The Food and Agriculture Organization on Thursday called on the African governments to seek urgent and long-term solutions to avert perennial food shortages which has ravaged the whole continent.
Speaking during the official opening of the high-level UN-sponsored meeting in Nairobi, FAO Director General Dr. Jacques Diouf said the African governments have responsibility to offer politically motivated solutions to reverse the current food crisis affecting millions of people in the region.
"The continent must place agriculture at the height of development. Africa can change the present situation and succeed to feed its population with the right decisions on agriculture," Diouf told the African ministers in Nairobi.
"The problem of food security is a political issue. It is the decisions made by governments that will determine allocation of resources. Members need to implement policies and strategies to overcome food insecurity," he said.
The FAO director-general said the UN agency had resolved that the food crisis needed to be addressed once and for all to avert perennial food shortages.
"The agricultural sector faces many constraints which have to be addressed collectively. Without investment in agriculture, Africa's future would be unpredictable," he warned.
He appealed to countries with land and water resources to partner with those having technology, management capability as well as financial resources to double food production for the world.
The director-general maintained that Africa has the potential to produce enough food not only to feed itself but the entire world, citing a lack of exploitation of available resources as the continent’s major undoing.
"In the 1970's, Africa used to be a net exporter of food. We have the land and we have water. Today only a paltry seven percent of the land is under irrigation while four percent is in sub-Saharan Africa. Compared to Asia which has 58 percent of its land under irrigation, Africa is lagging behind," said Dr Diouf.
FAO chief faulted African leaders for failing to adhere to their Maputo Declaration where they agreed to allocate at least 10percent of their national budgets to agriculture, adding that only one country in the whole continent had so far complied with the accord, according to the African Union report.
"Food insecurity has been caused by climatic changes, a greater demand for food, rapid population growth, the phenomenon of urbanization and plant and animal diseases," he said.
The 25th FAO Regional Conference for Africa comes barely two weeks after a similar one in Rome addressing the food crisis and before the African Union Heads of State summit to be held in Egyptat the end of the month.
FAO chief said food insecurity facing the countries was a political issue that could only be solved if governments resolved to allocate more resources for the agriculture and other productive sectors.
He said that although the continent was currently experiencing food shortages that had led to soaring food prices, the trend could still be reversed through massive investment in the agricultural sector by policy makers.
He urged the countries in the region to step up measures and come with a common approach to save the natives from starvation by investing heavily in irrigation, growing more resistant varieties of crops, carrying an in-depth research to assess opportunities that biotechnology offers to farmers and the risks, using improved seeds and application of fertilizers in cultivating crops.
He emphasized the importance of prioritizing agriculture, saying that the sector accounted for 70 percent of gross domestic product, 50 percent employment and 11 percent of exports for Africa.
Source:Xinhua
|
Comment
Tell A Friend
Print Format
Save Article