AFRICA: Not spending enough on food – Not enough food to go around
JOHANNESBURG, 21 June 2010 (IRIN): “Africa is now facing the same type of long-term food deficit problem that India faced in the early 1960s”, says a paper by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a US-based think-tank.
African countries are not spending enough on agriculture and the overall productivity of the continent has dropped since the mid-1980s, said the paper which looked at trends in public spending on agriculture in Africa.
“Since the 1960s, Africa has lost ground in the global marketplace. Its share of total world agricultural exports fell from 6 percent in the 1970s to 2 percent in 2007,” said the paper entitled, “Public Spending for Agriculture in Africa: Trends and Composition”.
The paper was produced by researchers who work with IFPRI’s Regional Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support System (ReSAKSS).
Spending money on food production is critical in Africa, where 70 percent of people live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for food and income.
There are also going to be more people to feed in Africa in the next few decades.
Sub-Saharan Africa’s population is expected to grow faster than elsewhere by 2050, increasing by 910 million people, or 108 percent; East and Southeast Asia’s population is set to rise by only 228 million, or 11 percent, according to UN projections.
In 2003, the continent adopted the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) and countries committed to allocating 10 percent of their budgets to agriculture.
Only eight African countries have reached or surpassed the 10 percent target, according to CAADP.
Læs videre på http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=89566
