+++ ECDPM Challenges blog series. Post number six +++ Declared the UN Year of Family Farming and the AU Year of Food Security, 2014 will be particularly interesting. With key challenges in terms of policy directions, international processes, and Europe-Africa relations, conflicts can certainly arise; but next year we could also see some break-through in all these three dimensions. Policy dilemmas The main challenge, in terms of policy choices, is going to be related to the agricultural model that public and private decision-makers promote through their efforts to enhance food security in Africa. Some believe ...
After decades of protocols and high-level declarations without implementation, regional integration is slowly happening in many parts of Africa, often driven by commercial moves. More recently, regional markets and especially public-private-partnerships (PPP) are becoming fashionable approaches to promote food security. Many bottlenecks remain, however, both in policy reform follow-up and asymmetric benefits for entrepreneurs along the food value-chains. RECs, their member states and interested stakeholders should pilot concrete results to show that regional integration can become more credible and effective, and contribute to food security. As part of ECDPM’s support to RECs and the Comprehensive ...
The Vice-President of Liberia, Joseph Boakai, the Minister of Agriculture of Liberia, Florence Chenoweth, and other West African public officials met with representatives of the Network of Peasant Organisations and Agricultural Producers in West Africa (ROPPA) in Monrovia to talk about progress in agricultural development over the past decade. (full length interviews published below) M. Boakai stated that his government is increasing public investment in agriculture. However the President of ROPPA insisted that policy-makers in Liberia and other countries of the region should do more to support family farms. Djibo Bagna asserted that it is ...
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is undertaking efforts to accelerate the implementation of their regional agricultural policy, the ECOWAP/Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Programme (CAADP), and its related regional and national investment plans. In that context, ministers of the 15 ECOWAS member states are scheduled to get together from 16 to 20 September for the Agriculture/Environment/Water Resources Specialised Ministerial Committee. They’ll meet in Lomé, Togo, for the long awaited launch of the Regional Food and Agriculture Agency housed there, which is being created to facilitate the implementation of regional ECOWAP/CAADP initiatives. The ministerial meeting ...
In 1992, European Heads of State and Government found their way to Maastricht to sign off on, with hindsight not always respected, Treaty revisions of the European Union. Maybe due to the unpopularity of the “3% budget deficit” or “60% public debt to GDP” limits among a growing number of politicians and the wider public, it has not led to a line-up of international gatherings in Maastricht since then. You will understand that this is a great sorrow to organisations working on international relations based in Maastricht, like ECDPM, forcing them to often keep the ...
Account of the “Food Across Borders” conference in West Africa West Africa has far-reaching commitments to promote intra-regional trade. The Economic Community of West African States’ trade liberalization scheme, launched back in 1990, provides for the elimination of tariff and non-tariff barriers between the region’s 15 member states. Also the regional agricultural policy, adopted in 2005, reflects this ambition, the regionalization of agricultural and food products is at its core. Both frameworks should contribute to food sovereignty and food security in West Africa, particularly through enhanced cross-border trade between food abundant and food deficit areas. ...
Reflections from the Annual General Assembly of the Global Donor Platform for Rural Development No doubt certain countries in the world, especially those in Africa, need to gain more reliable access to food in order to fight hunger. No doubt this requires increasing production and productivity in agriculture, as well as better integration of regional agricultural markets. No doubt the role of donors in supporting such efforts is important. But is food security just about producing more food, or about eating well? Are policy makers asking the ‘right questions’? Donors working on food security met ...
Dan Lui co-authored this article. For the first time, African Union ministers of trade and agriculture gathered last week at a joint conference in Addis Ababa. Originally scheduled for late October, the conference had been postponed since not enough ministers from AU member states had confirmed their attendance. Also this time the conference did not manage to attract a full turnout of high-level representatives from all African states and Regional Economic Communities – yet it still represented a significant moment with officials and experts from the two traditionally separate sectors and from both regional and ...
In 2003, African Heads of States launched the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), as an effort to renew interest in and prioritize the continent’s agriculture agenda, as well as put food security objectives at the fore of national, regional, continental and global processes. Progress on CAADP has been reviewed every year since 2006 at the CAADP Partnership Platform meeting. During the Platform meeting, various stakeholders who contribute to, have vested interest in or are associated with the CAADP process, have an opportunity to coordinate collective and mutual responsibilities for CAADP implementation. This year, the ...
African agriculture is currently at a crossroads, at which persistent food shortages are compounded by threats from climate change. But, as the book “The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa” by Calestous Juma argues, Africa faces three major opportunities that can transform its agriculture into a force for economic growth: advances in science and technology; the creation of regional markets; and the emergence of a new crop of entrepreneurial leaders dedicated to the continent’s economic improvement. It outlines the policies and institutional changes necessary to promote agricultural innovation across the African continent. Incorporating research from ...
