"African Food Security in the Knowledge and Information Era"

Annual Meeting of the American Agricultural Economics Association (AAEA)

Address by
K. Y. Amoako
Executive Secretary,
Economic Commission for Africa (ECA)
31 July 2000
Tampa, Florida, USA

Ladies and gentlemen:

It is particularly inspiring to be among people who share the same goals, no matter what part of the world we hail from. I am honoured to be in such distinguished company, and I particularly thank Christopher Barrett, Chair of the AAEA International Committee, for inviting me here, not to mention giving me the latitude to choose my own subject! I have chosen as my theme: "African Food Security in the Knowledge and Information Era".

I am particularly eager to address you since I come not just to expound, but to enlist you to be an even greater contributor to solving Africa's food security problems. Many of you have worked in Africa and know our problems probably better than I do. But just to allow everyone to get up to speed, let me summarize our food security situation. Here are the facts:

First, we are poor. In our own analysis at the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa, half of Sub-Saharan Africa, including two-thirds of rural Africa lives in poverty. A.K. Sen has persuasively demonstrated that in a world of abundance, food insecurity is a function of lacking purchasing power. That is true both of our poor people and of our economies. While economic growth has been picking up in the last five years, we are far from achieving the kind of growth rates (7-8%/year) that would assure our meeting the international target of reducing poverty by half by the year 2015.

Second, the environmental hand we were dealt was not too good, and it has not gotten better. We are in a classic nexus of food insecurity, declining but still high population growth rates, and an environment that is deteriorating fast.

A thin top- soil led our forefathers to let the land rest for very long fallow periods. Now population pressures have pushed us to short fallow periods and to cultivate more marginal lands. The result: accelerating environmental degradation. The old people in villages can still remember the forests, but to children, forests are hearsay. The labor intensity of farming marginal lands creates pressures for large families. The scale of the degradation, added to global warming, may well be exposing Africa to quicker cycles of environmental calamity.

Third, while conflicts have declined in other parts of the world, they have not in Africa. Research by the International Food Policy Research Institute shows that on average, countries in conflict produce 12.4 percent less food per capita in war years than during peacetime.

Comparison of wartime and peace adjusted trends shows that since 1980, peace would have added two to five percent to Africa's food production per capita per year.

Fourth, while we have many problems, I want to emphasize an overarching one: we have failed as a community of advisors to policy makers to make a persuasive political case for agricultural development. Most top government leaders still do not see the nexus of agriculture, environment and population as central to development. The case of Nigeria, our most populous country, is instructive.

Nigeria's head of state, Olusegun Obasanjo, in an unusual act of leadership, wants to place agriculture at the center stage of his country’s development agenda. Agriculture's share of Nigeria's GDP is about 32 percent and employs 70 percent of the working population.

Obasanjo, is a successful farmer and knows there is considerable potential for agriculture in his country. But a good deal of Nigeria's policy intelligentsia is arguing that declining terms of trade for agriculture make investment in the sector, beyond basic food security, a risky business.

The upshot of all I have just described is captured in the World Bank projection that by 2020, Africa will have a food shortage of 250 million tons. If we do not take concerted measures to resist the negative trends now, we will soon be deeply into the A. K. Sen famine scenario. The global center of poverty will increasingly be rural Africa.

Well, I'm not here to depress you, but to give you courage and hope to help change this scenario.

I wish to assure you that good practices and good cases are there for the looking. Liberalization and better agricultural policies in most African countries show signs that the odds are shifting towards agriculture.

Mozambique recorded 9 percent growth in agriculture in recent years. I think a recovery from this year's floods and further sharp growth is in sight. Uganda's food production, with the stimulus of liberalized policies, grew by nearly 14 percent last year. The change in the parity of the CFA franc, has made a major difference to agriculture in countries like Burkina Faso, where crop and livestock production are moving ahead smartly.

A particularly bright spot is the ongoing work led by Norman Borlaug in a number of African countries to bring green revolution-type solutions to African agriculture.

I encourage you to look into a recent joint publication of my Commission, the Global Coalition for Africa, the World Bank, the African Development Bank and the African Economic Research Consortium. Its title is "Can Africa Claim the 21st Century". We report that the median internal rate of return on agricultural research is 37 percent. Almost alone, this statistic points to the potential for agricultural improvements in Africa.

Yet the outlook for agricultural research is not good. Agriculture research was a growth industry in the 1960s and 1970s, but not since. Our study suggests four reasons for this state of affairs.

