Africa’s food crisis requires innovative financing, says UN official

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Innovative financing models are needed to boost investment and prevent food shortages that are expected to hit African countries in the coming years, a senior UN official has told Semafor.

Alvaro Lario, president of the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), spoke in reference to a new UN report which predicts that Africans will account for more than half of the 582 million people worldwide expected to suffer from chronic undernourishment by 2030.

The annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report, released on Wednesday, reveals that Africa will have the largest share of hungry people in 2023, at 20.4%. Its authors said there was a “clear trend” of rising hunger in Africa, while progress has been made in Latin America and the Caribbean and the situation in Asia is relatively unimpeded.

According to Lario, whose agency invests in long-term global food supplies, the trends in Africa are “extremely worrying.” He told Semafor Africa that more innovation, such as partnerships between financial institutions and the private sector to fund climate change adaptation projects, was needed to boost investment in agriculture and livestock.

“We want to mobilize more funding, but not all of it can be in the form of grants,” he said. “We need to make sure that funding catalyses greater resource mobilization.”

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The SOFI report, produced jointly by UN agencies including IFAD, the World Food Programme and the World Health Organization, highlights the continuing impact of supply chain shocks caused by the war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lario said African countries should diversify their crops, reduce their reliance on imports and produce more fertilizer locally. “You need a certain degree of self-reliance if you don’t want to suffer these kinds of short-term shocks, which are very difficult to overcome,” he added.

Alexis’s point of view

Food security issues are of paramount importance in Africa. Much of the political, economic and social upheaval we have seen in recent years on the continent is linked in one way or another to this issue.

On the surface, the mass protests in Kenya were sparked by unpopular tax hikes. But these plans were launched against a backdrop of high living costs, fueled by food price inflation. And Kenya is not alone: ​​high food inflation in recent years has also sparked discontent in other African countries, such as Nigeria and Ghana.

These prices are linked to a lack of access to nutritious food, which is the result of shocks to global supply chains. The solution to this food insecurity involves addressing a range of issues that go beyond models to stimulate private sector investment in agriculture. That is important, of course, but so is improving security to mitigate the impact of conflict on food production. Farmers in Mali and northern Nigeria, for example, have been forced to flee their lands to flee Islamist insurgents. These insurgencies, which have destabilized countries in the Sahel, prevent crops from reaching markets and, in extreme cases, isolate entire rural areas.

Better transport infrastructure, both road and rail, would facilitate the movement of food between countries, and better implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area would facilitate the cross-border movement of food. This could be achieved through administrative changes, such as the establishment of continental food standards agencies to facilitate the movement of goods and eliminate bottlenecks caused by different countries each having their own rules and regulations.

Room for disagreement

Ndidi Nwuneli, executive director of One Campaign, a non-profit organisation that campaigns to end extreme poverty, told Semafor Africa that the causes of food insecurity in Africa lie primarily in the fact that the continent is disproportionately hit by the global climate crisis. She said the problems caused by floods and droughts faced by African countries have been exacerbated by the pandemic and the debt burden faced by many governments on the continent.

Nwuneli said countries have become more insular and protectionist in response to supply chain constraints caused by the pandemic and that many African countries are “prioritizing debt repayment” over investments in climate adaptation.

She said solutions to the food crisis in a number of African countries required a focus on climate change adaptation, such as “climate change debt cancellation and climate and food security debt swaps.” She added that there were “many creative opportunities” for debt investment interventions.

Notable

  • Blessing Akombi-Inyang, a Nigerian academic based in Australia who specializes in global health, In The Conversation, she argues that the Nigerian government must ensure adequate nutrition for pregnant women, support small-scale agriculture and create community-based programmes to treat malnutrition. She makes these recommendations in response to UN figures suggesting that around 11 million Nigerian children suffer from “severe” food poverty.

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