2014: The year of agriculture and food security in Africa

Leaders of the continent have declared 2014 will be the year of agriculture and food security in Africa.Heads of State and Government of the 54 African countries met at the 23rd annual summit of the African Union, which kicked off last Friday, in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, to discuss new ways to improve this vital sector.

It is the primary livelihood in Africa (17% of GDP) and investment in this area can both sustain jobs and reduce hunger and poverty, which is the first Millennium Development Goal. According to the World Bank, agricultural growth is about two and a half times more effective for reducing poverty as growth in other sectors.

This meeting marks the tenth year since the launch of the Comprehensive Plan of Development, which was intended to help African countries achieve an annual agricultural growth rate of 6 percent, but little followed in practice.

In 2003, at the summit in Maputo, Mozambique, African countries pledged to devote at least 10 percent of their national budget to the agricultural sector (agriculture, livestock and fisheries). It was the government who had initially put a stop to the bleeding of investment in this sector as a result of structural adjustment plans made in the 1980s.

Now, a decade later, a serious lack of commitment is apparent with only 10 per cent of the 53 protocol countries being able to boast of having allocated the whole percentage of their budget to agriculture.

The dedicated countries can be found in the Sahel and West Africa (mainly Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea, Senegal, Mali, Ghana) and East Africa (Ethiopia, Malawi).

Ghana, Burkina Faso and Ethiopia are considered "champions of Maputo", because of the rapid growth and modernisation of their agricultural sector. Coastal countries are among the worst performers, in particular the Nigerian giant which spends less than 2 percent of its budget on agriculture.