African Development Bank President: Africa Should Be World’s Breadbasket

FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

African Development Bank President: Africa Should Be World’s Breadbasket

Aug. 9, 2018 (EIRNS)—Addressing the 2018 Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Annual Meeting in Washington, attended by over 1,600 agricultural and applied economists from around the world, African Development Bank (AfDB) President Akinwumi Adesina said Aug. 5 that Africa should be the breadbasket of the world, and questioned why Africa should be spending $35 billion a year to import food.

“All it needs to do is harness the available technologies with the right policies, and rapidly raise agricultural productivity and incomes for farmers, and assure lower food prices for consumers,”

Adesina said, addressing the 2018 Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, reported the bank’s website.

“Technologies to achieve Africa’s green revolution exist, but are mostly just sitting on the shelves. The challenge is a lack of supportive policies to ensure they are scaled up to reach millions of farmers,”

he stated, not referring to phony “green” environmentalism, but the green revolution that raises productivity and would make Africa food secure.

Adesina, who was the 2017 World Food Prize winner, is advocating the creation of staple crops processing zones across Africa (SCPZs): vast areas within rural areas, set aside and managed for agribusiness and food manufacturing industries and other agro-allied industries, made possible with the right policies and infrastructure.

“I am convinced that just like industrial parks helped China, so will the SCPZs help to create new economic zones in rural areas that will help lift hundreds of millions out of poverty through the transformation of agriculture—the main source of their livelihoods—from a way of life into a viable, profitable business that will unleash new sources of wealth,”

he said.