By James Hall
MBABANE, Dec 27 2004 (IPS)

When African leaders met at an African Union summit in the Mozambique capital, Maputo last year, their pledges to improve agriculture in their countries rang sincere, but ran up against the immensity – some realists thought the impracticality – of their goals.

“The heads of states promised to devote ten percent of their national budgets to agriculture, and follow steps that would produce an annual growth rate of six percent in agriculture in their respective countries,” said Richard Mngomezulu of the Swaziland’s Ministry of Agriculture.

Swaziland’s government budget devoted to agriculture has averaged only 3.8 percent over the past five years, despite the overwhelming dominance of agriculture in the lives of Swazis. Four out of five Swazis reside as peasant farmers on communal land, administered by palace-appointed chiefs, and workers in urban centres are mostly employed by industries that deal with agricultural products.

Yet, three years of drought and an AIDS crisis that has decimated the ranks of agricultural workers and heads of farming families have led to five years of declining harvests. Government is heavily in debt, with no funds to improve agricultural production, and the World Food Programme (WFP) and other international donors are keeping alive over a fourth of the population.

But other countries in Southern Africa are inching toward a measure of success. All are signatories to the Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP). The initiative, which falls under the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), a blueprint to attract foreign investments in return for good governance, seeks to produce a medley of positive social changes using agriculture as the engine.

NEPAD, which was launched three years ago, has committed itself to poverty eradication, a more equitable distribution of wealth, environmental protection, improved water supplies, and scientific and technological development with first applications centred on food production.

Under NEPAD’s plan, new agricultural products for export will find expanding markets, with national balance of trade ledgers improving, and more pan-African trade resulting.

All of this is to be achieved by 2015, a date now only a decade away. And with the achievement of these goals, planners hope, will come an end to the food insecurity problems that plague virtually all African countries, and 200 million Africans in total.

Are the goals realistic, or merely the wishes of another lavish heads of state summit?

A CAADP report released this month noted, “The emerging enthusiasm in embracing the CAADP process and framework is particularly evident in the numbers of countries that are reporting to achieving or are working towards achieving the goal of allocating at least 10 percent of national budgetary resources to agriculture within at most five years.”

Integrating a NEPAD document into a national agricultural policy is one thing, but funding and implementing actual projects is the hard part. The NEPAD Secretariat is committed to providing seed money of 350,000 dollars, or 10 percent of the 3.5 million dollars needed from international donors, to jump-start a variety of initiatives during the first half of 2005.

A source with the Mozambique diplomatic corps told IPS, “Success of one kind has already been achieved, because our countries under the AU (African Union) and NEPAD are speaking in a common voice. We have put industrialisation on hold as a means to get our countries out of poverty, and we have recognised that agriculture is the livelihood of so many of our people, and is the backbone of our national economies, that this should be our priority. We also have agreed on how to go about it.”

A new NEPAD report prepared by American professors at Michigan State University that draws lessons from the devastating Southern African regional drought of 2002-2003, concludes with the grim news that the region is likely to experience similar droughts two or three times a decade. The CAADP programmes for 2005 and beyond call for extending irrigation systems.

“It is a concern for Africa that the percentage of land that is irrigated is 7 percent (3.7 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa, while the corresponding percentages for South Africa, East and South-East Asia and South Asia are 10 percent, 29 percent and 41 percent respectively),” the CAADP report noted.

CAADP is looking to public-private partnerships to invest in river basin resources, invest in both large-scale public water management projects and small-scale projects like drip-irrigation to more efficiently water crops that now depend solely on rainfall.

This requires action by African governments to ensure legal mechanisms permitting public-private partnerships involving scarce natural resources, while putting in place environmental controls to protect those resources.

Grant money is also sought from Africa’s partners in developmental projects, such as U.N. agencies, and European, North American and Asian governmental aid agencies.

CAADP’s list of initiatives hoping to take flight in the next six months is comprehensive and ambitious. It includes creating more private local entrepreneurs in the agricultural sector, bringing down regional trade barriers so those entrepreneurs might more easily sell their products over their neighbours’ borders, and improve the nutritional intake of school children by founding home grown school feeding schemes, which would initially target one million African students.

These and other CAADP schemes have been talked about in many African countries. The difference now is they have been accepted as pan-African policy, and the dissenting voices are not raised against the programmes themselves, but are expressions of concern over the likelihood of funding and the political will to move forward.

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