Mobilising Parliamentary Action towards Agriculture, Food Security and Development in Africa

Mobilising Parliamentary Action towards Agriculture, Food Security and Development in Africa

Dr. Akinwumi Adesina
Vice President (Policy & Partnerships)
Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa

Key Note Address Delivered at the 25th Anniversary of the Association of European Parliamentarians for Africa (AWEPA)
October 2-3, 2009, Cape Town, South Africa

Your Excellencies, The Secretary General of AWEPA, Mr. Par Granstedt, Honorable Members of Parliament from Africa and Europe; Honorable Ministers; Ambassadors; Heads of Diplomatic Missions; business leaders; leaders of farmers’ associations; partners from the civil society; ladies and gentlemen:

Today, I would like to begin with special thanks to AWEPA for inviting me to address this august assembly. The array of leaders here today demonstrates well that your work over the past 25 years in support of democracy and development in Africa, beginning with the struggle against apartheid, is deeply appreciated on the continent. AWEPA rallied friends across the ocean to support the youth, women and men of South Africa who were laying down their lives for freedom. Breaking their own ties to the apartheid regime, the Parliaments across Europe took up the cause of black majority rule and freedom in South Africa.

I bring you greetings from Mr. Kofi Annan, Chairman of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), who congratulates you on your 25th Anniversary. AGRA knows that work with African and European parliaments is essential to success in transforming African agriculture into a highly productive sustainable system that can assure food security and lift millions out of poverty.

It is fitting that we meet here in Cape Town, 15 years after the fall of apartheid. We still behold with awe the sacrifices made in that battle for justice, and we celebrate the gains made since that victory. South Africa has charted a remarkable path, beginning with a peaceful transition to a representative, democratic government. Today, South Africa is the economic powerhouse of the continent and remains a beacon for Africa.

But while we have come a long way as a continent, the journey ahead is daunting still. Today, more than 200 million Africans go hungry every day. More than 33 million children are undernourished. And the hungriest of all are the families of our farmers.

To liberate Africa, we must liberate African farmers from hunger and from poverty. There is nothing more fundamental to the success of democracy than people’s access to food. Africa cannot build democracy on empty stomachs, and the best way to secure the right to food is for Africa to produce its own.

To do so we need a uniquely African Green Revolution, one which transforms the subsistence farming of millions of smallholders into highly productive and sustainable commercial activity. We must move rapidly, putting in place policies, partnerships and programs to trigger comprehensive change across Africa’s agricultural system, change that increases farmers’ productivity, adds value to their goods, moves those goods to markets, increases incomes and employment, and ends the hunger that ravages Africa.

African farmers have long faced enormous challenges. While the majority of the political leaders come from rural areas, including many of our parliamentarians, the misery of the African farmer have continued. We have abandoned our farmers. When I was a PhD student at Purdue University in the United States, I was fascinated by the support provided to farmers by land grant universities and the US Department of Agriculture. The farmers in the US and Europe are among the most fortunate in the world. They receive support in the form of research, extension, access to finance and up-to-date forecasts of market trends. Huge export subsidies ensure their global competitiveness. And when hail or drought destroys their crops, they receive disaster payments.

So great is this support that US farmers produce cotton below the cost of production. This depresses markets for poor smallholder farmers in Mali or Burkina Faso, even though they are more efficient producers. The picture is the same for European farmers, who receive enormous government support of their efforts. All this puts Africa at the receiving end of food aid. Until recently, development assistance for Africa declined steeply: from 18 percent of total assistance in 1979 to 3.5 percent in 2004. And, in the US, even as Official Development Assistance (ODA) to agriculture fell ten-fold, money spent on food aid tripled. Strange: farmers who are supposed to feed Africa are fed on food aid. What a paradox!

The so-called structural adjustment programs of the 1980s, imposed on Africa by the “Washington Consensus” have produced tragic results. African farmers were stripped of everything they needed, including extension, access to credit, and price stabilization systems. As Kofi Annan once said, “There is no farmer more abandoned in the world than the African farmer”. Yet, we know that unless we grow agriculture and support our farmers, we will reap nothing but misery.

Africa fought for liberation from the slave trade and colonization. We are today proud and free. But our freedom is incomplete: Africa cannot feed itself. This, then, is the next frontier for the fight for our total freedom, for a nation that cannot feed itself is free only in words.

Our parliaments must lead Africa to total freedom through developing comprehensive policies and support systems for farmers. Parliaments should become the voice of the rural poor, of women farmers who produce most of Africa’s food, of all our people who desperately need support to break the shackles of hunger and poverty.

