Agriculture

The Challenge

While rich with opportunity, sub-Saharan Africa's agricultural sector is not living up to its full potential due to limited productivity and under-investment. Globally, development assistance for agriculture in poor countries has fallen from 18% of development assistance in the 1980s to less than 4% in recent years. Farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are feeling the impact: over the last 25 years, agricultural incomes in the region have on average grown by less than 1% per year, the lowest rate in the world and significantly less than any other region.

The African agricultural sector needs long-term investment that will enable farmers to get goods to market, learn more productive farming methods, and access improved technology, seeds, tools, and fertilizer.

Sub-Saharan Africa is already seriously off track in meeting the Millennium Development Goals to halve hunger and poverty by 2015, and increased food prices will likely delay this progress even further. Between 2005 and 2008, staple food prices of crops like corn and wheat rose by 83%. Last year, the food and fuel crises pushed an additional 130-155 million people into poverty and the total number of hungry people around the world increased by approximately 100 million to an estimated 1.02 billion between 2008 and 2009. Higher food prices mean families have less money to spend on health and education, and could become more vulnerable to undernutrition.

The Opportunity

The impact of investing in agriculture is potentially transformative, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where the sector employs nearly two-thirds of the population and accounts for an average one-third of GDP. Investment in agriculture can help producers and farmers in the developing world to earn their way out of poverty, increase exports, and provide communities and families with sustainable incomes. The World Bank estimates that growth in the agricultural sector is twice as effective at reducing poverty as growth in other sectors. Addressing the challenge of food security in the developing world and facilitating economic productivity through agriculture will require short-, medium-, and long-term global efforts.

In the short-term, the developing world needs an immediate and aggressive focus on providing food aid, as well an increase in the availability of agricultural inputs like fertilizer, seeds, and other tools to help farmers stimulate production. The provision of food aid and other inputs should also be flexible, allowing these goods to be purchased locally rather than being shipped from donor countries, and enabling local markets to benefit from the production and sale of these goods.

In the medium-term, safety-net programs like cash-for-work and school feeding programs that focus on the poorest and most vulnerable can prevent families from descending further into poverty. Safety-net programs also enable people to remain healthy and productive contributors to the workforce.

In the long-term, donors need to scale up funding for agriculture by investing in technology research and innovation, and training farmers to use new technologies to increase production. Improving poor farmers' access to local and regional markets, and investing in rural infrastructure like roads, electrification, storage facilities, and irrigation systems, are also vital elements for increasing long-term agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa.

The food and financial crises have helped to expose the two decades of underinvestment in the agricultural sector - the time is now for new investments.  The G8 recently pledged $20 billion for agricultural development in developing countries.  Some countries, like the U.S., have pledged new money, but it remains to be seen whether other donors will provide new money, and where this money will go.