A mother homeschools her children in Shamva district, Zimbabwe, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 10,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Africa; Zimbabwe and South Sudan among most vulnerable. Credit: WFP/Tatenda Macheka

By Kundhavi Kadiresan
WASHINGTON DC, Dec 18 2020 (IPS)

Africa, compared to Asia, Europe and the US, has largely escaped the devastating death toll of COVID-19, accounting for a fraction of the world’s 63 million cases.

Instead, the continent has been uniquely affected by the pandemic’s impact on food supply chains, revealing underlying vulnerabilities that threaten to bring a different crisis and leaving the spectre of famine looming over several African countries.

As donors, NGOs and research organisations rally to support governments in preventing a rise in extreme hunger and poverty, we have an opportunity to transform Africa’s food systems for the better at a time when the entire world has reached an inflection point for the sustainability of food systems.

In tackling the secondary impacts of the pandemic, Africa can build greater resilience to global shocks, leapfrogging other regions by reconfiguring a food system that the continent – and the world – has long since outgrown.

This could provide a blueprint for other regions and countries in the run-up to a milestone UN summit in 2021 and help the rest of the world to leverage food and agriculture for better health, climate action and opportunities for equality.

Such a roadmap should start by recognising that the diet, nutrition and health of a population underpins all other indicators of progress and prosperity.

With this in mind, agriculture should be situated at the heart of any national or regional strategy for development and economic growth.

Since it was launched in 2003, the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) has set out clear targets for agriculture as a driver of other goals and includes more than 40 countries among its signatories.

As of 2015, public spending on agriculture across Africa under CAADP had increased by more than seven per cent a year to support more and better livelihoods, stronger food security and greater resilience.

It also provides a clear, shared vision around which partners, such as agricultural research networks like CGIAR, can unite to play their part.

Such an integrated, coordinated approach, both between governments and partners, will be essential in delivering the next decade of the programme to accelerate the transformation of African agriculture.

But while a high-level framework like CAADP is crucial for bringing together partners in pursuit of common goals, each country, district and neighbourhood will also need solutions appropriate to their specific contexts.

The world may be connected by its common need to produce sufficient healthy food in a sustainable way, but the means through which this is achieved varies enormously according to social and environmental factors.

Developing more innovations that fit geographical needs will allow food systems to be more responsive, adaptive and impactful.

Over the last 20 years, for example, CGIAR has developed 52 separate innovations across sustainable livestock, crop breeding and natural resource management in Ethiopia alone. By tailoring them to the specific challenges faced by smallholders, women and youth, these solutions have reached an estimated 11 million rural households.

Going forward, initiatives like the Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT) program, led by CGIAR and funded by the African Development Bank, will integrate expertise from across research areas to continue to scale up the uptake of appropriate new technologies.

Working in 30 countries, TAAT is forecast to increase raw food production by 120 million tons per year, helping to lift about 40 million people out of poverty, by focusing on national needs across different crops and livestock, and different challenges from crop pests to soil fertility.

Finally, in reforming agriculture, Africa has the opportunity to address systematic and long-term inequality, particularly when it comes to gender inequality.

Women in Africa continue to carry out around 40 per cent of agricultural labour yet their frequent exclusion from financial services, land rights and equal opportunities for training holds back Africa’s agricultural development.

CGIAR’s COVID-19 Hub enables researchers to work collectively, while also drawing lessons learned from research across the CGIAR System that can both support the pandemic recovery, and also identify opportunities to close the gender gap.

For example, one study demonstrates the challenges women livestock keepers faced compared to men as a result of a shortage of livestock feed during the pandemic, and offered solutions that could unlock the potential of women, building resilience not only for women but also for their families and their communities.

Arguably, if research into the connected relationship between human, animal and environmental health had been better funded, the world may not be facing today’s COVID-19, health and hunger crisis.

But if there is one lesson to learn, it should be that investing now in agricultural research could help prevent the next disaster, in Africa and around the world.

It is clear now that the needs of a 21st century food system stretch further than ever, and we must rise to the challenge of redesigning a food system for Africa itself and by Africa for the world.

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Excerpt:

Like many, I remember the warnings of parents and teachers to never count your chickens before they’ve hatched, and to never keep all your eggs in one basket.

Kundhavi Kadiresan

These lighthearted questions in fact carry a serious message. If we didn’t know how many chickens we could produce or how many eggs they could lay, our food value chains would begin to fall apart. The same important facts must be known for all food produced. Supply must meet demand.

We know counting is important for a myriad of reasons. We count the number of people on the planet and we mathematically project a rise in population — by 2050 the world’s population is expected to grow by another two billion, topping out at more than nine billion— and we are rightly worried about whether or not we will be able to produce enough food to feed everyone by then.

So ensuring that we can accurately count our chickens or our sheep, while correctly predicting our supplies of rice, fruit, vegetables and crops is critical. Unfortunately, we don’t always get the count right and some countries are better than others when it comes to collecting agricultural statistics. That’s why it is time to work together to improve the way we gather these statistics worldwide.

It is time to improve the way countries gather agricultural stats.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is working with our member countries and partners to improve these agricultural counts. Since 1950, FAO has been a leader in agricultural censuses by providing technical guidance to countries that conduct their national censuses every 10 years. More recently, our member countries have asked us to find ways to improve the methods of gathering statistics and to provide guidance on sustainable production, livestock, forestry, fisheries and how to analyse the impact of climate change.

To implement better practices on statistical gathering, and to share best practices on agricultural and rural statistics between countries, FAO and our partners are supporting two major initiatives. One is called the Global Strategy to Improve Agricultural and Rural Statistics and the other is the World Programme for the Census of Agriculture 2020 (WCA 2020). The Global Strategy, provides the vision for national and international statistical systems to meet 21st-century challenges, which include poverty, food insecurity, global warming and the sustainable use of land and water resources.

The WCA 2020 is providing governments with a new approach to comprehensive data collection on the structure of agriculture and it facilitates international comparisons. A new global census round is getting under way this year and, for the first time, it will include aquaculture as well as capture fisheries.

In order for national policymakers to intervene in agricultural production, at the right time and in the right place, they need reliable statistics. The data provided by these national censuses will form the foundation for building better systems that collect more recent and periodic information. For the first time, this new round of censuses will look at the impacts that greenhouse gases and ammonia emissions are having on agricultural activities.

This month professional statisticians and census leaders, who are likely to play a role in the planning and execution of the next agricultural census in their respective countries, are meeting in Bangkok to discuss WCA 2020. A total of 21 countries from Asia are participating, including Pakistan.

But all this attention is about more than just numbers and ways to count. As mentioned, statistics are the foundation of world agriculture. They underpin all agricultural decisions and work, and provide valuable information to meet challenges such as food insecurity, poverty and climate change.

Let us not forget that agriculture provides the primary source of food for humans, feed for animals, fibres for clothes, and material for fuel and housing — all things that are needed by a growing world population.

As we work together and with others to meet the world’s Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, the WCA 2020, implemented during 2016-25, has the potential to help provide valuable data to ensure many SDG targets will have been accurately met. We need to be sure that when shepherds bless and count their sheep they will have arrived at an accurate tally. To feed the world of our children and their children, we shouldn’t count our chickens before they hatch.

The writer is assistant director-general and regional representative for Asia and the Pacific, Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO).
Published in Dawn September 18th, 2016

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan