Lessons from the Global Food and Financial Crisis: Trade and Development to Unlock Growth in Africa's Breadbaskets

Keynote Address delivered by
Dr. Akinwumi Adesina
Vice President, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)

United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)
47th Executive Session of the Trade and Development Board
30 June 2009, Geneva, Switzerland

Secretary-General Mr. Supachai Panitchpakdi; Honourable Ministers; Heads of agencies; farmer leaders; partners from the civil society; Ladies and gentlemen:

I want to begin by thanking the Board of the United Nations Conference Trade and Development (UNCTAD) for convening this executive session on the lessons of the food crisis, and for the special attention UNCTAD continues to devote to food security in Africa. I also want to thank you for giving me, as a representative of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, the opportunity to speak to you. The Chairman of our Board, Mr. Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations, extends his warm regards. We know how critically important this meeting is to our work.

We are here to share the lessons from the recent global food crisis, particularly for Africa, where one-in-three people were hungry even before that crisis hit. UNCTAD is in a unique position to not only summarize those lessons but also to apply them to generate a new model for African development -- one which can succeed!  

When AGRA was launched -- created through the collaboration of The Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and now with support the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) -- we knew we faced stiff challenges. We did not know that our first two years would be shaped by the worst global food crisis and financial meltdown in living memory, adding yet more urgency to our work.  

AGRA’s programs and partnerships work toward one main goal: achieving a food-secure and prosperous Africa. Since our founding, AGRA has expanded from one program focused on Africa’s seed systems to four integrated programs in seeds, soils, market access and policy and a cross-cutting initiative on innovative finance for African agriculture.    

Today we are working with our partners to catalyze a uniquely African Green Revolution -- one that promotes equity, protects the environment and promotes change across the agricultural system. Our new strategy calls for focusing this work where it will make the biggest difference -- in Africa’s high-potential breadbasket areas. And, it puts Africa’s agricultural development where it belongs -- at the center of the continent’s response to the global food and financial crisis.
 
Our vision cannot be realized without science and technology that serves the needs of Africa’s millions of smallholder farmers. It cannot be realized without an enabling policy environment, on matters of trade and development, at global, regional and national levels.  Only with such an environment will the benefits of science and technology reach Africa’s millions of smallholder farmers, who grow the vast majority of our staple crops.  

Today I’d like to briefly address where we are, and how we got here. And by “we”, I mean the global community for Africa’s development. I’d also like to discuss how we can work with UNCTAD and the rest of the development community to end widespread hunger and poverty and catalyze a uniquely African Green Revolution.


Where We Are: The Continuing Challenge of Food Security in Africa

When I was a small child growing up in Nigeria, my father, who was a government accountant in the city, sent me to school in a village. Having grown up himself as a farmer -- and unable to attend school until the age of 15 years -- he was determined that I should understand the realities faced by resource-poor farmers. And I grew to understand them very well. I went to school, religiously, but many of the children of farmers did not have the same luxury. They worked in the fields to help eke out a living for their households. Every day, I saw the harsh impact of rudimentary farming on the livelihoods and health of rural families. I learned at an early age that to end poverty in Africa we must promote farming as a business -- not just a way of life.

But the reality today is that the situation I grew up with has not changed much. While yields across the globe, especially in Asia and Latin America, have steadily increased, the yields of Africa have remained constant -- sitting at about one-quarter the global average. Most farmers work without access to basic farm inputs, finance or markets. And the women, who carry the lion’s share of farming, do so with unequal access to secure land, finance, and education.

If anything, for millions of farmers the situation has worsened, as they cope with depleted soil, mounting population pressures, and diseases like HIV/AIDS.

Indeed, the African Green Revolution must cope with an unprecedented challenge: climate change. Production shocks from floods and drought will increase risks faced by farmers. The International Livestock Research Institute has estimated that maize yields -- already low -- could drop as much as 20 percent by 2050. Climate change in Africa will unleash unforeseen social and environmental costs. What we are witnessing today in the Horn of Africa -- 17 million people affected by drought and poor rains who must depend on food aid -- is but a glimpse of things to come.

