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| Ad-hoc Expert Group Meeting on Promoting Agribusiness and Agro-industry in African countries
Opening Remarks
Distinguished experts, It is my great pleasure, on behalf of Mr. Abdoulie Janneh, UN Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), to warmly welcome you to this Ad-hoc Expert Group Meeting (EGM) on Promoting Agribusiness and Agro-industry in African Countries. I wish to express our gratitude to all of you experts for accepting to come and share your valuable expertise and to contribute to enriching our joint effort at assisting African countries move forward the agricultural development agenda, especially within the framework of the NEPAD Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP). You would recall that, at this Summit, African Heads of State and Government declared their firm Commitment to “Increase Intra-African trade by promoting and protecting rice, maize, legumes, cotton, oil palm, beef, dairy, poultry and fisheries products as strategic commodities at the continental level, and cassava, sorghum and millet at sub-regional level without prejudice to focused attention being given also to products of particular national importance” Were to qualify as strategic from a regional perspective, agricultural commodities:
Distinguished experts, We all know too well how Africa continues to grapple with poverty and hunger more than ten years after the World Food Summit, nine years after the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and six years after the adoption of the CAADP. Sure, some progress has been made, but all in all, the poor performance of African agriculture and the persistent food insecurity in the continent remain matters of serious concern. The poor performance of the food and agriculture systems in Africa is mainly rooted in the severe undercapitalization resulting from decades of neglect, inconsistencies in policies and strategies of agricultural development. And this worrisome situation is further compounded today by the global issues of financial and economic crisis, and climate change, which all call for urgent and vigorous actions. From a global perspective, Africa is no doubt a major component of the food crisis. Yet Africa also offers considerable opportunities as part of the solution to the global food crisis. The region is not short of land as more than half of total area suitable for agriculture is yet to be exploited. The continent is not short of water either: only 4 percent of available water resources are used, while only 6 percent of arable land is irrigated. Africa, therefore, presents a great potential for solving food crises through harnessing those resources to considerably increase food production and supply not only for the continent, but also for the global market. In fact, besides growing global market opportunities, there is a considerable increasing gap between regional demand and supply as well as between regional supply and global demand. Intra-Africa agricultural trade remains low, averaging US$ 3.8 billion against an average regional import bill of US$ 33 billion for agricultural commodities over 2000-2005. Such a high import bill in face of abundant production potential is a symptomatic of a severe structural deficiency of the African food and agriculture systems that needs to be addressed. And addressing this deficiency, we believe, requires tackling two major and interconnected constraints of these systems:
There is no need to elaborate much on the disconnection of African farmers from the input market. Abounding statistics of the low, often insignificant, rate of use of modern agricultural inputs in the region provide convincing evidence of that reality. Similarly, the considerable and growing magnitude of the African food and agricultural import bill is a clear indication of a widening gap between regional domestic demand for increasingly processed products and supply of primarily raw commodities. Obviously, this double disconnection is closely associated with the lack of a vibrant agribusiness sector that can effectively link the African farmers, backward from the input markets and forward from the product markets. Hence the focus, in this meeting, on this missing link of particular importance for moving Africa’s agriculture forward. Yet, because of the fragmentation of the African food and agricultural economic landscape among the 53 countries and more than a dozen overlapping sub-regional groupings, the perception and understanding of the scope of the problem and opportunities for solutions is much less acute at the national and sub-regional levels than it would appear at the regional (continental) scale. Unfortunately, most past policy analytical and advocacy work has not meaningfully transcended the national and sub-regional perspectives to embrace a full continental scope. This is one direction in which additional analytical work could bring significant innovation and value added to the African agricultural transformation agenda. The overall theme of the last AU Summit: “Investing in Agriculture for Economic Growth and Food Security” comes at a right time to seek appropriate solutions to Africa’s chronic problems of poverty, hunger, and marginalization in the global market. It is in line with this regional perspective that ECA has been advocating the development of regionally coordinated strategic agricultural commodity value chains within the CAADP framework. In pursuing such an approach, effective Public-private partnerships should play a significant role in enabling the development of a vibrant agribusiness sector capable of capturing untapped opportunities of economies of scale, intra-regional complementarities and trade, and economies of transactions in cross-border investment in what could become preferential regional strategic agricultural commodity belts. Therefore, you are expected during this meeting to examine this initiative, develop an action plan and build consensus on the modalities of implementation. Distinguished experts, Those are some of the ideas that we have tried to put before your expert scrutiny and advice over this three-day meeting. Given the scope and calibre of expertise you graciously avail to us, I have no doubt that we will come up with a rich harvest of inputs on the challenges and opportunities for agribusiness and agro-industry development in Africa, the needs and tools for devising effective mechanisms for knowledge management, lessons sharing and capacity building in support of the development of efficient value chains of strategic food and agricultural commodities in Africa. We look forward to receiving your recommendations on how to improve the conceptualization of the advocated regional value chain approach through PPPs, and on concrete actions for its implementation through inter-institutional collaborative and partnership efforts. Thank you.
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