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Join on Telegram Marrakech – Ilias Elfali, Managing Director of Corporate Strategy and Sustainability at OCP, discussed the importance of food security and agriculture in Africa, highlighting efforts and plans by OCP to help accelerate the sector.
Speaking in the US-Africa Business Summit plenary panel “Building Forward Together,” Elfali highlighted some key numbers – and challenges – for agriculture in Africa.
The summit is being held in Marrakech, opening on July 19 to run until July 22 July. It aims to connect American government officials, investors, and businesses to African counterparts to achieve better sustainable development outcomes for the continent, as well as to deal with rising global issues.
Through its participation in the US-Africa Business Summit, OCP Group stressed the importance of agriculture as a key aspect of African and global development.
Despite agriculture employing a third of Africa’s population, and contributing 50% of several countries’ GDPs, the continent continues to be a net importer of food, Elfali pointed out.
While food prices have continued to increase over the past months, and are expected to register a hike of 23% later this year, African farmers have not benefited from the food price hikes due to a pointed increase in input costs.
Some of the issues contributing to this rising threat of food scarcity, he noted, are an increasingly growing population and decrease of available arable lands, as well as disruptions in supply chains and energy prices.
With these problems, as well as issues in the fertilizer industry specifically, the OCP executive noted that advancing the agriculture sector in Africa will require genuine commitment from governments and other stakeholders.
OCP itself has started increasing its capacities, fast tracking development projects across the continent, and adding up to 3 million tonnes of fertilizer into its supply by the end of this year. On Tuesday, the company announced the largest ever fertilizer program on Tuesday, mixing donations and decreased prices to bring over 500 kilotons of fertilizer to farmers.
A farmer-centric approach
“Africa is not part of the problem, but it is part of the solution,” Elfali said, adding that public private cooperation will be necessary in the future.
Citing the example of OCP, he noted how the company has partnered with Ethiopia to deploy a soil mapping operation in the country, in order to customize and adapt fertilizer products to the specific needs of small-scale farmers.
“The results were spectacular,” he said, specifying that fertilizer became cheaper, yields increased by 40%, and the adoption of fertilizer by farmers also increased twofold. “Coordination can have a deep impact and improve agricultural productivity.”
In addition to indicating OCP’s commitment to cooperation with the public sector, the program also demonstrates the centrality and significance of smallholder farmers to OCP’s approach.
Across all its projects and subsidies, OCP continues to emphasize working directly with small farmers to address their specific challenges.
“Transformation of agriculture in Africa cannot be done without the contribution of smallholder farms who account for almost 40% of global food production,” Elfali said. “The share is even more important in Africa.”
Farmers might not have incentives to increase yields because of other bottlenecks limiting their output, he added, noting that OCP aims to address those bottlenecks with farmers in a direct and holistic way.
To this end, OCP sometimes works with banks for example to deliver financial solutions to farmers, or with tech institutions to deliver other relevant solutions to some of the farmers’ problems.
Customization is another key aspect of OCP’s farmer-centered approach, Elfali argued, stressing that effective solutions need to be customized to meet farmers’ specific needs, instead of looking for off-the-shelf solutions.
As soils in Africa are radically different from those in other parts of the world, solutions that worked elsewhere cannot be applied to the African context, the OCP executive recalled.
This means there is a need for African solutions to African challenges, he emphasized, noting that governments and giant corporations across Africa should foster collaboration with specialized local experts to create solutions that are specific to each region, country, and individual farmer across Africa.
Africa can also “leapfrog the traditional green revolution,” Elfali stressed, recalling how mobile banking is gaining prominence in the continent as many African consumers skip the adaptation of regular bank accounts and jump straight into making transactions digitally.
