Statement - African Union Pages

AFRICAN UNION
UNION AFRICAINE
UNIÃO AFRICANA
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
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Website: www.au.int
Statement
by
H.E. Mrs. Tumusiime Rhoda Peace
Commissioner for Rural Economy and Agriculture
African Union Commission
at
The Opening of The11thMeeting of the Partnership Platform of the
Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP PP)
25March 2015
Johannesburg, South Africa
Thank you, Ms.EstherineFotabong, Director of Programmes at the NEPAD
Agency, our Facilitator.
Honourable AllanChiyembekeza, Minister of Agriculture, Irrigation and
Water Development of the Republic of Malawi
Your Excellency Dr. Ibrahim AssaneMayaki, Chief Executive Officer of the
NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency;
Excellency Ambassador Roberto Ridolfi, Chair,Development Partners Task
Team;
Your Excellency Mr.TijanBucar, Assistant Direcor General of the United
Nations Food and Agriculture (FAO), Regional Office for Africa
The Director General of the Ministry of Agriculture of the Republic f South
Africa
Honourable Members of Parliament
Dr Theo de Jager; President, Pan African Farmers’ Organisation (PAFO) and
the Southern African Confederation of Agricultural Unions (SACAU);
Distinguished Representatives of Farmer, Civil Society and Private Sector
Organizations;
Distinguished Delegates from Regional Economic Communities, AU Member
States and CAADP Focal Persons;
Ladies and Gentlemen, All Protocol Observed.
It is my distinguished pleasure to welcome you all to yet another meeting of the
CAADP Partnership Platform. As we meet this week again in South Africa, I
believe we can all celebrate the outcomes of last Year's efforts, the AU 2014 Year
of Agriculture and Food Security. As you would recall, our 10th CAADP PP
meeting in Durban a year ago paved the way to the land-mark AU Malabo Summit
Declaration on Accelerated Agricultural Growth and Transformation for Shared
Prosperity and Improved Livelihoods.
In the lead up to that Declaration, we learned lessons from some key facts and
evidence. We have seen that CAADP has served as an effective catalytic and
1 rallying framework and contributed to a structured approach towards fostering
progress in Africa's agriculture over the last 10 years.
On the investment front, we have witnessed significant progress as public
expenditures allocated to agriculture have increased by an average of 7.4% per
year, resulting in doubling the volume of public funding to agriculture since the
adoption of the CAADP. Although we still fall short of the commitment made in
Maputo in 2003, several Member States have been making efforts to meet the
CAADP target of allocating at least 10% of public expenditure to agriculture and
some have even surpassed the target.
It is encouraging to note that these policy and institutional interventions have
spurred agricultural growth, from the historical stagnation or even decline of the
previous few decades to an average of 4% per year under CAADP. A few
countries have even registered remarkable growth exceeding the CAADP target of
6%, thus attesting clearly that the desired level of agricultural growth is well within
the reach of the continent.
While celebrating these successes, we are also mindful of the challenges ahead in
strengthening and accelerating progress on agricultural transformation in Africa.
Indeed, majority of African Governments have yet to deliver on their 2003 Maputo
commitment to allocating at least 10% of their public expenditures to agriculture.
Likewise, most development partners are also yet to deliver on their pledges for
support and to align such support with the priorities expressed in CAADP-related
national and regional investment plans in spite of the fact that they are part and
parcel of the process and they do sign to CAADP Compacts. And investment by
the private sector has been severely constrained by a dismal performance of the
financial sector vis-a-vis agriculture, owing to a number of challenges of lending
risks associated with the variability of agricultural outputs and incomes, gender
bias against women's access to credit, insecure land tenure issues, as well as
financial institutions' reluctance to lend to our unemployed youth.
As a result, agricultural output over the last 10 years came mainly from expansion
of cultivated area, increase in livestock numbers and increased agricultural
2 labourforce, and little from improvement in productivity. Because of lack of
widespread adoption of modern farming as well as post-harvest technologies and
techniques, overall productivity in agriculture has been growing at half the pace of
the rate for all developing regions and post-harvest losses have reached 30% of the
entire agricultural production.