While Africa did not cause climate change, we now bear its brunt. We must move quickly to put in place institutional and scientific innovations that reduce farmers’ vulnerability to climate change and help mitigate its effects.

All hands must be on deck. And this means farmers’ hands, for only when millions of smallholder farmers have access to tools such as drought-resistant crops (using conventional breeding and tools of biotechnology), improved technologies for water and soil management and affordable weather-indexed crop resistance will these tools truly make a difference, and enable farmers to cope with the changes ahead.  

In all of this, there are numerous obstacles to overcome. To do so, we can begin by drawing lessons from the recent the food crisis, and its runner-up: the policies of neglect toward Africa’s smallholder farmers which created a perpetual crisis of food insecurity in Africa.


Lessons Number One: We Cannot Let History Repeat Itself

The extreme difficulties smallholder farmers face today, though similar to those of yesterday, are not the result of stubborn facts of life. Rather, they are the outcome of missed opportunities and decisions made at the highest levels of global institutions and national governments over at least the last 30 years.

The Asian Green Revolution, which did so much to end the hunger of millions and raise the agricultural productivity and national economies of countries from India to Thailand, by-passed Africa. Its technologies focused on a limited range of large cropping systems and irrigation, and as a result were poorly suited for Africa’s diverse agro-ecologies and rain-fed farming.

Nonetheless, by the 1970s, with government support, agriculture in a number of African countries was on a strong development track. Farmers were getting access to the good seeds and fertilizers they needed. Malawi, Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe were exporting maize to the world. But this success was not to be sustained.

It was cut short by the structural adjustment policies of the 1980s, based on the  “Washington Consensus” regarding African development. These policies called for liberalization of markets, privatization of government parastatals, drastic reduction of the role of government in agriculture, cancellation of subsidies for farmers, and cuts in public expenditures -- including for agricultural R&D and extension. While structural adjustment removed some of the worst distortions in the agricultural sector, especially taxation of agriculture, it resulted in the abandonment of support for smallholder farmers.

These policies assumed that the private sector and market forces would rise to fill the gaps. But reality intervened. The private sector was too weak to fill in, and smallholders suddenly found themselves deserted.

The era of structural adjustment coincided with a dramatic downturn in Official Development Assistance (ODA) for agriculture and on spending for agricultural research, along with an evolving global trade regime that left Africa out in the cold. African farmers were abandoned, by their governments and the world.

Today, millions of farmers remain in deep poverty traps, unable to afford farm inputs, lacking access to extension and to markets, and experiencing unstable prices for their farm products. The private sector remains under-developed and financing remains limited. That Africa suffered as a continent should be no surprise.  

Despite enormous setbacks to its development, by the early years of the new Millennium, many countries of sub-Saharan Africa were again on a growth track -- such is the determination of Africa! Dozens of African countries were registering 5 or 6 percent annual growth. Among those with the strongest growth were countries that had invested in agriculture.  

The commitment of African governments to agricultural development was further strengthened in 2003, when countries adopted the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP), initiated by African Union’s New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development. CAADP called for governments to put 10 percent of their national budgets into agricultural development, with the aim of achieving 6 percent annual agricultural growth.  

Along with the dawn of the new millennium and the forging of the Millennium Development Goals, came signs of renewed commitment by developed countries to support Africa’s growth. Perhaps the strongest such sign was the G8 agreement to double Official Development Assistance to Africa, to $25 billion a year by 2010.

But even as Africa’s future prospects brightened, another reality intervened. Since 2006, the global food crisis has wreaked havoc with African economies. When it hit, Africa’s agricultural development was still far below the threshold needed to enable our farmers to help supply global food needs. Rather, Africa was doubly battered by low productivity at home and rising global prices for food imports and fuel.

Then, hot on the heels of this crisis came an equally devastating blow, a global financial meltdown. As national economies of the developed world reel, as the markets for African commodities and niche products contract, as credit tightens and remittances slow, Africa is again watching its precious progress unravel.

This, then, is our first lesson: We cannot let history repeat itself. We cannot once again allow Africa’s farmers to be abandoned! It is essential that African governments stand up and support their farmers, and that the developed world uphold its commitments to African development.


