- The Malabo Declaration deadline has expired with only a handful of African countries on track.
- Of 51 AU member states, only Rwanda is on course to achieving the 2014 Malabo commitments on financing agriculture.
- In year’s Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali, authorities cited a myriad of challenges in achieving key goals.
Africa food systems are failing but there is still optimism. This is despite the fact that we are only one year away from the Malabo Declaration’s deadline and only six years to the end of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
In June 2014, the Malabo Declaration was made in Equatorial Guinea, where all African countries made a commitment to spend 10 per cent of their annual national budgets on agriculture.
“Only four countries achieved the Malabo target of allocating 10 percent of public spending to agriculture (Burundi, DR Congo, Ethiopia and Mali),” writes Moumini Savadogo for Farming First in his June 2024 review of the 10-year anniversary of this historic declaration.
In adopting the Malabo Declaration, the African leaders supported further far-reaching goals, such as: ending hunger in Africa by 2025, halving poverty by 2025 through inclusive agricultural growth and transformation, boosting intra-African trade in agricultural commodities and services, enhancing resilience of livelihoods and production systems to climate variability and other related risks, and mutual accountability to actions and results.
“Out of the 51 AU member states, only one country, namely Rwanda, is on track to achieving the Malabo commitments,” Savadogo notes.
It is no wonder that Rwanda hosted this year’s Africa Food Systems summit, September 3-6, under the theme “Innovate, Accelerate and Scale: Delivering food systems transformation in a digital and climate era.”
Rt. Hon Dr Èdouard Ngirente, Prime Minister of the Republic of Rwanda launched the Africa Food Systems Forum 2024 annual summit and underscored the “urgent need to radically transform African food systems.”
“This transformation should enhance local food production, bolster resilience to climate change, uplift African livelihoods, and harness the continent’s potential to tackle global challenges,” he told stakeholders.
The summit highlighted the need to prioritize three key actions: innovating, accelerating, and scaling up. It called for emphasis on innovative policy delivery mechanisms, financing initiatives, research, and business models.
“To transform the agriculture sector into a powerful engine for economic development, our country is embracing innovation and making evidence-based-policy decisions,” he said.
He cited his country’s focus on “de-risking the sector to ensure that it becomes more profitable and attractive for the youth and private sector actors.”
Addressing the over 5,000 delegates in attendance, the Chair of the AFS Forum Partner’s group, and former Ethiopian Prime Minister, Hailemariam Dessalegn, cited the role of youth in “accelerating the delivery of sustainable and prosperous food system.”
“With an abundance of emerging African young talents, remarkable innovations, and proven practices and solutions both locally and internationally, scaling up adaptation and replication is feasible. However, achieving this requires mobilizing actions and investments on a large scale, especially from the private sector,” he said.
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Africa Food Systems Forum 2024
The Africa Food Systems Forum (AFS Forum), is described as the world’s premier forum for talks on agriculture and food systems touching on the continent. Stakeholders at the summit called for the adoption of practical actions and lessons.
They insisted on food systems transformation to make nutritious foods more accessible to end users. However, the stakeholders admitted to the fact that the process is complex and unpredictable.
While strong evidence on best practices is needed to make the required transformation, the summit submitted to the fact that “due to the complexity of food systems and limited guidance on how to conduct rigorous evaluations, evidence is only slowly starting to emerge.”
Two organs offered assistance to help address the knowledge gap, specifically the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) shared insights from six food systems interventions that have been implemented in Africa.
However, the question of lack of concrete information to work on remained; “evaluating the impact of food systems interventions presents several challenges. One notable obstacle is the limited evidence on the processes through which food systems interventions are expected to achieve desired impacts,” FAO reported.
FAO officers contend that because food systems are dynamic, it follows that “interventions intended to influence them may require adjustments throughout the implementation period.”
“The interconnected nature of food systems means that changes at any level within a food system can influence an intervention’s effectiveness. These food system characteristics create challenges with respect to clearly defining the intervention and identifying the outcomes that need to be assessed,” the summit was informed.
Then there is the difficulty of isolating the impact of intervention outcomes from external factors, FAO stated, “The inability to control or manipulate different variables within a food system makes it hard to determine what would have happened in the absence of an intervention.”
“Interventions generally involve private-sector companies and so obtaining timely and accurate data can be a significant obstacle, whether due to poor recordkeeping or proprietary information,” FAO said in the media communication that was released post summit.
“Another data-related challenge relates to tracking the way food travels through the food system, as many points in the supply chain are untraceable,” read the media report.
The report finally concluded that, “focusing only on nutritional outcomes and neglecting other factors like food affordability, accessibility, and consumer behavior does not account for the complexity of food systems interventions, leading to an incomplete understanding of intervention effectiveness.”
“Rwanda has demonstrated translation of political pronouncements such as declarations into practice,” said the FAO Assistant Director-General and Regional Representative for Africa Abebe Haile-Gabriel.
He commended Rwanda for receiving the Award for Best Achievers of the Malabo Target under Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), a recognition the country has won four times in a row.
On its part, Rwanda representatives highlighted major agricultural and livestock opportunities in their country that can lead to successful adoption of a change in their food systems.
Rwanda, where agriculture is the second largest contributor to the economy at 27 per cent share of its GDP in 2023 said it needed over $1.68 billion in investment to conduct its Rwanda Legacy Program, which the country launched at the summit.
According to the Rwanda Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources (MINAGRI), “the Legacy Program on Food Systems aims to provide the country with a more operational and bankable investment.”
Much remains to be decided as to the rest of Africa’s commitment to agriculture, this despite the fact that, all African countries admit that agriculture is their biggest employer, one of the largest GDP contributors and the backbone to their economies.
