Africa spends a whooping $35 billion annually on food importation annually, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, IFAD, has said.
IFAD disclosed this in a statement to reporters in Abuja. The statement quoted its President Mr. Kanayo Nwanze as saying this at the opening of a three-day ‘African Union-European Union Conference of Ministers of Agriculture’.
The conference tagged: ‘Investing in a food secure future’ was convened by the Government of The Netherlands to discuss how to deepen cooperation between Africa and Europe to mutually invest in food and nutrition security.
Nwanze said investing more in Africa’s rural areas will stem the flow of economic migrants and minimise the acts of desperation that makes the continent’s newspaper headlines.
He said: “People are leaving the rural areas of Africa because they can’t find jobs or feed their families and the ripple effects are felt here in Europe. The irony is that Africa spends $35 billion a year on food importation; it is time to stop creating jobs in other countries and redirect that investment to their own agricultural transformation.”
Nwanze added that Africa had enormous potentials and contained half of the world’s uncultivated land suitable for growing food crops, and that only five per cent of it was irrigated.
The IFAD president said Africa could easily double its productivity in the next five years simply by making better use of its existing farmland.