Lesson Number Two: We need an African Consensus

This will only happen when we develop an “African Consensus” that puts an indisputable priority on smallholder-based agricultural development.

Other regions of the world rose to the challenge of the food and financial crises by dramatically increasing support to their farmers. Nations around the world have provided billions of dollars of support for farmers -- ranging from $8.5 billion in China, $1.8 billion in the Philippines and tens of billions of dollars in India. Asia today has a great chance of achieving its second green revolution. Most African governments have yet to extend the helping hand their farmers so desperately need, yet the continent desperately needs its first green revolution.

In the meantime, the global food supply remains far from secure. And, although the global food price crisis has lulled, research assures us that this is merely the calm before the next storm: We have not yet tamed the forces of speculation, climate change will yet trample our farm fields, crop diversity remains under increasing threat. Global grain reserves may be replenished for the time being, but global food security remains a goal, not a reality.   

Africa, and the world, need to turn a new page.

Today we need an “African Consensus” on policies to rapidly trigger agricultural productivity growth through a uniquely African Green Revolution -- one which promotes equity, protects the environment, and brings about comprehensive change across the agricultural system.  

And, an African Consensus is emerging among key players in Africa’s agriculture sector.

First, as I mentioned earlier, is CAADP, a regional framework to guide agriculture toward the 6 percent annual growth. While progress has been slow, countries such as Ethiopia, Rwanda, Mali, Tanzania and Malawi have increased the share of allocations to agriculture.

Second is the emergence of technological advances that address Africa’s challenging conditions. Look, for example, at the development of improved crops such as New Rice for Africa (NERICA), and drought-tolerant maize varieties by the CGIAR centers; or at the breeding of locally-adapted, high-yielding African staple food crops by AGRA’s own Program for Africa’s Seed Systems (PASS); or innovative methods to restore soil fertility such as fertilizer microdosing.  

Third, African nations are slowly returning to policies of support for their farmers. At the top of this policy agenda are reforms that make farm inputs affordable for smallholder farmers. For this to occur there must be strong political will and a willingness to break with old orthodoxies. This kind of political will is at work in Malawi today, transforming a once hungry nation into a breadbasket with record food surpluses for the past four years.

With the use of “smart subsidies” -- better called “growth enhancement support” -- Malawi has unlocked the poverty traps holding down smallholders, and enabled them to develop more productive and profitable farms. These policies target resource poor farmers, enabling them to access improved seed and fertilizer, while also supporting growth of the private sector.  
 
Malawi has now exported more than $160 million worth of maize to its neighbors, and gave 10,000 metric tons as food aid to Lesotho and Botswana when they were in the midst of drought. And last year Malawi’s economy grew a stunning seven percent -- one of the highest in the world. Such is the power of agricultural technologies in the hands of poor farmers. Recognizing this success, other countries, including Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya and Nigeria are putting in place similar smart subsidy programs.

Comprehensive policy support includes policies that facilitate trade: both within Africa and between Africa and other world regions. The International Food Policy Research Institute estimates that the value of staple food crops in Africa exceeds $150 billion per year, compared to the gross value of the traditional export crops of $8.5 billion per year, and non-traditional export crops (especially horticulture and fish) of $7.8 billion per year.  Yet only a fraction of this $150 billion reaches the market. Unless regional markets are expanded, increased food production in the breadbasket areas will lead to price collapse and erosion of income gains.

Trade rules, such as export bans, which limit intra-regional trade, must be eliminated, along with tariff and nontariff barriers, while also harmonizing food grades and standards within the region.

Change must not only emanate from our statehouses, but also in rural villages and towns, where farmers must organize themselves into effective bargaining units to trade on favorable terms. They need support in the form of training: in management and finance and to meet new consumer-driven demands for standards and labeling. Most smallholders cannot pay simple costs of transport, let alone the costs of certification. In Kenya, such conditions have driven smallholders’ share of horticulture exports down from 80 percent to 30 percent.

For an African Consensus to fully emerge, African governments must embrace the responsibility and opportunity that is theirs: to provide comprehensive support to their farmers, especially the women, who are the backbone of most African economies.  Policies must ensure their rights to land tenure, and enhance their access to financing, extension services and education.

