ADDIS ABABA – The African Union (AU) has urged stakeholders to make concerted efforts to intensify the implementation of policies and programs that create an enabling environment to make agriculture in Africa more inclusive and profitable.
As the second UN Food Systems Summit takes place in Addis Ababa, the seat of the AU, the continental bloc highlighted the significance of Africa’s 10-year Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), which was launched in January 2025 to boost production and reduce imports.
Africa is a net food importer with heavy reliance on the international food market for wheat, rice, and edible oil, which costs over one billion USD per annum. From 2010 to 2019, Africa’s average annual food import was valued at approximately 74.1 billion USD. Of this, cereals, sugar, and vegetables amounted to 22.8, 6.4, and 8.5 billion USD respectively, according to the Union.
By 2021, Africa’s food import rose significantly to 100 billion USD. It is expected to increase exponentially as Africa’s population is set to double to 2.4 billion by 2050, posing a greater food demand and intensifying the need for significant increases in agricultural production, productivity, food processing, and trade, it stated.
To change this trend, the AU stressed the need to reduce Africa’s overreliance on imports and focus on strengthening its local food system. In this regard, African leaders have expressed commitment to intensify sustainable food production, agro-industrialization, and trade when they adopted CAADP last January.
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They plan to achieve this ambition by improving the productivity of farmers through enhanced access to yield-raising inputs such as quality seeds, fertilizers, and technologies, as well as services including extensions, finance, training, and building infrastructures for farmers to reduce post-harvest losses and access markets, the Union mentioned.
This requires concerted efforts among stakeholders to facilitate the formulation and implementation of policies and create an enabling environment to make agriculture inclusive and profitable, it underscored.
The African Union’s new agricultural development strategy will see the continent increase its agri-food output by 45 percent by 2035 and transform its agri-food systems as part of its new plan to become food secure in a decade. The strategy will also see Africa reduce post-harvest loss by 50 percent, triple intra-African trade in agri-food products and inputs by 2035, and raise the share of locally processed food to 35 percent of agri-food GDP by 2035.
The adoption of the strategy is seen as a pivotal moment that will lay the groundwork for agri-food systems across the continent and enable countries to act.
BY STAFF REPORTER
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD TUESDAY 29 JULY 2025