FOOD SCARCITY; PROMOTION OF INTRA TRADE IN AFRICA, A KEY TO UNLOCK AGRICULTURAL POTENTIAL IN THE CONTINENT.
As an African citizen who truly believes in the tremendous potential that agriculture holds for the African populace I would take a lot of drastic steps to unlock our agricultural potential and put us on the march to greatness.
First of all, the infrastructure that we have on this continent is an eyesore to all concerned individuals and cannot sustain massive agricultural production and to solve this problem I would write a memo to the African leaders and inform them about the need to set up an ‘infrastructure mutual fund' to the tune of $50BN. This mutual fund would be for the construction of cross border super-highways and fast railway lines with state of the art trains across the length and breadth of the African continent in order to ensure that farm produce can easily and freely move from the place where they have been produced to the point of need. I would make it very clear to the leaders that the poor and almost non-existent network of cross-border roads that we have is a great impediment to any hope of a more integrated Africa.
According to statistics from Deutsche Bank, intra-African trade only represents 15% of total African exports (jefferson, 2019) and if we can connect our continent with a robust transport system, then intra-African trade is set to jump to more than 50% of total African exports by 2030.
Furthermore, I would also convince the African leaders to come together and see how they can adopt a common currency just like the Eurozone did. A common currency would mean that a farmer in Nigeria who is exporting cocoa to Ghana does not need to convert his naira to cedi to pay for transport costs and does not also need to convert his payment in cedis back to naira and get slaughtered by ridiculous exchange rates and fees being charged by banks. A common currency would also strengthen the sense of brotherhood among our people and put to rest elements of xenophobia that exists in some African states.
I would also promote the idea of local consumption and my hope is that other African leaders would follow suit. It is high time that Africans produce what they eat and eat what they produce. We as a people have for long looked down on our farm produce and we’ve preferred to purchase foreign foods at the expense of our own locally grown food that is even more nutritious.
If our people look at their leaders and see this change in behavior they would begin to make the right adjustments and make no mistakes about it, this would go a long way to boost the morale of our farmers and it will put money in the their pockets and not the pockets of wealthy foreigners.
One very big problem that is holding our agricultural sector down is the fact that a large percentage of our farmers are illiterate and are not adept with 21st century farming practices and techniques such as the use of harvesters, planters and tractors. If the government would be establishing 'agricultural awareness and training hubs' in all states of the federation, these hubs would feature the brightest minds in modern farming technologies and they would show our farmers how to use the latest machinery on their farms, how to automate most of the activities on their farms thus reducing their overhead costs.
Conclusively, with the level of arable land, adequate sunshine and good rainfall that we have on our continent, it is a pity that a large percentage of our population cannot afford to feed at least three times daily. All African leaders must rise up to this challenge and ,I, want to tell the Nigerian people that in the next 10 years we would be completely food sufficient and it would be in such a scale that food prices would drop considerably for the first time in a generation and we would become a major exporter of agricultural products.
If the terms of this write up is applied, then food scarcity in africa would be a thing of the past.
References
- Jefferson, (2019). African statistics in Agriculture; phoenix print. Enugu state Nigeria.