An African Consensus equals a paradigm shift: a switch from policies of abandonment to policies of support that enhance agricultural growth.

But Africa cannot do it alone. We must also level the playing field for global trade. We must reverse the trend that saw Africa’s share of global trade fall from 6 percent in 1990 to 2 percent in 2002. We must end excessive subsidies to industrialized agriculture that distort the global marketplace. Doha trade negotiations must finally be concluded, putting in place a more equitable global trade system.  

Furthermore, development partners around the world must uphold their commitments to Africa’s development. It is critical that the G8 countries meet their commitments to Africa with actions not just words. We look forward to such an outcome in the upcoming G8 meeting this month in Rome.

It has been heartening to see a global re-prioritization of agriculture, from the United States to the United Kingdom, Spain, Japan and the World Bank. The Global Food Security Act, now making its way through the US Congress, is a five-year, $10 billion plan for agricultural development. US President Obama has called upon Congress to double US financial support for agricultural development.

The recent announcement by the European Union to provide 1 billion Euros in support of African agriculture is another significant and laudable development. And the World Bank is also coming on-board. In Tanzania, it is now working with the government on a $160 million initiative to provide affordable farm inputs to farmers.

Led by an African Consensus, we can “make hunger history,” and put agricultural development at the center of the continent’s response to the financial and food crisis.

We need a new integrated, comprehensive and focused strategy for transforming African agriculture, one which puts a high priority on the development of Africa’s potential breadbaskets. To unlock their potential, we need to marshal resources and partnerships, and make sure the right landlords -- Africa’s smallholder farmers -- are in charge.


Lesson Number Three: Choose the Right Land-lords

A major challenge facing Africa’s Green Revolution is the spate of land deals consuming huge tracts of farm land. This trend was partly triggered by the food crisis, and the uncertainty it spread about future food security. Today, Africa has new landlords -- and they are not African smallholder farmers! As The Economist recently reported, countries and corporations from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, South Korea and China have entered into deals with governments from Kenya to Sudan, Congo, Mali, Senegal, Mozambique and Zambia.  From ocean to ocean, African governments are trading away their high-potential lands in exchange for one-time investments. African countries who are net importers of food and reliant on food aid are now giving away their best lands.

The International Food Policy Research Institute estimates that about 15-20 million hectares of land has been sold or leased in developing countries.

The majority of these deals are government-to-government, with little transparency or regulation. There is no environmental oversight to assure sustainable use of land and water resources. Smallholder farmers are losing their customary land-use rights, as governments do not recognize them. And, even as consumers in the investors’ nations benefit from cheaper food, net-buyers of food in Africa -- strangely farmers in many cases -- pay higher prices for food.

African countries would benefit more -- in terms of broad-based agricultural growth, increased food security and lower food prices -- by investing in their own breadbaskets.

It is clear that investor nations see unutilized potential in Africa’s breadbaskets. So must we.

African countries have a choice: allow our best lands to primarily benefit narrow outside interests or invest in an African Green Revolution and unleash the agricultural potential of those lands and the smallholder farmers who work them, for the benefit of Africa.

Africa’s best farm lands are not up for a garage sale. And we are not going out of business. African farmers cannot be ignored and abandoned. Instead of relinquishing these lands, let us invest in them, working on mutually beneficial terms with partners, protecting our invaluable natural resources and achieving a food secure and prosperous Africa.


Lesson Number Four:  Breadbasket Development Must Benefit Smallholder Farmers and Trigger System-wide Change
 
More than three-quarters of our population is engaged in agriculture, mostly on small farms of about five hectares or less.  Smallholder farmers are the life-blood of African agriculture.  

To invest properly in smallholder farmers we must recognize that their farming systems are highly diversified, from livestock to crops. We must conserve this diversity. Farmers in Ghana’s northern breadbasket area, for example, may grow combinations of maize, groundnuts and sorghum, while others grow rice rotated with cowpea. Farmers in northern Mozambique grow various combinations of crops, among them rice, maize and sweet potatoes. Breadbasket development must increase the overall productivity and sustainability of such diverse agro-ecosystems.