First, declining world cereal prices, which has created complacency. Second, declining real prices for Africa's agricultural commodities, which has cooled enthusiasm for agriculture-led growth strategies. Third, fatigue over seemingly slow progress towards a green revolution for Africa. And fourth, a tendency to believe, that extensive market reforms will somehow solve Africa's problems without further attention from public authorities.

As we point out in the report, these perceptions are seriously misguided. The rebuttal to these misconceptions is worth stressing, as we need to make as strong a case as possible to buck up the recent trends in neglecting investments in agricultural research.

Consistently high yields and returns that are achieved at research stations and demonstration plots suggest that such research could contribute greatly to agricultural growth and development. As our joint report points out, at 37 percent, the median internal rate of return on agricultural research spending in Africa should spur higher levels of investment in research, not discourage it. Most significantly, where agricultural policy reforms have been taken, farmers have been quick to respond to positive incentives, contrary to old theories of the backward rising supply curve in African agriculture.

Studies by the UN Institute for Natural Resources in Africa (INRA) show that a combination of good policies, high yielding seeds and enriched soils could double rice and wheat yields in Africa, triple sorghum yields, and quadruple maize yields. So I think the case for investments in agricultural research in Africa is quite strong.

Agricultural economics and allied fields could be quite helpful in advancing the policy and physical science research agenda necessary for addressing key challenges ahead for Africa.

First, a large gap exists between available knowledge and its application by the agricultural community. In the past, widespread on- farm replication of the high yields and returns achieved at research stations and demonstration plots has been problematic. But in the new information age, this could be overcome. Research, supported by ICT- enhanced extension and education services could bridge this gap, a direction likely to benefit from the recent Okinawa G-8 meeting.

Many have asked me, in a continent with only as many phone lines as Manhattan, how can information technology possibly be of relevance particularly to those living in far-flung places. But ICTs are catching on in Africa in ways that would hardly have been thought imaginable a decade ago.

On a much larger scale we take heart from what Muhammad Yunus is doing in Bangladesh. This great professor of development and leader of microcredit, is turning many practices upside down. He is providing cellular phone connections throughout rural Bangladesh. His nonprofit Internet provider, Grameen Communications, links the Internet with educational and research institutions, even where reliable telephone lines do not exist. He sees an advantage in a late start in terms of technologic leapfrogging. So we, I hope with you, need to really ramp up technology applications in Africa.

A second challenge we face is, of course, poor soil and water resource management. As the UN Institute for Natural Resources in Africa (INRA) warns, the green revolution will be impossible unless soil quality is improved. According to the institute 72 percent of the sub Saharan African cropland and 31 percent of its pastureland are degraded, contributing to enormous losses in output.

Third, dilapidated physical and institutional infrastructures and agriculture support services have deteriorated, compounding the problem of high transactions and transport costs associated with complex regulatory frameworks. Africa must modernize its physical infrastructure, including all modes of transport, telecommunications and power utilities, and reform and strengthen the institutions supporting agriculture.

Fourth, we must create larger and open markets on the continent and have markets opened to us overseas. Within Africa, we are working on increasing all sorts of inter-state cooperation largely through sub-regional groupings. But a compelling case also exists to assure that Africa is better integrated into the world’s markets. Here heavy subsidies of agriculture and tariff barriers in Europe and elsewhere plus non- tariff barriers, particularly on processed foods, require very important attention. To give you an idea of the scale of these problems, Europe's agricultural subsidies equals Africa's combined GDP.

Fifth, a more diversified production base is required. Non-indigenous cereals and horticulture have huge potential in Africa-as countries such as Zimbabwe and Kenya have shown. More focus could be on Africa's long neglected traditional crops such as cassava, millet and a wide variety of food and medicinal plants. Apart from their importance to food security and bio-diversity, these crops also offer commercial possibilities. Indeed, to address the chronic decline in world commodity prices for Africa's traditional exports, far more research is required into nontraditional export crops to make them more competitive.

Advancing along the several fronts highlighted here requires massive investment and as I said, taking full advantage of new technologies. Yet current investment in agriculture in most African countries is still awfully low; agriculture receives less than ten percent of public recurrent and investment spending but accounts for 30 to 80 percent of gross domestic output.

Both the private and public sectors will have to invest much more in on-farm, agro-industrial, and infrastructure facilities, in addition to generating and using more knowledge through research and training, including agricultural science education, farmer education and exploring modalities for more effective extension services.

