Experts urge focus on raising agricultural productivity

Efforts to end hunger in Africa by 2020 can achieve results if governments focus on raising agricultural productivity, food experts said at the weekend.

At the closing of a food security conference in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, on Saturday, delegates called on African leaders to prioritise increased agricultural production, noting that food security was a "human rights issue".

Organised by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the Ugandan government, the three-day meeting brought together about 450 delegates from 50 countries, 30 of them African.

Participants said agricultural growth among smallholders was the first step towards reducing poverty and food insecurity. They recommended that governments scale up investment in local, national and regional infrastructure, including safe water and sanitation.

One of the concerns raised by participants was existing trade barriers among African countries, which thwarted the regional exchange of goods and services. Additionally, African leaders should continue to pressure Western countries to open their markets to African products, delegates said.

Achieving food security should involve a broad spectrum of actors, it was recommended.

"Food and nutrition security is cross-sectoral and involves national and international as well as public and private actors. It therefore requires that teams of actors leap forward together rather than separately. New partnerships are also needed, such as with cultural and religious leaders, to support the food and nutrition agenda," the conference closing statement read.

There was also broad consensus that HIV/AIDS was threatening to undo many of the gains made in sub-Saharan Africa in recent years. Nearly 30 million people in sub-Saharan Africa - more than 70 percent of the global total - are infected with the virus.

It was suggested that a "large-scale" investment should be undertaken in order to combat the impact of the epidemic on food security.

One of the recommendations was that the international community "underwrites" insurance against natural calamities through food and other aid.

Participants concluded that a "small and transparent" set of criteria for evaluating the quality of actions implemented by governments to address food insecurity should be followed in "country peer reviews".

Under the New Partnership for Africa's Development, peer-review mechanism African countries will monitor each other's performance on economic management, human rights, corruption, and democracy.

According to research conducted by IFPRI, an estimated 200 million people in Africa are malnourished, and their numbers have increased by almost 20 percent since the early 1990s.