Agriculturist Offer Solutions To Africa's Food Security Challenges

Prof. David Millar

The immediate past Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University for Development Studies (UDS) Professor David Millar, has called on African governments to reassess the progress of the continent’s agricultural prospects in view of growing urbanisation so that they could deal with the issue of food and nutritional security effectively. 

He said that, a bulk of the food produced by farmers to feed the populace including urban dwellers, majority of who were in the formal sector, was often through the toil of smallholder farmers in rural areas. 

The Professor of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences however, wondered why decisions taken by African governments and policymakers often excluded the views of the rural farmer, saying this had made it almost impossible to mitigate the challenges of food and nutritional security on the continent.

Prof. Millar who was delivering a lecture on the topic: “Food and Nutritional Security: Mitigating Hunger in Africa” as part of the university’s 20^th anniversary celebration in Tamale, observed that at a time when most people lived and worked in urban environments, feeding Africa’s cities challenges the current food supply and production patterns. 

According to him, “Feeding African cities also challenges the way in which policymakers and other key actors perceive the rural vis-à-vis the urban. Traditionally, the rural area has been seen as a provider of services for the urban area, where as food policies have largely been addressed from the angle of large-scale production of major selected staples”, he noted.

Quoting extensively from the 2011 Africa Progress Report of the Africa Progress Panel chaired by former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, he said it recognized the fact that several African countries were on the verge of meeting their Millennium Development Goal targets for hunger reduction.

This notwithstanding, the report he noted, also emphasised that the continent as a whole continued to be the world’s most food-insecure region. “Hunger and malnutrition remain pervasive in many countries, and rising food prices are compounding the situation for millions across the continent, particularly in zones of protracted conflict and in fast growing urban areas”, he observed.

Adding, Prof. Millar mentioned the position was taken in the report that, agricultural productivity was also affected by social realities such as persistent poverty and insufficient access of women to land and other essential resources.

Faced with reduced access to food and increased vulnerability to the seasonality of local food prices and markets, the report he said also observed that households were forced into unavoidable compromises such as choosing cheaper (often less nutritious) food, selling productive assets, withdrawing children from school, forgoing healthcare or simply eating less than they needed.

The report, according to Prof. Millar, enumerated the barriers to food security which included disadvantageous international trade rules and subsidy regimes; a debilitating lack of essential infrastructure such as irrigation and storage systems; inadequate agricultural research; a lack of improved seeds, fertilisers and plant protection material; poor soil and water management systems; poor access to credit and marketing services as well as inefficient and wasteful agricultural value chains.

He explained that these structural barriers cited by the report were increasingly compounded by global trends, adding that, in the short-term, the gap between the continent’s domestic food supply and demand would widen as global consumption patterns continued to shift towards meat products, and more profitable bio-fuels supplant food crops.

Global food production would have to increase by 70 percent over the next 40years to keep pace with population growth, and a significant part of that increase he confirmed, would have to come from Africa.

However, a section of the report concluded that there was an urgent need to scale up successful interventions, focus on Africa’s army of smallholder farmers and increase emphasis on staple food crops. Adding, Prof. Millar noted that, there was also a need to ensure that the growing foreign investments in Africa’s arable land, sometimes referred to as “land grabs”, were transparent saying “they add to the continent’s food insecurity, they do not benefit local farmers and communities, they undermine social, environmental and indigenous governance systems.”

Thus, in conclusion the former Pro-Vice Chancellor of the UDS stated that if African governments really want to feed their people they must assist the continent develop what its people on their own see as food, saying that was the area partners from the North needed to support because that was where real challenge lies for everyone to feed Africa.

Meanwhile, established in May 1992 by the Government of Ghana, the UDS exist to blend the academic world with that of the community in order to provide constructive interaction between the two for the total development of Northern Ghana, in particular, and the country as a whole. 

The UDS has four (4) campuses, seven (7) Faculties, a Business School, one Medical School, one Graduate School and three (3) centers located across the three regions of the North including Upper West, Upper East and Northern. Several programs are run at these places. 

With an initial student population of 39 that was enrolled into the Faculty of Agriculture at the Nyankpala campus in September 1993, the university currently has about twenty-thousand students spread across all its four campuses with the Wa campus being the most populated.