progressing, we feel technology is going to play a big part in that,” said
Patel.
Growing Africa’s
next crop of agripreneurs will not be easy, experts say. It will take major
investments in money, time, and attention, but they say the fruits of this
labor are necessary to feed this continent’s economic growth.