africa

26.5 Moving forward
Africa’s mixed agricultural results to date and clear ongoing challenges mean that a
regional green revolution remains a priority, even if in practice it requires a “rainbow
of revolutions,” as described in Kofi Annan’s 2004 Addis Ababa speech. There is no
one-size-fits-all strategy, since each country faces its own combination of potential
crops, degree of access to global markets, and domestic linkages across sectors.
Nonetheless, there are some common priorities for advancing agriculture across
Africa. Here we stress six:
First, transport costs need priority attention, both within and across borders. This
likely requires an order of magnitude greater investment in road infrastructure,
including trunk roads and feeder roads, in addition perhaps to regulatory reform to
ensure necessary firm-level competition in areas like trucking and rail cargo.
Second, water is essential for farming, so the rain-fed nature of African agriculture
and increasing climate variability, particularly in the Sahel, require concerted policies
to promote farmers’ access to irrigation, especially small-scale irrigation. Reliable
irrigation brings multiple economic benefits. It supports greater climate resilience,
allows the introduction of multiple planting seasons, and provides the predictability
to enable planting of crops with higher value per hectare.
Third, in order to promote farm-level investments in irrigation and other areas that
are likely to be profitable over the medium term, policies are needed to provide
incentives for commercial lenders to expand credit in rural areas. Given the historically
high—often prohibitively high—cost of loan administration in rural areas,
this will likely require a significant amount of commercial experimentation to identify
new business models that can leverage emerging information technologies and
market conditions to develop viable product lines. This might require an international
agricultural finance facility, with public funds used to provide credit subsidies and
appropriate insurance measures. An indicative calculation suggests that perhaps
US$25 billion per year of annual private lending across the region could be unlocked
by US$5 billion per year of public support (McArthur, 2011).