The President of the African Development Bank (AfDB), Dr Akinwumi Adesina, has said that time has come for Africa to bring together the needed support and resources, including agricultural technologies to produce enough to ensure that Africa is food sufficient.
Speaking at the opening of the Annual General Meeting of the AfDB on Tuesday in Accra, Ghana, Dr. Adesina said: Africa needs seeds in the ground and mechanical harvesters to harvest bountiful food produced locally.
According to him, Africa must feed itself with pride and that there is no dignity in begging for food.
He noted that Africa with its rich natural resources, youthful population and occupying 20 percent of the earth’s total land area has no business depending on other continents for food aid, adding that food aid cannot feed Africa.
On the issue of energy transition, Adesina said that the ongoing energy transition process would ensure cleaner sources of energy and warned that it should not short-change Africa’s growth and development.
He, however, noted that Africa cannot rely only on renewables for stable energy to power industrialisation.
According to him, Africa needs to combine renewables with natural gas to ensure stability and security of energy, and to improve access and affordability as well as energy security.
Declaring open the annual meetings of the AfDB, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo of Ghana, urged African nations and their financial institutions to come up with a new economic model that would serve the interest of their peoples.
Local media reports quoted the Ghanaian leader as saying that the profits from African resources have benefited foreign creditors for far too long, while “we suffer abusive borrowing cost on the international capital markets”.
According to him, there is no basis for African economies to be saddled with the so-called ‘African Risk Premium’, which translate into higher spreads for European and North American counterparts, particularly when African resources are the catalyst for the economic advancement of Western nations.
He said that it was high time Africa worked hard to address and remove the structural barriers to its development and also dealt with tax avoidance and illegitimate commercial transactions by multinationals.
The reports added that Presidents of Mozambique and Tanzania, Filipe Jacinto Nyusi and Samia Suluhu Hassan, respectively; the Vice-President of Cote d’Ivoire, as well as Finance ministers from Africa and other stakeholders from around the world attended the opening of the four-day annual meetings of the regional bank.
GIK/APA