The 2022 Africa Agriculture Status Report (AASR22) released Tuesday in Kigali calls for African governments to lead and coordinate domestic and external efforts to urgently and holistically tackle food insecurity in the continent.
The Africa Agriculture Status Report is an annual publication by AGRA, focusing on emerging issues in Africa. Last year, the 2021 AASR Report focused on the resilience of Africa’s food systems, and why ensuring this resilience is critical.
The 2022 report released during the ongoing AGRF Summit in Kigali is themed “Accelerating African Food Systems Transformation”.
It emphasizes the urgent need for inclusive, equitable, sustainable and resilient growth in the agricultural sector, while acknowledging intensification of major drivers of recent food insecurity trends in Africa and also recognizes the need to accelerate action.
Fundamentally, the 2022 report calls for good leadership and coordination, a need to build capacity and capabilities to address food systems, but most importantly the mobilization of financing from both the public and private sector.
The publication focuses on practical pathways to meeting these ends and highlights six megatrends shaping the development of agrifood systems in Africa that warrant greater attention by stakeholders.
It examines the role of leadership in harnessing collective effort, shared responsibility, greater stakeholder engagement, as well as rallying political will, to achieve food systems transformation in Africa.
It presents the investment gap required to trigger and sustain Africa’s agro-food transformation reflecting on the requisite human, institutional and systemic capacities and capabilities that are required to achieve agro-food system transformation at scale.
It recommends priorities for African national governments, development partners and the private sector.
The report states that “accelerating agro-food transformation in a sustainable and inclusive way is an extremely complex task. It requires an integrated approach, which draws heavily on the cooperation of system actors, with African governments driving the process that facilitates the required change,” adding that addressing the vulnerability of Africa’s food systems requires political will and leadership.
AGRA’s President, Dr Agnes Kalibata noted that a combination of the after-effects of the pandemic and the Ukraine conflict have led to elevation of food prices thus exacerbating food insecurity in the continent.
The AASR22 reflects on key action areas required to tackle the most urgent and important areas in response to these challenges, he said.
“There is urgent need to repurpose food policies to address the emerging challenges affecting conditions, outcomes and behavior of our food systems, without compromising the economic, social and environmental fundamentals,” Dr Kalibata added.
CU/as/APA