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Twentieth FAO Regional Conference Welcome
Statement By K. Y. Amoako,
Your Excellency, Dr. Salim Ahmed Salim, Secretary-General of the Organization of African Unity, Your Excellency, Mr. Jacques Diouf, Director-General, Food and Agriculture Organization, Honorable Ministers, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, It is a great pleasure for me to welcome you to the Economic Commission for Africa and to the United Nations Conference Center on the occasion of the 20th FAO Regional Conference for Africa. I wish to extend a most cordial welcome to Director General, Mr. Diouf, and the FAO delegation and to express my appreciation for the tireless effort in working with the Member Countries to address the most basic of mankind’s needs, and for organizing this conference. While food is the most basic of human needs and the need for food security hardly requires debate, its attainment is not equally obvious. This fact is amply demonstrated by the successive reaffirmation of goals and action plans whose overall impact keeps falling short of expectations. The present Conference is yet another opportunity to reflect on Africa’s food situation, assess the actions taken to implement the recommendations of the global and regional food conferences and identify additional steps to invigorate food security and sustainable development interventions in the region. I will not catalogue the well-known facts about Africa’s agriculture and food situation. We all know of the existence and consequences of famine, malnutrition, under-nourishment and the decline of Africa’s agricultural production and exports. We also know about the inadequate responsiveness of agriculture to the broad policy reforms undertaken in the continent. The negative ramifications of a stagnating agriculture in terms of growing rural unemployment and poverty, food imports, increased food insecurity and rapid natural resource degradation are increasingly understood by policymakers. Likewise, the benefits to be derived from successful agricultural development, like employment creation, foreign exchange earnings and rapid industrial growth are well recognized. How to design policy and program interventions and successfully implement them to realize these benefits is the difficult part. Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, In pursuing food security, several measures have been implemented or are in the process of implementation, with the assistance of FAO and other players, at the country level, and to a less extent at the regional and sub-regional levels. During this conference you will review the actions taken at the country level to implement the recommendations and action plans of the World Food Summit and other related Africa regional fora on food security. I am sure you will agree with me that while some progress is visible, many policy goals continue to be elusive. A recent report by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) reminds us of the predictions of Thomas Malthus exactly two centuries ago. His basic argument was that the world’s natural resources could not assure the expansion in food supply that would match population growth. Region after region has disproved this prediction, but in Sub-Saharan Africa the population growth rate has exceeded the rate of growth in food production since the early 1970s and the gap is widening, resulting in declining per capita food production. Simple extrapolations of the trends in population and food production growth since 1961 show a further increase in the gap between population and food production. This is exactly the gap predicted by Malthus. The same IFPRI report says that by the year 2010, every third person in Sub-Saharan Africa is likely to be food insecure compared with every eighth persons in South Asia and every twentieth person in East Asia. The challenges of attaining a situation in Africa where all people at all times have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences are formidable. If Malthus is to be proven wrong in Sub-Saharan Africa, a much greater effort must be made to ensure that farmers have access to appropriate production technology and that policies are conducive to expanded productivity in staple food crops. Also, increased investment in irrigation can make a significant contribution to food production growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. Besides new initiatives and expanded support for agricultural development, more must also be done to reduce population growth. Sub-Saharan Africa’s annual population growth rate to the year 2020 is projected to decline. Yet the number of people added to the region’s population every year is projected to increase until that year, a consequence of the past high rates of population increase. Moreover, Sub-Saharan Africa’s projected annual population growth rate of 2.33 percent during 2015 to 2020 will be more than double the growth rates in other regions. Population growth of this magnitude will severely constrain efforts to increase income and welfare, while at the same time it will greatly increase the need for food. Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, These are some of the many challenges the country agriculture policy management teams, principally the Ministers gathered here, face on the long road to food security. The Good News is that these challenges, while formidable, can be surmounted. Analysis has advanced to a point where the inter-relationships between food security, environment, population and socioeconomic factors are better understood, and experience can be shared. For example, in Africa, we have seen fertility rates come down in Mauritius, Botswana, Kenya and Tunisia. The factors behind this trend when isolated can facilitate more focused programs elsewhere. In this context, UNFPA and ECA have designed a collaborative population project focusing on support for women’s services during their reproductive cycle which increase the demand for smaller, healthier families. There are also encouraging signs that productivity-increasing technology is beginning to accelerate yield growth of African food crops. For example the introduction of improved maize varieties has resulted in productivity increases in West and Central Africa at rates as high as 4 percent per year during the period 1983 to 1992. We now know that an integrated multidisciplinary approach to the analysis and design of policy interventions in agriculture, population, environment, and technology development is a step in the right direction. We also know that the efficacy of policy interventions in the population, agriculture and environment nexus is related to the macro-policy and institutional system, which must be supportive of food security programs in order to realize long-term goals, etc. From the on-going country programs, an inventory of important results on what works or is not likely to work can be put together. I am sure that your conference will once more afford us an opportunity for the useful exchange of the lessons of country successes and setbacks. The role of FAO in meeting the above challenges and counseling the African States, particularly from its global perspective, is critical. With its mandate as the lead agency in the UN system on food security recently reinforced by the World Food Summit of 1996, and its considerable knowledge and experience, FAO has worked for over 50 years to help promote agricultural development and food security world-wide, and in recent years, more especially in Africa. I do not need to pre-empt the conference presentations on work undertaken by FAO related to its food security mandate, but I like to give special commendation to the Organization, and Mr. Diouf in particular, for doing an outstanding job for Africa. A few examples illustrate what I mean:
Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, What is the appropriate role for ECA in the Africa food security field? During ECA’s recent reorganization, care was taken to begin to respond to the compelling need to support and promote policies and programs that mitigate the problems arising out of the inter-related issues of food security, population and Africa’s fragile ecology. One of the five programs created by the reforms is the "Food Security and Sustainable Development Program managed by a division with a similar name. The activities of the Food Security and Sustainable Development Division (FSSDD) include: raising African policymakers’ awareness of the urgency to integrate food, population, and environmental concerns into development planning; encouraging member states to develop policies to accelerate agricultural productivity and generally to adopt best practices in the three nexus areas. The program supports policy analysis, policy advocacy, research, dissemination, promotional and advisory services, and the building of critical capacities in these areas. Training and dissemination of partner’s output to make it more directly available for policy application by ECA Member States are important ingredients of FSSDD’s work. These are areas of potential partnership between FAO and ECA to the mutual benefit of the two organizations and the African countries. Partnerships for ECA’s major programs have been, or are being established with bilateral agencies, multilateral development organizations, African and international civil society organizations, and private international bodies, like the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which is a partner in technology programs. As I said earlier, a population project to be implemented collaboratively with UNFPA has been prepare. ECA looks forward to similar collaboration with FAO in the areas of common interest. ECA-FAO partnership and collaboration should be based on the comparative advantages of each agency. I hope to travel to Rome to visit you, my Dear Brother, in the next month or so. We can then discuss in detail and more concretely the areas and modalities for a strong future partnership for the benefit of Africa. Your Excellency, Mr. Negasso Gidada, Honourable Ministers, Your Excellencies Ladies and Gentlemen, I thank you for listening, and I wish you all conference participants very fruitful deliberations for the benefit of our continent. |
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