Africa is blessed with fertile land, plenty of water resources and also young skilled and unskilled labour. Yet, food security is a mirage for most of Africa. Hunger Relief in Africa report (2018) revealed that 239 million people in sub-Saharan Africa (22.8 per cent) were undernourished, the highest in the world. This is despite an
investment in agriculture to the tune of more than US$15 billion to boost its food security during the last 20 years. There are several issues that contribute to the continent’s vulnerability to food insecurity, such as low savings, limited access to finance, insurance and inadequate deployment of technology including mechanization etc. The result is loss of lives, rise in malnutrition, and continuous drop in school enrollment, ruining the economy’s productive capacity.
Food security in Africa, particularly sub-Saharan Africa has been disrupted by successive natural disasters and epidemics largely due to climate change. Cyclones Idai and Kenneth, locust outbreaks in eastern Africa, and droughts in southern and eastern Africa are a few among them. The COVID-19 pandemic is just the latest catastrophe to affect the continent home to 1.3 billion people. The World Economic Forum reports that in most of Africa, people are more likely to die from hunger caused by the economic fallout from the pandemic than from COVID-19 itself.
The measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic have further pushed Africa into a food crisis. Border closures, lockdowns, and curfews intended to slow the spread of the disease are disrupting the already weak supply chains.
Most of the African countries are net importers of food. The continent’s annual import bill for food is close to US$65 billion. Many countries have focused their policies to encourage commercial industrial agriculture with a view to boost exports. The recent global webinar organized by www.trendsnafrica.com and Africa4U on “Africa Matters” had, among other things, focused on the food security and how the continent could leverage its fertile soil and rich flora and fauna to emerge as the global granary. The under-utilized vast tracts of arable land, rich water resources and agrarian mindset of the vast majority of its inhabitants can have a new meaning and context in the post-covid-19 days, when pandemics can disrupt everything including food availability even in the developed world. The world is now looking at increasing food production to feed its 7.8 billion people. That emerging agricultural landscape assigns Africa an important place for agricultural production to beef up world food security.
The webinar also catalogued the critical areas that the continent should focus on, such as facilitating foreign direct investments, supporting large scale industrial production systems that focus on producing raw materials for export markets and the secondary manufacturing industries for processing.
Today, when mobility of supplies has been greatly affected by the existing logistical challenges due to COVID 19, Slow Food, a global, grassroots organization, has urged Africa to focus on strengthening rural small-scale producer communities as well as supporting backyard gardens. With larger farms facing labour challenges and scaling down production, the hope remains in the rural communities that have shown high levels of resilience. The vast but under-utilized resources of Africa’s 33 million smallholder farming families are well poised to help feed Africa. But they can deliver only by connecting them to an ecosystem of partners, by providing access to inputs, capital and markets.
Over and above, the smallholding farmers of Africa should be taught to address the issue of wastages of agricultural produce. Currently, Africa loses food worth $48 billion each year as a result of postharvest losses. Value addition is imperative to avert these losses. In short, in our quest to build a better post-pandemic Africa,
fixing the food systems should be at the top of the list.