Moreover, for the continent as a whole, agrifood production continues to be
outpaced by fast growing and changing demand, which is fuelled by population
growth (about 3% per year), strong income growth (at 5% or more over the last
decade) and rapid urbanization (at the annual pace of 5%). As a result, and also
owing to slow progress on regional integration and intra-African trade, Africa's
imports of food and agricultural products have continued to increase and the
continent's net agrifood import bill now exceeds US$ 40 billion a year. This
diverts considerable resources from domestic investment and job creation
opportunities. It also increases the vulnerability of Africa's poor and food insecure
people to external shock factors such as food price volatility and climate variability
and change.
This is why, in this their 2014 Malabo Declaration, the AU Heads of State and
Government, committed themselves, over the next 10 years, to:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Upholding the principles and values of the
CAADP process; this is important: inclusiveness, partnerships;
Enhancing investment finance in agriculture;
looking at innovative ways and not only public sector finance
Ending hunger in Africa by 2025;
Having agriculture contribute at least 50% to the
poverty reduction target through inclusive agricultural growth and
transformation;
Boosting (tripling) intra-African trade in
agricultural goods and services; Africa currently trades more with the rest of
the world than within itself;
Enhancing resilience of livelihoods and
production systems to climate variability and other related risks; this is very
3 critical considering that Africa loses more people to natural disasters than
any other region of the world does and
•
Subjecting all key stakeholders to mutual
accountability to actions and results.
I know that most of you know these because you participated actively during the
consultations that fed into the Malabo Declaration and so I will not go into greater
detail.
Excellences,
Distinguished CAADP Partners,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
For this 11th CADP Meeting, let me sound the clarion call made by the AULeaders
during the Malabo Summit: “It is now time to deliver!It is now time to walk the
talk!”Indeed, the Malabo Declaration on Accelerated Africa Agricultural Growth
and Transformation,in line with Africa’s Agenda 2063, reiterates a Call for Action
and delivery of results and impact. It calls for an expedient process of translation
of the commitments into results.
In this regard, we the AUCommission andthe NEPAD Agency , together with the
Regional Economic Communities, Member States and our Development Partners,
many of who are present here, have developed an “Implementation Strategy and
Roadmap” (IS&R) and a programme of work for the implementation of the
Malabo Declaration.Mr. Roberto Ridolfi has reminded us of complementarities and
subsidiarity. These are principles of the AU whose building blocks are RECs and
Member States. Walking the Talk at this CAADP PP Meeting, therefore, calls for
looking critically into concrete actions that need to take place for:
1. Effective implementation and delivery of results and impact at country level;
2. Non-state stakeholders - farmers, private agribusiness sector actors, civil
society actors -- to fully own the process and deploy their own strategies;
4 3. Technical partners to play lead technical role in implementation at country
level;especially in multi-stakeholder multi-sectoral coordination and
4. Development partners toalign, harmonize and coordinate their support with
country-level implementation priorities.
This, in essence, is what we have set ourselves to achieve at this CAADP PP
Meeting. And I am confident that we will do so, and I wish to reaffirm the
AU'sfull commitment to deliver on our part and to be held accountable for it. We
are also committed to working with all of you more closely and that is why, for
example, yesterday, I made it a point to open the meeting of the Non Sate Actors
Coalition and also later launched this Coalition to promote awareness raising and
advocacy for our common cause. After that, I also participated in the Diner that
the AUC co-hosted with the Alliance for a Green Revolution on domestic private
sector for inclusive growth and expanding markets tht will catalyse Africa’s
agricultural transformation.
As I end, let me applaud the women of Africa. Those of you women here, young
and old, you represent a big women constituency. Can you applaud yourselves! As
you are aware, 2015 is the AU year of women empowerment and development. Let
us all commit ourselves to reinforce the contribution of women to Africa’s
agriculture.
Thank you.
5