Adesina Calls For Actions To Lift 1bn People Out Of Hunger

—Says World Not Winning War Against Hunger

Tayo Olanipekun

The African Development Bank (AfDB) has called on global partners for efforts to lift one billion people worldwide out of hunger.

The Bank also announced that it was leading the way by investing $24bn in African agriculture over the next 10 years,according to a statement in Lagos on Wednesday.

“We are not winning the war against global hunger,” AfDB President, Akinwumi Adesina, told an agriculture conference at Purdue University in Indianapolis.

“We must not get carried away,” he added, referring to statistics showing a decline in the global population living on less than two dollars per day.

The number of hungry people in the world had increased from 777 million in 2015 to 815 million in 2016, he added, citing the latest World Food Security and Nutrition data.

Adesina said simple technical and scientific methods were already making a whole difference to farm yields and income in Africa.

“The release of water efficient maize varieties now allows farmers to harvest good yields in the face of moderate drought,” he noted.

“Today, rice varieties exist that can give yields of 8 tonnes per ha. Cassava varieties exist with yields of up to 80 tonnes per ha. Heat tolerant and disease resistant livestock and technologies for ramping up aquaculture exist,” according to him.

Bank experts put current comparative yields at 1.5-2 tonnes per ha for rice and 10-15 tonnes per ha for cassava.

“All Africa needs to do is to harness the available technologies with the right policies and rapidly raise agricultural productivity and incomes for farmers and assure lower food prices for consumers,” Adesina said.

The Bank has launched its Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT), a $1 billion initiative to extend the use of farm technologies.

TAAT is currently engaging seed companies, public and private entities, and financial institutions in 27 countries to make technology available to a total of 40 million African farmers.

The conference on “Scaling Up Agricultural Technologies for Transformation” marked Adesina’s fond return to his alma mater.

“It was here, as a graduate student, that I began the journey of searching for ways to get technologies into the hands of millions of farmers,” he said.

Adesina,therefore, called for global partnerships to establish Staple Crop Processing Zones across Africa.

The African Development Bank has already started investments to develop these SCPZs in a number of pioneering African countries, including Ethiopia, Togo, Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique.

It expects the processing zones to be active in about 15 countries in the near-term.