All of these factors - - creating and linking knowledge to users, improving soil and water management, upgrading physical and institutional infrastructures, market integration within Africa and with the rest of the world, crop diversification, and creating new investment - - all of these call for making the intellectual base more active, dynamic, and involved than in the past. Here is where you come in.

I have to confess that I am not sure the incentive structure in American academic institutions rewards those of you interested in working with us. A generation ago, if you went to Africa as an assistant professor and worked with us for two or three years, your chances of becoming an associate professor really improved. I'm under the impression that now the assistant professor stays at home as she or he feels that to go to Africa would jeopardize a promotion.

We have been happy that the US Administration is really working hard to tilt towards Africa on a large number of issues, sadly agriculture not being among them. Tilting towards Africa requires leadership.

President Clinton has sent most of his cabinet to Africa and he has come himself and plans another trip soon. He has helped bring our key topics to the G-8. He has hosted our key ministers and heads of state. Leadership!

So I appeal to those of you who are deans and department heads to really exercise leadership. Include our problems in your curricula, encourage good graduate students and faculty who have interests in Africa. Permit study and research in Africa. Lend staff to institutions like the one I lead—the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Invite key African counterparts to your key meetings.

Encourage academic partnerships with our struggling yet still proud institutions of higher education. And talk us up. I know, and you know that presidents of some of your universities are nearly as powerful, as your governors; so please enlist their leadership too. I note that Peter McPherson at MSU has recently launched a US effort to increase attention to Africa's food security issues.

We have no reason to want to return to the exact patterns of the 1960s and 1970s. Now there is a lot more African talent to work with-- many on your own campuses. You can now conduct all sorts of activities with a lot more assurance of talented counterparts capable of partnering for knowledge creation and institutional strengthening.

Obviously, we must take advantage of information and communications technologies in our new partnerships. ICT increases efficiency and impact of joint programs allowing much faster linkage with the field, · lower cost joint seminars and sharing of faculty, · research networking, · roundtables at all levels, including leadership levels, · backstopping students and faculty sent to Africa to raise their effectiveness, · joint writing and review, and · peer support.

So, I urge you to dream up wonderful joint activities with our research centers, universities, regional institutions such as mine, and with official agencies. I urge you to be vigorous in helping to secure funding, including funding for the ICT infrastructure which may well be needed in order to help make African institutions and your own staff far more efficient partners.

And I urge you to lead in finding partnerships with more dignity for your professional colleagues in Africa. The policy and program agenda in Africa has been too heavily influenced by a small group of donor agencies and expatriate thinkers without enough African intellectual input. -an anomaly that must be redressed.

Part of new relationships would be to recognize the huge number of talented professionals in Africa's Diaspora. Many Africans left for very good reasons, but a large number of our professionals living abroad now need help to reconnect with their homelands-- homelands which in many cases have changed positively from the oppressive states they left.

Many of the estimated thousands of young academics who leave Africa annually come to the US; 36% of Africans awarded PhDs in US and Canada stay abroad. Insightful partnership might well involve top people in the African Diaspora. They and you will find a different Africa, one much more active in producing its own knowledge. An Africa, requiring a higher level of partnership than before. We cannot afford an unengaged Diaspora.

At ECA, we have launched a new initiative -- the Africa Knowledge Networks Forum. It is designed to meet the need for more knowledge-sharing and indigenous research. We are not only networking researchers, but, linking them with policy centers. Through these kinds of efforts, I think you will find African counterparts much better networked. And far better able to discuss with you what your research agenda with Africa might best cover and who to link with.

Our effort at strengthening capacity for research, policy analysis and decision making, as well as training is in line with, and further strengthens a number of important internationally sponsored initiatives in the continent. For example, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) which supports a network of six international research centers in Africa, will benefit from ECA's Science and Technology Network (ESNET). ESNET supports science and technology policy capacities and the sharing of science and technology resources, including information and research output.

Friends, a changing Africa welcomes updated partnerships. Recently villagers in northern Tanzania gathered at the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain, after an NGO and donor funded project. The villagers, using radio and solar technology, succeeded in linking to the Internet despite the fact that there was no electricity or phone line in the vicinity. After praising God for the mountain, the elders prayed and here is their prayer: "God give us rain, give us food and give us technology. We have seen the benefits for development. And we no longer want to be isolated."

Let us together help answer those prayers.

Thank you.