The African Development Bank has called on global partners to join hands to lift 1-billion people worldwide out of hunger and is leading the way by investing $24-billion in African agriculture over the next 10 years in the largest such effort ever.
“We are not winning the war against global hunger,” says bank president Akinwumi Adesina, speaking at an agriculture conference at Purdue University in Indianapolis on 25 September.
“We must not get carried away,” he adds, referring to statistics showing a decline in the global population living on less than two dollars per day. In reality, the number of hungry people in the world had increased from 777-million in 2015 to 815-million in 2016, he said citing the latest World Food Security and Nutrition data.
Adesina says that simple technical and scientific methods were already making a whole difference to farm yields and income in Africa. While such technologies to deliver Africa’s green revolution exist, they are mostly just sitting on the shelves, he says.
“The release of water-efficient maize varieties now allows farmers to harvest good yields in the face of moderate drought,” he notes. “Today, rice varieties exist that can give yields of 8 tonnes per hectare. Cassava varieties exist with yields of up to 80 tonnes per hectare. Heat tolerant and disease resistant livestock and technologies for ramping up aquaculture exist.”
Bank experts put current comparative yields at 1,5 to 2 tonnes per hectare for rice and 10 to 15 tonnes per hectare for cassava.
What is needed urgently is deployment of supportive policies to ensure technologies are cascaded down to millions of farmers.
“All Africa 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 says.
The bank has launched its Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT), a $1-billion initiative to extend the use of farm technologies. TAAT is currently engaging seed companies, public and private entities, and financial institutions in 27 countries to make technology available to a total of 40-million African farmers.
Combining targeted subsidies for farmers with a market-based system for rapidly expanding access to financing for farmers and agricultural value chains is the fastest way to get many people out of poverty to a sustained pathway for economic growth, Adesina adds.