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DEVELOPMENT-AFRICA: Food Security Depends on Access to Western Markets
By Joyce Mulama
KAMPALA, Apr 2, 2004 (IPS) - Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has renewed his appeal to the West to open up its market so as to enable Africa to achieve food security.
"You cannot talk about total food security for Africa without talking about the need for Africa to gain access to rich western countries’ agricultural markets. Can we have food security when we are competing on unequal playing field with these nations? When they flood our markets with finished agricultural products that have been manufactured from our raw materials?" he posed to delegates attending an international meeting on food security.
Organised by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the three-day meeting which opened in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, on Apr. 1 brought together about 500 delegates from 50 countries, 30 of them African.
Titled ‘Assuring Food and Nutrition Security in Africa by 2020: Prioritising Actions, Strengthening Actors and Facilitating Partnerships’, the gathering seeks to explore ways of ensuring food security. Africa’s food production "is not increasing at a rate necessary to meet population growth, currently averaging 2.4 percent annually across the continent," IFPRI says
Museveni said the huge western agricultural subsidies were hurting African farmers who lacked such privileges.
His Nigerian counterpart Olusegun Obasanjo, who was present at the opening session, concurred. "In the OECD (a Paris-based Organisation for Economic Corporation and Development whose members comprise wealthy countries) the subsidies stand at about one billion U.S. dollars per day. We are all familiar with the cliche about Africans living on less than one U.S. dollar per day. Yet a cow in Europe is subsidised at over two U.S. dollars per day," he said.
"With this sort of subsidies, African agriculture cannot attain the competitive edge required to make it buoyant, be it in the area of foreign exchange earning or precipitating necessary incentives to increase production," Obasanjo added.
Some research agencies say the African farmer is growing poorer due to diminishing agricultural productivity, which has led to low food availability, rising poverty levels and increased number of undernourished populations.
"An estimated 200 million people in Africa are malnourished, and their numbers have increased by almost 20 percent since the early 1990s," an IFPRI statistics shows.
It says "undernutrition is the major risk factor underlying over 28 percent of all deaths in Africa, translating into some 2.9 million deaths annually."
The falling agricultural yields in Africa could be reversed if governments invested in infrastructure, says Adrian Mukhebi, Executive Director of the Kenya Agricultural Commodity Exchange Limited. He blames poor infrastructure for the rising poverty level.
"Due to bad roads, the high transport cost is unfriendly to the farmer who cannot afford to take his produce from one station to another. Most farmers transport their produce by road and because of the poor state of roads, the goods, which are mostly perishable, reach their destination after days when they are rotten. Investing in infrastructure will automatically reduce transport and marketing costs, as well as poverty level," he told IPS.
More than half Kenya’s population lives below the poverty line.
Kenya’s economy, like many of other African countries, is dependant on agriculture. Small-scale farmers dominate the sector, accounting for 75 percent of the total agricultural production and 70 percent of marketed agricultural output, according to Joseph Kinyua, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture.
Asha Rose Migiro, Tanzania’s Minister of Community Development, Women and Children, believes the solution for food security in her country lies in irrigation. Tanzania’s semi-arid northern parts are experiencing severe drought and government has undertaken a project to draw water from the River Nile, amid resistance by Egypt.
Edward Lowassa, Tanzania’s Minister for Water and Livestock Development, told IPS last month that Tanzania did not need permission from Egypt to save its famine-stricken population by drawing water from the river, which originates from East Africa of which Tanzania is part.
In solidarity with Tanzania, President Museveni responded (Apr. 1) to a question posed by IPS, "Water is the source of life and Egypt has no right to monopolise use of the Nile water. It cannot deprive others of livelihood. Egypt must sit down with the countries surrounding the Nile and work out a new arrangement, which is equitable. This egocentric approach on the use of Nile waters must stop."
Controversy has for decades surrounded the use of the Nile water. Egypt claims it has legal rights over it following an agreement signed in 1929 between it and British government on behalf of Sudan. According to the treaty, none of the riparian states of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Eritrea, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Rwanda and Burundi are to undertake any developmental projects that will interfere with the flow of the water to Egypt.
Delegates at the meeting say the Nile water may ensure food security in the region, thereby achieving part of the UN Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of people suffering from malnutrition and hunger by 2015.
More than 350 million people, over half of sub-Saharan Africa’s population, live on less than one dollar a day, according to the World Bank.(END/2004)
(END)
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