Agriculture's Growing Concern

I saw that the Commission for Africa, one of Tony Blair's projects, has issued its report making a big fuss about the fact that progress on the world trade reform talks is so slow it can be compared to a glacier. Perhaps they also meant it has frozen and stopped completely! As the United Nations Millennium Development Summit is coming up in November the report is quite damning to say the least.

The report took five years to produce and says that there is no way Africa will meet its Millennium Development Goals despite making good growth and quadrupling foreign investments and exports.

The most interesting part of the report for me was that African governments have not done enough to speed up their own investment in rural infrastructure and have failed to fulfill their commitment to spend at least 10 percent of their budgets on agriculture.

The report says that only 6 percent of land in Africa is irrigated and between 2004 and 2007 the amount of land equipped for irrigation increased by just 0.9 percent. This fact is mind-boggling. It also fits in with your story in September issue about China sharing agricultural expertise with Africa and we can see now how desperately Africa needs that help. If we think about how China can feed its billion population with a small percentage of arable land it becomes obvious that they are doing something very effective when it comes to irrigation. As we start seeing the influence of China in the form of African farmers growing rice in what was traditionally a maize eating people we must believe that if the Chinese can irrigate and produce the amount of crops to sustain so many people then surely with their help we can too. A great start is the agricultural technology centers being built across Africa as our farmers can get hands-on knowledge at these centers and put their new skills into practice. China's agricultural technology is way ahead of what we have in Africa but it also needs for our farmers to learn and then apply the irrigation and farming knowledge learned consistently each year, so that the crops can literally bear fruit in a sustainable way.

This attitude would be just as, if not more, important than the $120 billion a year between 2010 and 2020 that the Commission for Africa estimates is needed to achieve the MDGs on time.

David Dressden

South Africa