MPs decry limited agriculture budget as hunger rises in Africa

While Africa committed itself to ending hunger by 2025, trend shows that hunger is on the rise among the continent’s population, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and parliamentarians have exposed. They blame the situation on limited resource allocation to its agriculture sector. This was disclosed during the fourth General Assembly of the Eastern Africa Parliamentary Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition on December 8. The gathering that is currently underway in Kigali aims at considering the challenges, and lessons learned and deliberate on future actions in the region to advance the food security and nutrition agenda. Chimimba David Phiri, FAO Coordinator for Eastern Africa, and FAO Representative to the African Union (AU), said that in 2003 – under the Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP) – African Heads of State and Government agreed to put at least 10 per cent of their national budget, not donor funds, into agriculture, a commitment that is still, generally, far from being achieved. Today, he said, only seven or eight countries out of 54 countries in Africa, have managed to reach that level of funding for agricultural development. “They wanted to end hunger by 2025, which is just two years from now. But, in fact, what is happening with numbers is that the numbers are increasing now. We are now at 282 million that are still undernourished in Africa. Of these, 123 million, are in Eastern Africa alone,” he exposed. These data imply higher hunger rate on the continent compared to those of 2018 when 257 million individuals were undernourished in Africa, according to FAO’s Africa Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition 2018. With regards to the commitment to ending hunger by the year 2025, African Union Member States committed to improve access to agricultural inputs and technologies, increase agricultural productivity, reduce post-harvest losses and food and nutrition insecurity, among other targets. “Translating political commitment that is made verbally and with signature, but then domesticating it at a country level, and then implementing it, is extremely important,” he said. Speaker Donatille Mukabalisa said that the Covid-19 pandemic combined with the Russia-Ukraine crisis, have merely exacerbated and exposed the already existing precarious food security and nutrition fragile situation in the world “and particularly in our respective countries”. In addition to this, she said, environmental degradation and climate change have seriously destabilised the regions’ entire agricultural and farming systems. Also, she pointed out, all these factors have resulted into high fertilizer prices, thus high food prices, making it difficult to afford a decent amount of food and nutrition for our average households,” she said. “We have to move from subsistence farming to a modern and transformed agriculture, our countries need to reconsider the budgets allocated to research and technologies, invest more in climate smart technologies in collaboration with regional institutions and development partners as well as the private sector,” she observed. “MPs, as people’s representatives, are stakeholders in the effort to end hunger and malnutrition by ensuring that the necessary enabling legislative environment for effective actions are put in place and government allocated enough resources for food security,” Mukabalisa said. Abdi Ali Hassan, Chairperson of the EAPA FSN said that the alliance works to empower the legislators with the right tools to use the power they were given by the people in their respective countries to solve food insecurity and malnutrition. “If the parliamentarians get the tools we are offering them, they are the ones who can decide how much we put into agriculture,” he said, indicating that a budget cannot pass without parliamentarians’ approval, but warned that sometimes the focus is put on wrong priorities. “That’s why we exist as the Alliance to remind them what priority is. That’s why we choose food security as priority,” he said.

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MPs decry limited agriculture budget as hunger rises in Africa