Agriculture has a huge potential to increase food availability, create jobs, raise incomes and increase economic development, particularly, in the Africa countries like Ethiopia. It as well plays a role towards reducing food insecurity and malnutrition. So, policy formulation is instrumental to end hunger and food security through the active engagement of private sector, so disclosed state authoritative bodies.
On the meeting, of Africa’s delegates and other international partners, held in Addis, FAO Strategic Programme Leader for Hunger Eradication, Food Security and Nutrition Programme, Dr. Brave Ndisale said that agriculture is the backbone of most Sub-Saharan African economies like Malawi, Chad, and from our host country Ethiopia, to Liberia.
Therefore, unlocking this potential requires major transformations in the way agriculture and food systems work. “If we want to nourish an increasing population, cope with growing urbanization and adapt to climate change impacts without depleting our natural resources, we need to sustainably increase agricultural productivity and profitability,” she said.
“We need to find a way to accelerate and sustain productivity growth at scale among smallholder farmers, while protecting the natural resource base. This will probably imply less labour-intensive production systems, which will require creating more off-farm jobs. This raises the question of
how to smoothen the transition to off-farm employment among smallholder farmers that cannot achieve the required productivity growth,” she added.
Adding she noted that while paving the way for the private sector both smallholders and big corporations to transform food systems towards these desired outcomes and engaging with them effectively, governments have to push for the social transformations that are essential for success: achieving gender equality, empowering the growing African youth population and strengthening consumers’ capacities to demand better nutrition and to make their voices heard.
As to her, “we should start learning about what needs to be put in place to enable the private sector to transform agriculture and food systems, while protecting nature, improving nutrition and gender equality and increasing youth employment and incomes of small farmers.”
FAO sub-regional Coordinator for Eastern Africa and Representative to the African Union and United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, Dr. David Phiri noted “ this workshop is an opportunity to learn from each other about how we enhance our policy support to member countries to effectively accelerate progress towards ending hunger in 2025 and all forms of malnutrition by 2030. ”
Adding he pointed out that in our policy support to government, it is important to support them in resolving inconsistencies between policies between different sectors and sometimes between the national macro-economic policy and sectoral policies; and often also between the country-level policies and continental and regional policies that those same countries have signed on to.
As to him, there is generally a discrepancy between a policy’s intent and its outcome for various reasons. Policy failure can result from inaccurate or flawed policy design, bureaucratic incompetence or resistance, insufficient resources or expertise, just to name a few.
We also need to understand the policy context we operate not only at country but also at continental and regional levels to ensure vertical and horizontal policy coherence. This will require an improvement in the collaboration between SP1 and regional and sub-regional offices.
“Enabling policy environment to foster policy implementation requires enforcing policy into laws and regulations. This is where FIRST collaboration with on-going Parliamentarian initiatives that FAO is supporting will be important.
For example; we are working with the Pan-African Parliament and members of parliament of 12 countries in Eastern Africa that launched their Parliamentary Alliance on Food Security and Nutrition in April this year, with our support,” he stated.
According to him, one of the issues is the fact that we tend to focus on only one aspect of the policy process, which is policy formulation. In fact, policy formulation is only one-step in the policy cycle, which includes from three to eight steps depending to school of thoughts.
“African countries are simultaneously blessed and challenged by a large youthful population segment, with great and innovative minds, but at the same time strongly affected by unemployment and distress economic migration, especially in rural areas. If agricultural or food system policies do not look at the youth and their needs, little change will be achieved,” she noted.
He further indicated that countries and development partners can also take advantage of this kind of exchanges and cooperation. Indeed, partnerships are crucial in this time of emerging challenges. Cooperation between countries from the Global South, based on the concept of solidarity and breaking the traditional dichotomy between donors and recipients, is playing a greater role than ever before in international development cooperation, and innovation in the South is generating new tools and partnerships for tackling issues of food insecurity, poverty and unstable agriculture.
The meeting brought together a group rich in diversity and expertise drawn from Governments and regional organizations, European Union Delegations, Representatives of the Civil Society and the private sector, One of FAO’s sister Rome-based agencies –WFP, Policy Officers of the FIRST programme and Technical experts from FAO, and specifically those from the region.
The Ethiopian Herald December 29/2019
BY MEHARI BEYENE
