Source: APO GROUP
The president of the African Development Bank, Akinwumi Adesina, recently announced that Africa must prepare for the inevitability of a global food crisis, occurring in the coming months, when the crisis worsens.
According to him, the tripling of fertilizer costs, the rise in energy prices and the rise in the cost of the basic food basket are the main crises that could worsen in Africa in the coming months.
Akinwumi Adesina was speaking when he spoke as a guest at the African Center of the Atlantic Council, last Friday, where he gave a talk.
Responding to questions from the Chairman of the African Center Council, Ambassador Rama Yade; senior researcher Aubrey Hruby; and the Washington/UN correspondent for Jeune Afrique and The Africa Report, Julian Pecquet, the Bank’s leader called for a greater sense of urgency in a once-in-a-century context of convergence of global challenges for Africa.
According to Adesina, the most vulnerable countries on the continent were those most affected by the conflict, climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic, which set back economic and development progress in Africa. She stated that Africa, with the lowest GDP growth rates, had lost around 30 million jobs due to the pandemic.
Speaking of the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war, Adesina expressed his sympathy for the people of Ukraine, describing their suffering as unimaginable. She said the ramifications of the war extended far beyond Ukraine to other parts of the world, including Africa. He explained that Russia and Ukraine supply 30% of global wheat exports, the price of which has risen by almost 50% globally, reaching levels identical to those of the 2008 global food crisis. He added that fertilizer prices had tripled, and that prices energy prices had increased, which fueled inflation.
Adesina warned that the tripling of fertilizer costs, the rise in energy prices, and the rise in the cost of the basic food basket could worsen in Africa in the coming months. He noted that 90% of Russian exports, worth US$4 billion to Africa in 2020, were made up of wheat; and 48% of Ukrainian exports of almost 3 billion dollars to the continent were made up of wheat and 31% of corn.
Adesina warned that to avoid a food crisis, Africa must rapidly expand its food production. “The African Development Bank is already active in mitigating the effects of a food crisis through the African Food Crisis and Emergency Response Mechanism – a dedicated mechanism that is being considered by the Bank to provide African countries with the resources needed to increase local food production and purchasing fertilizers.
“My basic principle is that Africa should not be begging; we must solve our own challenges without depending on others,” Adesina said. The Bank leader spoke of promising successes through the Bank’s innovative initiative, the Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT) program, a program that operates on nine food products in more than 30 African countries.
Adesina said TAAT helped rapidly increase continent-wide food production, including the production of wheat, rice and other cereal crops. “We are putting our money where our mouth is. We are producing more and more of our own food.” Our Food Emergency Plan for Africa will produce 38 million metric tons of food.” Adesina said TAAT had already delivered “heat-tolerant wheat varieties to 1.8 million farmers in seven countries, increasing wheat production by more than 1.4 million metric tons and a value of US$291 million”.
According to Adesina, heat-tolerant varieties were now being planted on hundreds of thousands of hectares in Ethiopia and Sudan, with extraordinary results. In Ethiopia, where the government has put the TAAT program to work on a 200,000-hectare lowland irrigated wheat program, farmers are reporting yield increases of 4.5 to five times per hectare. He said TAAT’s smart seeds were also thriving in Sudan, which recorded its largest wheat harvest ever, 1.1 million tonnes of wheat, in the 2019-2020 season.
Adesina added that TAAT came to the rescue of farmers during the drought in Southern Africa in 2018 and 2019, deploying heat-tolerant maize varieties that were grown by 5.2 million households across 841,000 hectares. As a result, she said, farmers survived drought in Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia, allowing corn production to expand by 631,000 metric tons to a value of $107 million.
Adesina also spoke of the urgent and timely need for a strong replenishment of the African Development Fund – the concessional lending arm of the Bank Group that supports low-income African countries. She stated that the Fund connected 15.5 million people to electricity and supported 74 million people with improved agriculture; provided 50 million people with access to transportation; built 8,700 kilometers of roads; and provided 42 million people with improved water and sanitation facilities.
The head of the Bank said that there were three lessons to be learned for Africa from the challenges Africa faces: first, that the continent could no longer leave the health security of its people to the benevolence of others; second, that it must view investments in health differently, and make the development of a health defense system a priority – investing in quality health infrastructures as an obligation – and third, that the economies, which were already turning around , must create fiscal space to deal with debt challenges.
Asked about the results for Africa of the global climate summit, COP26, in Glasgow, last November, and how he views the prospects for success at COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, in 2022, Adesina expressed optimism. He said it was important for developed countries to fulfill their promise to provide Africa with the $100 billion a year needed for climate adaptation. “Our challenge is adaptation because we were not the ones who caused the problem. In Africa, we are adapting to climate change,” said Adesina.
He explained that the African Development Bank, together with its partner, the Global Center for Adaptation, was mobilizing US$25 billion to support climate adaptation in Africa.
The leader of the African Development Bank highlighted the importance of the technology sector as a driver of growth in Africa, and the prospects for the continent’s young people. Adesina described the African youth as one of her greatest assets. She praised the contributions of young entrepreneurs in the fintech, digital, creative arts and entertainment industries. She said young entrepreneurs’ need for innovative financing is why the Bank is exploring with stakeholders the establishment of investment banks specializing in young entrepreneurs to unlock potential and economic growth.