“Agriculture, across Africa, must now be taken as a business – to generate wealth and rapidly diversify our economies – not for managing poverty,” AfDB President, Akinwumi Adesina said.
Agriculture is the answer to Africa’s development and has the potential to grow the region faster, feed itself, eliminate hunger and food insecurity as well as feed the rest of the world.

This potential according to New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) lies in its land, water, oceans and the labor force on the continent.

However, the opposite is happening. Agriculture in Africa is not growing as fast as it is widely expected despite the fact that Africa has world’s’ largest arable land.

Making his presentation at the Africa 2016: Business for Egypt, Africa, and World Conference, in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, on February 21, the African Development Bank Group President, Akinwumi Adesina supported the notion that Africa has more than 60% of all arable land left in the world to feed 9 billion people by 2050.

He was speaking of the five strategic goals that the bank is working on with an aim to accelerate development in Africa. One of the strategies being “Feed Africa”, which is part of AfDB’s High 5s for Africa.

“There is absolutely no reason why Africa is a net food-importing region, spending over $35 billion importing food. Africa must feed itself – and Africa must become a global powerhouse in food and agriculture,” said adding that the Bank will accelerate support for massive agricultural transformation across Africa – while building resilience to climate change – to fully unlock the potential of agriculture, to lower food prices, save scarce foreign exchange, increase foreign exchange earnings, strengthen macroeconomic and fiscal stability, revive rural areas – and in particular, create jobs for hundreds of millions of Africans. We must change our approach to agriculture.

This article was published here

In the last decade the gross domestic product of the 11 largest countries in sub-Saharan Africa has grown 51 percent — more than double the world average of 23 percent and four times that of the U.S., according to Bloomberg.
The continent’s average consumer price index has stayed at 8 percent since 2013 compared to 13 percent plus in 2008 — a combination of rapid economic expansion and low inflation that has enticed investors as other once-favored emerging markets struggle.
The major drivers in Africa were consumer-focused industries that are taking advantage of the burgeoning population, materials (construction) and financial services, which outpaced emerging markets by 11 percent.
Only energy was the main loser. Yet the struggles of major exporters such as Angola and Nigeria have been conflated with the reduced demand by China for commodities to paint a dire outlook for the continent.
The picture is nowhere as bad as persistently advanced, says Carlos Lopes, executive secretary of the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa. Most African countries are not important exporters of commodities, and it is difficult to predict just how the downturn will actually hurt Africa’s growth.
There is actually a benefit to the downturn: the current market volatility could accelerate the drive to turn the continent’s attention towards seeking internal and more sustainable growth.
A counter-argument to the rapid expansion of GDP has been that data on Africa’s growth is weak. It definitely is, but it presents a different “problem”: that of undercounting.
Compelling data from the international economics analysis organisation World Economics shows how in four ways:

This article was published here