Mills urges African leaders to give attention to agriculture
President John Evans Atta Mills has urged his colleague African leaders, to give priority to agriculture, to help solve the food deficit in the continent. “No country or continent has achieved rapid economic progress, and improved the lives of its citizens without investing conscientiously, deliberately and scientifically in agriculture,” he said.
Addressing the Africa Union (AU) summit in Libya yesterday, President Mills admonished them to channel their efforts and resources into that sector, since it had the tendency of salvaging the continent from its woes.
According to the President, Africa had become the only region in the world, where per capita food production has steadily declined over the years, or one-third third of the continent is chronically undernourished.
He also expressed concern about the fact that most of the continent's farmers lacked access to productive seed varieties, adequate water resources, and soil nutrients, stressing “our soils are the most depleted, and our infrastructure is next to non-existent.”
The President quoted a recent AU-ECA report, which said, “Modernizing agriculture is crucial to development and industrialisation in Africa, to food security, sustained poverty re-education and integration of African in the global economy,” to buttress his point.
This report, he said, calls for special attention for agriculture, since Africa was heavily dependent on that sector for providing employment, generating economic growth, foreign exchange and tax revenue.
The said report noted that the impact of the global financial crisis had already resulted in lower demand for Africa's exports, and a share decline in commodity prices, emphasising “this is indeed, a clarion call for more innovative approaches to be management of the agricultural sector in our countries, and expand the internal continental market space to overcome our history, where external forces sought to strangle our development effort through methods of divide and rule.”
To address the situation, he said, “We in Ghana are pursing a Strategy for Accelerated Modernisation of Agriculture (SAMA), aligned to the national vision in the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy (GPRS), the sub-regional ECOWAS Agriculture Programme (ECOWAP), NEPAD's CAADP, and the global Millennium Development Goal (MDG) to halve poverty by 2015.
The said strategy seeks to provide easier and faster access to marketing centers for agriculture produce, whilst scaling-up credit support facilities for farmers.
It is also intended to provide some form of subsidy for the procurement of improved seeds, grade breeders and stocks, pesticides and fertilisers, expand irrigation and infrastructure, and improve small-holder productivity in transition to large scale production.