Think of the United States of America, where no serious contender for President dare voice lack of support for farmers: that is why all elections start with Iowa, the heartland of US agriculture. During India’s drive for a green revolution, Nobel Laureate Dr. Norman Borlaug once said: “If I was a parliamentarian, I would interrupt the session. Every time I get a chance, I will say ‘seeds, seeds, seeds’. Then I will sit down. I will get up again and say ‘fertilizers, fertilizers, fertilizers’ ”. Dr. Borlaug, the father of the green revolution, which fed Asia, knew the power of parliaments.

Recently, we witnessed a change in India’s ruling party. The change came from the votes of rural folks – the majority of them farmers – who had been left out of trickle-down economics. There is price to be paid when the poor recognize their leaders have not been working in their interest. It should be a wake-up call.

Years ago, when I was a young boy in Western Nigeria, I heard a similar wake-up call. It was 1968, and the farmers in the region were voicing their frustration at the political elites in what became to be known as “Agbekoya” or “farmers refuse to suffer”. "Agbekoya" was a rallying of farmers who marched on parliament to protest the punitive taxes on their cocoa crop. Decked in traditional juju wares and shouting incantations, their voices resonated across the city. The parliamentarians quickly disbanded and ran for their lives. The poll tax was lifted: the farmers’ voice was finally heard.

But change doesn’t have to come this way. Farmers can use the power of their votes to turn around parliaments and ensure that their issues are at the top of the agenda of debate: their issues.

When the global food crisis hit two years ago, nations around the world rallied to the support of their farmers. China put up close to 9 billion dollars in farm support. The Philippines launched a subsidy program of some $1.8 billion. India provided several billions of dollars in farm support programs. But the farms across many African countries were dry, left to fend on their own - abandoned to the forces of markets. As prices for fertilizers rose, farmers could no longer afford them. Yields plummeted. Africa’s food import bill rose to over $20 billion per year, as nations were stretched beyond their budgetary capacities, and food inflation rose, hurting the poor, driving millions more deeply into poverty.

The food crisis turned a commonly accepted economic wisdom on its head: the idea propounded by Nobel economist Amartya Sen that access to food is more important than a nation’s ability to produce food. The global food crisis proved this wrong: even when countries had the resources to buy food, exporting nations banned food exports and imposed high tariffs. The lesson was clear: food is a matter of national security and cannot be left simply to the forces and vagaries of markets.

Africa must arise and change from “policies of abandonment” to policies of comprehensive support for farmers. Such change is what is at the heart of the success of Malawi. With strong political leadership, which included expanding farmers’ access to seeds and fertilizers, Malawi averted famine and became a net exporter of maize. For the past four years, it has been self-sufficient in maize and exported $160 million worth of maize to Zimbabwe. It gave 10,000 metric tons of maize as food aid to Swaziland and Lesotho. This year, it will export maize to Kenya.

The transformation was not a miracle: it came from astute political leadership that rejected the arguments of pundits, instead embracing support to farmers. Malawi went against the grain, and today their stores are full of grain. As in Malawi, Africa needs its own solutions, not those imposed from outside the continent.

And such homegrown changes are coming. On farmers’ fields in Tanzania, a remarkable transformation is underway, initiated through a new government program of farmer support, which includes vouchers used by farmers to purchase seeds and fertilizers from rural agrodealers. Last year, during the pilot program, 700,000 smallholder farmers in the Southern Highlands produced five million metric tons of maize: more than any other region of the country. The World Bank took note, and will provide some $160 million to scale up this program. Such is the power of local change.

On the hills of Rwanda, a revolution is silently on its way. With bold political leadership, aided by government support to farmers, Rwanda has made major strides in food production in the past two years. Food production grew by 15% in 2007 and 16% in 2008, as the country embarked on a green revolution program. This wave of change must sweep across Africa.

Now is the time for Africa to lead its own development, and put in place home-grown policies that correspond to our needs and priorities. Only in this way can we achieve economic growth that lifts millions out of poverty. Change must come as well from our rural villages and towns, where we must support farmers’ efforts to organize themselves into effective bargaining units to trade on favorable terms—whether they are purchasing seeds, selling their produce, or trading carbon sequestered in their fields.

