Dakar summit birthed a close agreement and relationship within countries’ national governments in developing the Country Food and Agriculture Delivery Compacts. Motivated by the evident rise in food prices and disruption in global food supply due to Covid-19, climate change, and conflicts such as the Russia- Ukraine war, that worsened food insecurity in Africa.
The Dakar Summit hosted in Senegal last month by H.E Macky Sall of Senegal and former chairperson of the African Union in collaboration with Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, President of the African Development Bank Group (ADBG) was solution based.
Dakar 2 Summit on Feed Africa: Food Sovereignty and Resilience in Dakar, Senegal from 25 to 27 January 2023, which lauded the initiative partaken of by the ADBG president in fronting for agriculture elevation within African countries.
According to both H.E Sall and Dr. Adesina, Africa has 65 percent of the world’s remaining uncultivated arable land and has the potential to produce enough food to feed itself and contribute to feeding the rest of the world.
Emphasizing that it’s time to acknowledge Africa has a third of the 828 million hungry people in the world being on the continent hence urgency in embarking on exploiting the huge African agricultural potential.
Africa has 65 percent of the world’s remaining uncultivated arable land and has the potential to produce enough food to feed itself and contribute to feeding the rest of the world.
However, this can only be attained through delivering agricultural technology to farmers at scale, raising food production, and increasing investments in food and agricultural systems.
A step that has been embraced by the planned investment of $10 billion by the African Development Bank and a further $20 billion by several other partners in support of Africa’s agricultural transformation as catalyzed by the Country Food and Agriculture Delivery Compacts.
The Dakar Summit also reiterated in acknowledgment that the Country Food and Agriculture Delivery Compacts developed at this Summit, were prepared and are owned by African countries.
This conveys the vision, challenges, and opportunities in agricultural productivity, infrastructure, processing, and value addition. Further answering the question of markets and financing that will accelerate the implementation of the African Union’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP).
The leaders were to front their opinions at African Union Summit that was upon agreeing that it is time for Africa to feed itself and fully unlock its agricultural potential to help feed the world.