Agriculture has been identified as the single most strategic sector for Africa’s economic growth. African Development Bank (AfDB) president, Akinwumi Adesina, said agriculture was the best way to create jobs and make money. “Our problem is that we have viewed African agriculture through the wrong lens for too many years. Agriculture is not a development activity or a social activity, it’s the biggest money-making business in the world.”
A former Nigerian Agriculture Minister, Adesina stressed that a Minister of Agriculture needed to work hand-in-hand with a Minister of Finance and a Minister of Trade and Investment. “And while it’s government’s role to create policy, incentives and infrastructure – it’s ultimately the private sector that must step up and invest along the length of the agricultural value chain, from producing to processing, from farm to fork,” he said.
A question he raised was what use was it that Africa produced 75% of the world’s cocoa beans, but produced only 2% of its chocolate. “We simply have to transform African agriculture,” he said. “The African future is not, as some people think, based on oil and gas - you can’t drink oil or smoke gas. The future is food – you can eat food. Our continent’s food and agriculture markets will be worth US $1 trillion within 13 years.”
Adesina was addressing press at the start of the AfDB’s 52nd annual meetings in Ahmedabad, India.
He said the African continent was holding its own economically against global headwinds and commodity price drops and in large measure exceeding global patterns, with four of the world’s five fastest-growing economies being in Africa, 14 of its countries growing above 5% in 2016, and 18 between 3% and 5%.