While new agricultural technologies are needed, technologies that exist today could make an enormous difference. The primary challenge is how to get critical farm technologies to farmers. In many parts of Africa, it is easier to find Coca Cola in rural areas than to find improved seeds and fertilizers. Farmers may have to travel as much as 10-30 kilometers in some countries to find these farm inputs.

A market revolution is on its way now in Africa. Rural agrodealers, who have been trained and provided technical and business management skills, and knowledge of farm inputs, are transforming rural input markets.

In work initiated in 2001 with support from the Rockefeller Foundation and continued by AGRA, more than five thousand agro-dealers have been trained. In 2008 alone, they sold over $45 million of improved seeds and fertilizers to farmers in Tanzania, Kenya and Malawi. Agro-dealers have reduced the distance that farmers must travel to buy farm inputs. In western Kenya, this distance has been cut from 17 kilometers to 3 kilometers! Agro-dealers have also made it possible for government-funded "smart subsidy" programs to use the private sector, as farmers redeem their input vouchers from rural agro-dealers.

Local solutions are working!

To take such Africa-driven innovations to scale, governments need to increase their spending on agriculture. The Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Program of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, or CAADP, calls on governments to allocate 10% of their national budgets to agriculture. Progress has been very slow. Only six countries have met this target. Estimates from the International Food Policy Research Institute show that Africa will need $30-38 billion per year to achieve agricultural transformation, not including the costs of infrastructure. By meeting their 10% allocation, African governments would raise at least $20 billion. The increased investments from the European Union – spurred by the work of its parliaments – the US government, and the rest of the G8 should meet the remaining short fall, if they honor their promises.

To effectively advocate for these critical public investments, parliaments across Africa need strong capacity to demand and utilize evidence-based policy analysis for shaping debates on public investments to support agriculture. Many of our parliaments do not have this capacity.

We must turn this around.

AGRA will launch, later this month, a major policy capacity building initiative that will help to revitalize African policy institutions, strengthen capacity of local policy analysts and think tanks and build institutional capacities of agricultural parliamentary committees to help drive much needed policy change. We will work closely with AWEPA, the African Union and the NEPAD Secretariat to coordinate this support across African parliaments.

Public investments must also be matched by private investments. In Africa, strong economic growth rates over the past decade left many commercial banks awash with money. Even today, there is excess liquidity. However, less than 1% of the available domestic private sector financing goes into agriculture – a disturbing fact, since agriculture accounts for 70% of the labor force. The global financial crisis has tightened financial markets, but lessons from Africa could now pave the way for innovative financing for agriculture.

What is critical is to reduce banks’ risks of lending to agriculture, develop appropriate financial products for farmers, improve performance of agricultural markets, and improve farmers’ financial literacy.

AGRA has used these principles to spark a revolution in lending to smallholder agriculture. Using $17 million in loan guarantees to reduce risks of lending by banks, AGRA and its partners have leveraged $160 million in affordable loans from commercial banks in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana and Mozambique. AGRA is now working with partners to develop a syndicated loan guarantee facility that will leverage 1 billion Euros from commercial banks into smallholder agriculture. For this we would need support from our partners in Europe. And we can start this here today!

If farmers are to truly prosper, they must also have access to markets, and this includes markets in developed countries. Africa accounts for less than 2% of total global agricultural trade, a drop from 6% in 1990. We must reverse this trend. And to do so, we must reduce the high tariff and non-tariff barriers to Africa’s agricultural produce. To level the playing field, we must end excessive subsidies to industrialized agriculture that distort the global marketplace. The Doha trade negotiations must finally be concluded putting in place a more equitable global trade system.

Improving market access also means enabling African farmers and businesses to process and add value to their goods. A case in point: while Ghana is the largest producer of cocoa, it exports raw beans and imports fine chocolates processed in Europe. While Nigeria is the largest producer of cassava in the world, it accounts for zero percent of global cassava trade. Uganda, which is the 2nd largest producer of bananas in the world, seats at 75th in terms of exports.

A few years ago I met with the President of Uganda and he bemoaned that while science and technology has helped his country to dramatically raise the yield of bananas, the number one problem now was “what to do with the banana glut and waste”. It is not hard to understand why: the country loses over $150 million annually from spoilage!

To ensure that farmers can benefit from higher yields, we must invest in affordable processing technologies. This includes developing new end uses for the staple crops - bananas for use in starch, cassava for use in high-quality flour, starch, glues and animal feed. Fiscal policies must support this. For example, governments need to reduce taxes on agro-processing equipment, and enact investment policies that encourage agribusiness to locate processing centers close to production zones.