Another key to breadbasket development is determining what sets of investments will best unlock their potential. We need well-designed investments all across the value chain. Take northern Ghana: the country’s 400,000 hectares of lowland rice yield only 0.5 tons per hectare. This can be changed -- and speedily too. Introducing new crop varieties and improved soil and water management practices could raise these yields to at least 3 tons per hectare. This will transform Ghana into a net exporter of rice, and free up $500 million now spent on rice imports.

To make such a change, investments will be needed across the value chain. AGRA’s integrated programs in seeds, soils, market access, and policies and partnerships are paving the way.  

Its $150 million Program for Africa’s Seed Systems has led to the release of 68 improved locally adapted crop varieties just in the last two years. Its support of twenty-four seed companies and cooperatives has doubled their production of improved seed. Its value-chain approach is training a new generation of African crop breeders, strengthening national agricultural research systems, and establishing venture capital funds to nurture local seed companies.

AGRA’s soil health program, a $180 million undertaking, aims to revitalize 6.3 million hectares of farmland through integrated soil fertility management over the next 10 years. AGRA supports national research and extension institutions to roll out soil fertility techniques to thousands of farmers. And we are working with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) to scale up the use of micro-dosing with some 300,000 farmers in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. We are supporting the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) efforts to rapidly scale-up soybean and pigeon pea farming, improving the nitrogen content of soils in Tanzania. In Mozambique we are funding improved soil fertility management for thousands of farmers growing improved sweet potato varieties developed by the International Potato Center (CIP).

AGRA is also investing in making markets work for poor farmers. Our Market Access Program works to ensure that once farmers have increased their yield, they can sell it, and at a decent price. The Market Access Program has already begun training tens of thousands of farmers in market function, in some cases increasing the prices they get from 30-to-100 percent.  The program is also strengthening farmers’ organizations, increasing farmers’ grain storage options, and supporting agro-processing to enable farmers to add value to their crops.      

Here, too, technological innovation is critical. While the wheat and rice crops that drove the Asian Green Revolution were tradable with limited processing, Africa’s staple crops are different. Crops like cassava and bananas are bulky, perishable and cannot be traded without significant processing. Nigeria is the largest producer of cassava in the world but accounts for zero in global export markets. Thailand accounts for 10 percent of global production but 80 percent of cassava trade.

A few years ago I met with President Museveni of Uganda, together with Sir Gordon Conway, then President of The Rockefeller Foundation. The Uganda President bemoaned the fact that while science and technology had dramatically raised the yield of bananas, the number one challenge was "what to do with banana glut and waste". It is not surprising to understand why: Uganda is the 2nd largest producer of bananas, but 75th in terms of exports. The country loses over $150 million annually from spoilage.

Beyond all this, there is still much to do. We cannot afford to have transformative technologies sitting unused on shelves. Policy and institutional innovations must ensure that new agricultural technologies reach millions of farmers.

One important institutional solution is available now: agro-dealers. While it is easy to find Coca Cola in rural Africa, millions of poor farmers must travel up to 50 kilometers to find improved seeds, fertilizers and other farm inputs. But with the rapid expansion of rural agro-dealer networks, millions of rural farmers are now able to find inputs. AGRA has trained and supported over 5,000 rural agro-dealers in 11 countries, including Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria and Ghana.

And it is working: in 2008 alone these agro-dealers supplied $45 million worth of improved seeds and fertilizers to farmers. In Western Kenya, the distance traveled by farmers to find farm inputs has declined from 17 kilometers in 2004 to 4 kilometers in 2007. Such successes are changing lives and farms, and getting noticed.


Lesson Number Five: Breadbasket Development Requires a Critical Mass of Resources

Over the decades, millions of dollars have been invested in hundreds of agricultural programs in Africa. Many have registered important gains, developed valuable technologies, and made real differences in the lives of African farmers and their families.  Yet rural Africa, as a whole, remains impoverished. It is time to take these good ideas, this wealth of experience, these isolated successes and extend their impact across vast areas of Africa.  

This requires identifying those areas most ripe for smallholder-based agricultural development, and marshalling a critical mass of resources and partnerships to catalyze that growth. Neither AGRA, nor any one organization, can bring about the scale of change needed to transform rural poverty to prosperity. For that we need partnerships, and we need to strategically focus our work.

