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Challenges and opportunities for African agriculture and food security: high food prices, climate change, population growth, and HIV and AIDS.

Over the past decade, economic and agricultural growth in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has resumed. The secular downward trend in agricultural prices ended in the early 1990s; growing incomes in Asia and Africa, combined with continued rapid population growth, are fueling food demand, which is expected to lead to a gradual upward trend in international real agricultural prices. For Africa the major agricultural growth opportunities will be in regional and domestic markets for food staples. Economic and agricultural growth have resumed despite continued high population, the AIDS crisis, and the onset of measurable climate change. Climate change will provide both challenges and opportunities, and countries need to strengthen their general capacities to deal with stresses and weather shocks in line with general agricultural development priorities. Population growth adds to the challenge of increasing per capita income and feeding Africa. It will also drive further agricultural intensification and in many place has led to improvements, rather than deterioration in the natural resource base. The fight against HIV and AIDS in rural areas is lagging badly and will need to be intensified via participatory approaches to prevention, expansion of HIV and AIDS treatment to rural areas, and massive improvements in rural safety nets. To seize the agricultural growth opportunities that derive from recent policy and price trends, SSA will have to support economic growth via continued sound macroeconomic policies, further improvements in the investment climate, and investments in infrastructure and institutions. More specifically in the agricultural sector, SSA will have to (i) further reduce agricultural dis-protection in countries and commodities that still practice it; (ii) reduce barriers to intra-regional trade in food and other agricultural commodities and properly finance the regional institutions that support regional trade, quality and phyto-sanitary controls, and other regional agricultural public goods; (iii) sharply increase domestic and regional funding of agricultural science, science education, and research; and thereby regain the technology agenda from the donors; and (iv) assist in the deepening of domestic markets and foster sharp improvements in smallholder services. 1 Hans P. Binswanger-Mkhize is Professor Extraordinaire at the Institute for Economic Research on Innovation at the Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria, South Africa. I am grateful to Alex McCalla for his collaboration on the research that is partly reflected in this paper, and to the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the African Development Bank who supported us. And I am indebted to Ira Matuschke for great editorial support. The views expressed in this information product are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. 2 FAO Expert meeting on How to feed the World in 2050