Hungry for Capacity

Kevin J Kelley (The EastAfrican)—The United Nations food summit last week produced pledges of greater short-term aid for the hungry but did little to enhance the capacity of growers in Africa.

"Apart from the existing UN Food and Agriculture Organisation funds, no money has been given to address the key problem of boosting capacity," Magda Kropiwnicka, a food policy advisor for ActionAid, said at the close of the three-day meeting in Rome.

The summit may thus have failed to follow the adage, "Give a hungry man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."

Kenya’s representative at the 183-nation conference underscored the "urgent need" to invest in African agriculture. Agriculture Minister William Ruto called for a trebling of the use of fertiliser with the development of drought-resistant, high-yield seed varieties.

Heads of state, ministers and UN officials conferred amid intensifying pressures to provide both immediate and long-term relief from soaring food prices. Riots have erupted in some 30 countries, including Kenya, as millions of poor people experience growing difficulty in maintaining even subsistence diets.

Today’s food crisis might have been avoided had rich countries done more to promote agricultural development in Africa and other impoverished regions, critics contend. A recent study by a US Congress research agency found that donors have lagged behind in efforts to improve the capacity of African farmers.

The study notes, for example, that the US provided $500 million in aid to African agriculture in 1988 but less than $100 million in 2006.

The US Agency for International Development remains overly focused on responding to food emergencies, "to the detriment of actions designed to address the fundamental causes of these emergencies, such as low agricultural productivity," the Congressional report adds.

But African governments have also failed to provide adequate assistance, the same study charges. It identifies Kenya and Tanzania as two of the many African countries that have failed to honour pledges made in 2003 to devote 10 per cent of their respective budgets to agriculture.

Tanzania is further faulted for the heavy burdens it imposes on its food producers. "Tanzanian farmers must pay about 55 taxes, levies and fees to sell their agricultural products, equivalent to 50 per cent of the price the farmers receive," the US study says.

The Rome summit did feature a capacity-building pledge for African agriculture from three UN agencies and a foundation headed by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

"We hope to spur a Green Revolution in Africa that respects biodiversity and the continent’s distinct regions and great variety of crops-from millet and sorghum in the Sahel, to the root and tuber belts that cut across humid West Africa, to maize in the high and lowland areas of East and Southern Africa," Mr Annan said.

The joint initiative is intended to reverse a trend of declining productivity in Africa’s agriculture. Food output per person has fallen in Africa for the past 30 years, with archaic farming methods having left the continent far behind the rest of the world in food produced per hectare of cultivated land.

Much of the debate in Rome centred on the issue of using arable land to raise crops for fuel rather than for food. Diversion of farmland to growing maize and sugar cane for production of biofuels accounts for about 30 percent of the past year’s rise in global food prices, according to the Washington-based International Food Policy Research organisation. The United States - the world’s leading producer of maize-based biofuel - estimates there is only a three per cent impact on food prices from this source.

Delegates from East African countries generally took moderate positions on the issue, declining to oppose development of biofuels outright.

Noting that fuel accounts for one-quarter of Kenya’s total spending on imports, Mr Ruto suggested that "an alternative source of fuel would release some of the resources to other critical areas."

Uganda’s representative, Environment Minister Mary Lubega Mutagamba, told the summit, "The production of bio-energy comes as a relief to Africa to stop the over-dependence on fossil fuel, which is becoming scarce. However, the production must be guided and must not in any way encroach on food production."

Speaking on behalf of Tanzania, Zanzibar President Amani Abeid Karume struck a similar note, saying, "We recognise and appreciate the need for diversion of some food crops to bio-energy production but we stress that there must be a balance to ensure that human food needs are not sacrificed."

In the summit’s final declaration, a compromise was struck on the issue of biofuels, which are said to provide both "challenges and opportunities" requiring further investigation.

Despite the Rome summit’s disappointments, many nations’ delegates welcomed donors’ pledges of $5.8 billion in new food aid. There was also general agreement that the conference had succeeded in drawing global attention to the food crisis, raising expectations that more substantive steps will be taken at next month’s gathering in Japan of the G8 group of rich nations.

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