The Way Forward

A policy paradigm shift is needed in Africa today. Comprehensive policies that enhance growth must replace the old policies of abandonment. Such policies of support must address the fundamental challenge of poverty traps and do so in ways that build private sector markets. Just such a comprehensive approach underpins Malawi’s success, as well as the recent remarkable growth of Rwandan agriculture.

The challenge now is how to go to scale. Scaling up such impacts will require massive investments in infrastructure in Africa. Our continent has less infrastructure today than Asia had in the 1950s. And the negative impacts are staggering. It costs $3,000 to ship a container from Mombasa to Kigali next door; twice the cost of shipping it from Mombasa to Singapore or Malaysia (Africa Business June 2009).

Poor infrastructure also leads to high farm gate prices for fertilizers. We need to improve regional fertilizer procurement to lower the costs of fertilizer imports, especially for landlocked countries. And it is a plain fact that smallholder farmers need access to fertilizers if they are to improve the productivity and sustainability of their farms.

It was smallholder farmers who helped to feed Asia during its Green Revolution. The wisdom of T.W. Shultz in his classic book Transforming Traditional Agriculture still holds true today: smallholder farmers may be small, but they are efficient. The difference is that in the 1960s and 1970s, Asia’s smallholder farmers were supported, while today Africa’s smallholders have been left to fend for themselves.

According to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Africa will need $32-39 billion annually to achieve an agricultural transformation -- not including infrastructure costs. While this may sound large, it is achievable. If African governments meet their agreed allocation of 10 percent of national budgets to agriculture under CAADP, at least $20 billion will become available from domestic budgets. The increased investments from the US government, the European Union and others, including foundations, should make up much of the remaining shortfall.

But public investments need to be complemented by private investments. Lack of access to finance is a major constraint to unlocking the potential of agriculture in Africa. The global financial crisis has compounded the problem by tightening credit markets. It is therefore critical to unlock existing financial liquidity available within Africa itself for the development of agriculture.

Agricultural lending can be improved by: reducing its perceived risks; developing more appropriate loan products that can serve the needs of farmers and the entire agricultural value chain; synchronizing credit needs with the seasonal nature of agriculture; and providing financial literacy to farmers to manage farming as a business.

Based on these principles, in the last two years AGRA has used US$17 million in loan guarantees to leverage US$160 million in affordable loans for agriculture from commercial banks in Africa, ranging from the Equity Bank in Kenya; National Microfinance Bank in Tanzania; and Standard Bank -- Africa’s largest bank, for lending in Ghana, Mozambique, Uganda and Tanzania. These loans are going to associations of smallholder farmers, agro-dealers and agricultural businesses, and they are being used to increase agricultural productivity and create options for farmers to add value to their crops. AGRA has set a target of helping to leverage $4 billion into agriculture for smallholder farmers and agricultural value chains in Africa over the next five years.

Financing did not hinder the Asian Green Revolution. What mattered was showing results. The then-President of the World Bank, Bob McNamara, while observing the remarkable yield increases on farmers’ fields in India said, “If you with your Centers can generate returns like that I will help you raise the money you need”.

The monies we need to achieve the African Green Revolution will come on demonstrated successes -- from farms, across villages, across nations and regions. The impacts must be highly visible and transformative. This can only be achieved by working together to leverage the power of science and technology, policies, markets and trade, and institutions to unlock the potential of Africa’s breadbaskets.

Together we must invest at scale, but we must invest strategically. We must work closely in partnerships with government leaders to champion the African Green Revolution.

Partners in hope, now is the time to forge this strong alliance for change in Africa’s breadbaskets and beyond. If we do, we will have the right landlords: smallholder farmers -- the majority of whom are women -- and these landlords will enable Africa to not only achieve food security, but also become a global supplier of food.

Let us draw inspiration from a son of Africa, whose roots were in a small village in Kenya, in an area that may one day be an African breadbasket. He rose to become the first African-American President of the United States. It was he who said: “Yes, we can!”

The present calls for action. The future yearns for hope.

To both we must say today: “Yes, we can!” And “Yes, we will!”

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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.