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Rabat – “Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want,” the African Union’s action plan for continental development in the coming decades, lists food insecurity among the most critical challenges the continent has to overcome to assert itself on the global stage and become effectively self-sufficient.
While Africa has made considerable strides on some areas highlighted in the AU’s 2063 agenda – the recent entry into force of the African Continental Free Trade Zone (AfCFTA) is the most promising development – most reports suggest the continent still lags behind the global curve when it comes to food security.
As the continent celebrates Africa Day today, the socio-economic disruptions brought by the COVID-19 crisis are likely to be the central focus of African leaders’ post-pandemic visions and projections. Africa’s challenges in food security are formidable and acutely dire, according to a recent report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies. But with OCP’s expertise and resources, the continent already has an African actor with the right profile to support its food security aspirations.
Since its creation in 2016, OCP Africa, a subsidiary of OCP Group, the world’s largest phosphate mining and leading fertilizer company, has established itself as the go-to corporate actor for African governments looking to make the most of high-quality fertilizers or develop an effective agricultural strategy. Now active in 16 countries, OCP AFRICA has sponsored or created countless initiatives aimed at helping African small farmers increase their productivity and income.
In countries like Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Senegal, for example, OCP’s “Agri Booster” program is set to reach over 12,000 smallholder farmers by 2022. The program is designed to support farmers with financial and technical assistance – smallholder farmers receive expert advice and financial services to boost their yields.
In Ethiopia and Nigeria, meanwhile, OCP Africa has partnered with authorities to boost agricultural productivity by developing local plants for the production of high-quality and soil-specific fertilizers. Transpiring from all these initiatives — and many more across the continent — is OCP Africa’s ambition of boosting the continent’s chances of attaining its food security challenges by helping individual countries reach their agricultural development objectives.
But Africa still has a long way to go, especially with the COVID-19 pandemic and persisting climate change-linked crises pointing to serious obstacles ahead if African governments and other stakeholders do not adapt quickly. Africa could be on the brink of a growing crisis in the availability of basic food products, the World Food Program (WFP) suggested in its latest annual report on food security across the globe.
Qu Dongyu, the Director-General of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), agrees. In projections as dire as those of the WFP, Qu Dongyu suggested earlier this month that Africa could witness new, severe waves of starvation if countries do not update their agricultural strategies.
The reason for such inauspicious projections, he explained, is that most African countries have not fully committed to their 2003 pledge to spend 10% of their national budget on food production. The FAO chief added, however, that the continent can still reverse course with a genuine political will and a holistic vision to carve out a better path forward.
“Let’s unblock the bottlenecks that are holding back potential by increasing coordination and upskilling human capacity in African nations,” Dongyu recommended. Fittingly enough, OCP ticks all the boxes that Dogyu underlined as the missing ingredients in most African government’s strategies for agricultural development and self-sufficiency.
Together with its leadership position in the global fertilizer market and its focus on growing local expertise and bolstering intra-African exchanges, OCP has the technical know-how and the resources African governments need to increase their harvest yields and combat growing food scarcity amid rising prices for basic foodstuffs.
And so, as many reports project an impending food insecurity crisis while Africa grapples with the devastating consequences of COVID-19, African nations have a choice to make. If countries across the continent commit to their pledge to boost spending on agriculture, the continent itself holds all the ingredients to become a food-producing giant that can help promote economic growth, development and rising living standards for all.
More practically, Africa is home to 60% of the world’s arable land while Morocco boasts over 70% of the world’s known phosphate reserves. This means that with Africa’s vast arable surfaces and Morocco’s phosphate – a key ingredient in fertilizers – the food security battle is still winnable for the continent.