Policy change is needed to ensure women farmers have full and equal access to land, finance, extension and technologies. To organize effectively, farmers need support in the form of training; in basic literacy and numeracy; in management and finance; and to understand and meet new consumer-driven demands for standards and labeling.

But the future challenges to agriculture will be enormous – especially from the impacts of climate change. Although Africa accounts for only 3% of total global carbon emissions, it must now bear the brunt of climate change. The estimated impacts could be as high as $130 billion. Predictions show that the frequency of droughts and floods will increase. The impacts are not only in the future: we can already see them in the floods that have devastated Burkina Faso and the droughts that have left thousands of livestock dead in northern Kenya. Africa urgently needs policy, technology and institutional innovations to help smallholder farmers adapt to climate change.

To enable farmers to adapt, we must improve early warning systems and invest in better technologies for water management, including small-scale irrigation. To adapt, farmers need affordable weather-indexed crop insurance, drought-tolerant varieties of staple food crops, and conservation of crop biodiversity that underpins all agriculture.

Africa’s farmers can and must adapt to climate change. But they can do more. They can be part of the global solution, helping to tame climate change. As we improve the productivity and sustainability of existing farmland, we will slow down the clearing of forests for cultivation. As we improve our depleted farm soils, African farms can transform from being carbon sources to being carbon sinks. Farmers can sequester millions of tons of atmospheric carbon in our soils, crops and through agro-forestry.

This raises a critical question for the Parliaments of Africa and Europe: how to reward Africa’s farmers for both avoiding deforestation through intensified production on existing land, and for sequestering carbon through improved land use practices. After all, these changes do not come free. For providing not only food, but also a global public good, Africa’s farmers must be compensated. African carbon must count on the global carbon market. Let's be very clear: Agriculture in Africa is a solution to climate change.

We cannot wait for the COP15 in Copenhagen to produce solutions. Here at home, we need a sustainable and uniquely African Green Revolution that benefits human well-being, the environment and the climate. Globally, we must insist on a fair carbon market, one which fully accounts for the benefits of environmentally sound farm land management. Africa cannot hold its breath. We must be proactive. It is in Africa’s own interests to save our environment and to develop our agriculture as a diverse, high-productivity, low-carbon system. One concrete measure African governments can take is to float carbon bonds on national and regional stock markets. People will buy the bonds, and governments can use the income to compensate farmers for carbon sequestration and for conservation of our forests.

Finally, we must marshal critical masses of resources where they will make the biggest difference – in Africa’s high-potential breadbasket areas – areas with relatively good soil, rainfall, infrastructure, and large numbers of smallholder farmers. There, public-private partnerships, including with farmers’ organizations and civil society, can work together to grow more food, sustainably and efficiently.

The rush for land in Africa by foreign governments and companies is not the solution to African agriculture’s challenges. The solution will come when African smallholder farmers are supported to be productive, efficient and competitive. Africa’s lands are not up for a garage sale. By investing in its own breadbasket areas, African countries will be able to produce enough food to meet their food needs and export the surpluses.

African farmers have waited long enough. The time for transformative change is now.

Parliaments all across Africa, in partnership with those of Europe, should rise in support of African farmers. You are the voices of our people – the leaders of our pathways for development. The time for Africa’s green revolution is now. Let us together unlock the power of agriculture. Let us make agriculture a source of wealth that will transform the future for millions of our children.

The future depends on your bold leadership. It was Nelson Mandela who said “there is no such thing as part freedom”. Let us resolve to march on to full freedom, when our peoples will be free from hunger and poverty. Let us together hasten the coming of the day when our fields are filled with plenty; when our barns overflow; when our children dance in our fields; and when the uniquely African green revolution is achieved.

All this will happen with your support and leadership! We know you can, and we are confident you will!

I thank you.

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About the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)
AGRA is a dynamic partnership working across the African continent to help millions of small-scale farmers and their families lift themselves out of poverty and hunger. AGRA programmes develop practical solutions to significantly boost farm productivity and incomes for the poor while safeguarding the environment. AGRA advocates for policies that support its work across all key aspects of the African agricultural value chain ­from seeds, soil health and water to markets and agricultural education.

AGRA's Board of Directors is chaired by Kofi A Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations. Dr Namanga Ngongi, former Deputy Executive Director of the World Food Programme, is AGRA's president. With support from The Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the UK's Department for International Development and other donors, AGRA works across sub-Saharan Africa and maintains offices in Nairobi, Kenya, and Accra, Ghana.