AFRICA: Going rural and green – Farming needs to make money to drive growth
ADDIS ABABA, 15 October 2010 (IRIN): Rural Africa needs to wake up to climate change, which is threatening food security, people’s resilience to cope with (modstandskraft til at klare) natural disasters, and economic growth, participants were told at the Seventh African Development Forum which ends in Addis Ababa today.
Africa’s Rural Futures (RF) programme, an initiative of the African Union’s New Partnership for Development (NEPAD) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), sets out plans to boost rural development, and is an attempt to adapt to (tilpasse sig) the impact of climate change.
At the same time, organizations such as the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Bank are backing the UN’s Green Economy Initiative, which is more focused on mitigation (lindring).
In his address, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, NEPAD’s chief executive officer, called RF a “new way of thinking about development”.
But is it new? At a policy level, Lindiwe Sibanda, head of the Food Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network, a think-tank, explained:
– Well, what they are talking about is integrated rural development with agriculture as the driver. It will get all the ministries to look at their sectors with a rural lens. It moves beyond the sectoral approach.
This would do agriculture in Africa some good, she hoped:
– Development of agriculture has suffered because of the sectoral approach. Departments of transport, infrastructure and agriculture have not worked in consort in many countries, affecting food production and supply.
In a bid to revive their failing rural economies, some developed countries have been running RF programmes for some years. WWF, which has been involved in some of these programmes, had been looking at an initiative to improve rural livelihoods with a link to improving biodiversity in Africa, when they found NEPAD.
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