Ethiopia to Host Continental Food Security Meet

By Staff Writer

Addis Ababa--- From Monday 24th January, Ethiopia will be hosting about 20 experts drawn from the academia, research institutions, the private sector, international organizations and regional economic commissions at a review meeting on a project focusing on the development and promotion of regional strategic food and agricultural commodities value chains in Africa.

The experts will discuss the joint project of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), African Union (AU), and the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), which aims to accelerate the implementation of the agricultural protocol of the 1991 Abuja Treaty, as well as operationalize the 2006 Abuja Food Security Summit and the 2010 Abuja High-level Conference on Agribusiness and Agro-industries in Africa.

The project entails a pilot project in COMESA and ECOWAS focusing on three strategic food and agricultural commodities – livestock, maize and rice.

ECA’s Food Security and Sustainable Development Division (FSSD) which is facilitating the expert meeting said in a statement that although agriculture employs 90 per cent of the rural labour force and nearly 60 per cent of the total labour force of the continent, the continent still spends $33 billion annually on food import and loses its export market shares due to unexploited intra regional production and trade potential.

“This problem is symptomatic of an increasing disconnection of the region’s agriculture – and farmers -- from the market, both at the regional and global levels” the statement said.

For Africa to reverse its weak and declining competitiveness in regional and global markets, it is important that African countries collaborate in regional frameworks to create and sustain a competitive edge in commodities that the countries produce and trade.

This means therefore that strategic commodities must be identified according to agro-ecological zones while marketing of commodities must take into account entire commodity value chains from input acquisition, production, transformation, and end use.

The experts will discuss these issues and come up with recommendations to assist African policy makers and key shareholders in improving the competitiveness of strategic food and commodities subsectors in Africa, thereby contributing to the implementation of the African Union’s Common Market Initiative.

At the 2006 Summit, African heads of state committed to increasing intra-African trade by promoting and protecting rice, maize, legumes, cotton, oil palm, beef, dairy, poultry and fisheries products as strategic commodities at the continental level. They also identified cassava, sorghum and millet at the sub regional level.

The heads of state further committed to accelerating the development of these strategic commodities by fast-tracking the implementation of trade arrangements adopted in the RECs through lowering of tariffs and removing non-tariff barriers.