Nigeria, for example, was once a major exporter of groundnuts, or peanuts, cocoa and other crops, and it was “food secure”. It grew all its people needed to eat. But last year Nigeria spent over U.S.$70 billion importing food, including products made from such crops as tomatoes that can grow in abundance in Nigeria.
Nigeria’s agriculture minister, Akinwumi Adesina, whose doctorate from an American university is in agricultural economics, is one of the new leaders determined to reverse that food dependence.
Nigeria, in order to build resilience and tackle food insecurity through raising agricultural productivity and food production, launched the Agricultural Transformation Agenda in 2012. The overall goals are to add 20 million metric tons of food to the domestic food supply by 2015, create 3.5 million jobs and to become a net exporter of food, Adesina has said.
Calestous Juma, director of the Science, Technology and Globalization Project at the Belfer Center of Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, said there is a “new generation” of African leaders focusing on agricultural transformation.
“Political leadership is a key driver of agricultural investment in Africa,” said Juma. “This should now be followed by long-term national and regional policies that guarantee consistency in government commitment to agriculture. This is a key role that the African Union can play by maintaining focus on agricultural policy over the next two decades.”
Juma, author of the 2011 book “The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa” has said that Africa, which has the largest share of the world’s uncultivated land, can feed itself in a generation and be able to export products to other regions of the world. But he said doing so would require concerted investments in infrastructure, technical training and creation of regional as well as new international markets.
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