Africa may need as much as $400 billion of investment in food production over the next decade to meet the continent’s needs, a report showed.

“It could require $315 billion to $400 billion over the next 10 years in public and private sector investments in all aspects of food production, processing, marketing and transport,” the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa said in an e-mailed report Tuesday. The organization was founded in 2006 through a partnership between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

El Nino weather patterns damaged crops from South Africa to Ethiopia, leaving the continent’s countries fighting for supplies even as they have made strides to improve agricultural output and productivity. Malawi has declared a state of disaster and about 50 million people face hunger in the eastern and southern parts of the continent, the United Nation’s humanitarian affairs agency said earlier this year. Weak transport networks, access to energy, irrigation systems and stockholding facilities also inhibit farming, the organizations said.

“The food-import deficit currently in Africa is $35 billion annually and could grow to $110 billion in the next decade, if we do nothing,” AGRA President Agnes Kalibata said Monday in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. “We need to bring our leadership on board to keep the momentum and move our farmers from subsistence farming to profitable business.”

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Africa Agriculture Status Report 2016

Progress towards African Agricultural Transformation

Africa is making steady progress towards agricultural transformation. In the past decade there has been dramatic transformation in different countries and various localities. There is a noticeable upward shift in expenditure on agriculture by national governments in African countries. African governments have reaffirmed their commitment to prioritizing agriculture in their development agendas and are investing an increased proportion of their budgets in the sector from a growing national revenue base. There is evidence of faster growth in agricultural productivity, improved nutrition, and greater job expansion even in the non-farm segments of their economies. The private sector is increasingly investing in agriculture, and the foundations have been laid for a renaissance in Africa’s agriculture, one powered by the enormous progress increasingly evident in farmers who are gaining more options in the seeds they plant, in the fertilizers they use, and in the markets available to purchase their produce.

These glimpses of success offer an inspiring new vision of a future Africa in which farming as a struggle to survive gives way to farming as a business that thrives. The process by which an agri-food system transforms over time from being subsistence-oriented and farm-centered into one that is more commercialized, productive, and off-farm centered is taking place in Africa. Much more remains to be done to sustain these gains and truly drive the agricultural transformation needed for Africa’s development, and to ensure a better life for all of its people as laid out in the Malabo Declaration and in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

This is the fourth volume of the Africa Agriculture Status Report series focusing on, “Progress towards African Agricultural Transformation”. The 2016 Report has tracked the progress made in the last decade with the MDGs and the Maputo Declaration as critical benchmarks, through to the current status, considering the Malabo Declaration and the projection and trajectory towards 2030 in line with the SDGs. The Report has maintained the original objective of producing an annual series that provides an in-depth and comprehensive analysis of emerging issues and challenges being faced by Africa’s smallholder farmers. The series allows African scholars and development professionals, and their colleagues in non-African countries, to contribute practical and evidence-based recommendations and share knowledge that contributes to Africa’s food security. The publication has also maintained its two section format: a detailed narrative that addresses various facets of the publication’s theme, and a data section that presents country-level agriculture and economic growth data which reveal important trends in African agricultural development.

The 2016 Agriculture Status Report has as its main objective to: (i) highlight major trends in African agriculture, the drivers of those trends, and the emerging challenges that Africa’s food systems are facing in the 21st century; (ii) identify policies and programs that can support the movement of Africa’s farming systems from subsistence-oriented towards more commercialized farming systems that can raise productivity, increase incomes, generate employment and contribute to economic growth; (iii) identify areas that enable better targeting of investment resources to increase agriculture productivity; (iv) identify the necessary conditions, appropriate technologies, and institutions that can propel and catalyze African agricultural transformation; (v) examine the past and the present role of public and private sector investment in agriculture, and the success factors that can be scaled up to accelerate transformation; and (vi) explore how agricultural transformation can contribute to solving the reality of rural poverty, low productivity, food insecurity, malnutrition, unemployment, and lower income among the population in countries in sub-Saharan Africa. These objectives have been addressed in the 11 chapters of the Report.

The role of Africa agricultural transformation is to change today’s rural poverty in sub-Saharan Africa into tomorrow’s prosperity, through sustainably and significantly increasing the productivity of smallholder farmers, and the power and transformative effect of agriculture to sustain broad-based, inclusive and equitable sustainable economic growth. This is the aspiration of this 2016 Report.

» Download: Africa Agriculture Status Report 2016 (PDF, 10.89 MB)