RATIONALE AND SCOPE
1. Within the context of the United Nations Decade of Action to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, the World will come together at an extra-Ordinary Global Summit in September 2021 under the auspices of the United Nations Secretary-General, preceded by the pre-Summit in July 2021. The UN Food Systems Summit aims to bring new and more action in fostering game-changing solutions to transform food systems across the globe. A resilient and inclusive food systems impact directly all the 17 SDGs of Agenda 2030 and in the Africa’s case, transformed, resilient and healthy food systems is central to achieving the 20 goals of Agenda 2063.
2. The United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS), and particularly the National and Independent Dialogues leading up to the Summit, offer opportunities for Africa and the World to examine and identify context specific solutions to the challenges hindering achievement of set food systems related goals and targets in various development frameworks, including the SDGs and the African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the CAADP-Malabo Decision.
3. The Africa common position on Food Systems provides a synthesis of member states’ expressed views, perspectives and priorities as well as ambitions on key issues shaping Africa’s and the global food systems. In 2003, Africa adopted the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) as a continental policy framework for agricultural transformation to increase food security and nutrition and reduce poverty. In 2014 Africa renewed this commitment to agriculture transformation under the African Union (AU) CAADP Malabo declaration on agricultural growth and transformation with an expanded set of goals and targets to be achieved by 2025. The CAADP-Malabo goals and targets were also aligned to 10 Year Implementation plan of Africa’s Agenda 2063 as well as to the UN SDGs. The vision for the 10 years of the CAADP Malabo declaration is to position agriculture at the centre of driving inclusive growth and economic development to ensure wealth creation, food and nutrition security, economic opportunities for poverty alleviation and prosperity, as well as ensuring resilience and sustainability. Through the CAADP agenda, African leaders envisioned a food systems approach to attain agricultural-led economic transformation. AU Member States assess progress in the implementation of their CAADP-Malabo commitments every two years through the CAADP biennial review exercise and report. The latest biennial review report of 2019 indicated that Africa was not on track to achieve the CAADP goals and targets by 2025. As such, Africa is searching for solutions that will help to accelerate the pace of implementation of the CAADP-Malabo declaration. Therefore, the UNFSS has come at an opportune moment when the continent is also looking for game-changing solutions to transform its food systems to attain its goals in the CAADP Malabo declaration.
4. The Africa common position on food systems has emerged out of wide consultative and iterative processes with AU Member States’ perspectives, aspirations, priorities and experiences as the primary basis of the position – appreciating and as much as possible embracing the diversity and differences in priorities and identified pathways. Even more important is that the national and sub-national food systems engagements have provided experiences, views and ambitions of the frontline and grass root players and stakeholders who normally do not feature in dialogues and development decisions of this nature. Consultations and input from specialized agencies and constituencies including universities, thinktanks, research institutions, and policy networks all ensured that the perspectives and views were, as much as possible, anchored on science and evidence as well as lessons from decades of concerted work on food security, nutrition, and food systems transformation.
5. The ultimate objective of the Africa common position is to create awareness, build consensus on shared vision and critically galvanise necessary individual and collective set of actions including policy alignment and increased investments towards building and sustaining resilient, viable and inclusive food systems. Specifically, the Africa Common Position aims at: (i) providing an overview of Africa’s food systems; (ii) presenting challenges and opportunities in Africa’s food systems, recognising food systems as a cross-cutting development issue; (iii) examining the drivers and levers of Africa’s food systems and thereby highlighting Africa’s game changing solutions along identified priorities areas. Africa expects the momentum created by the UNFSS to result in mobilizing and galvanizing implementation of its priorities in Agenda 2063, CAADP-Malabo declaration, the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) and other AU continental development frameworks.
6. The common position has also benefited from the wealth of information generated from robust conversations and inputs from Africa Regional Economic Communities; civil society organizations, farmers’ organizations, including groups of women and youth; the private sector; academia; African multilateral institutions; and UN agencies.
7. The common position has gone through review and endorsement by the AU Specialised Technical Committee STC) on Agriculture, Rural Development, Water and Environment (ARDWE). The preparation of the Africa common position is led by the AUC Department of Agriculture, Rural Development, Blue Economy and Sustainable Environment (DARBE), and the African Union Development Agency (AUDANEPAD) in collaboration with the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), with technical support from several technical and multilateral agencies.
OVERVIEW OF AFRICA’S FOOD SYSTEMS
Intensified production-driven global processedfood markets
8. Africa’s food systems are rapidly evolving towards intensified production-driven systems. National, continental and global megatrends are shaping these patterns, including i) the rise of the African middle class; ii) rapid urbanization and consequent shifts in food demand and downstream modernization of the food systems; iii) a rapid shift in the labour force from farming to non-farm jobs; and iv) rising competition over African farmland. Other mega trends include climate change, technology advances especially digitalisation and the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Africa’s AfCFTA will certainly also be a factor in influencing how the food systems evolve over the coming decade and beyond.
9. In 2019, Africa expended US$43 billion on food imports, and it is projected raise to US$90 billion annually by 2030, pointing to two contrasting realities, namely existing opportunities for African agriculture and farmers, and on the other hand, growing unsustainable food supply dependence on foreign sources. Overall, the continent’s per capita food production declined partly because the region’s population has been increasing and food production has not been matching up, leading to a widening gap between production and the attendant consumption.
10. Africa’s food retail is dramatically shifting to the ‘supermarket’ mode which include the largely informal Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) food stores and food vending. It is estimated that 80 percent of food consumed in Africa passes through the hands of an SME. They are a contextual representation of the changing African reality. The expansion of global food industry, markets and trade with the movement of corporate retailers from developed economies to less developed ones, and a shift from urban centres to small and rural towns is also a feature in recent trend in Africa’s food industry and food markets. This is bound to intensify as the continent’s urbanization path intensifies and consumption patterns and preferences change, including a rise in the youthdriven consumption of processed foods. African smallholder producers, processing entities and traders, as mentioned, who are SMEs and informal must compete with international agribusinesses, despite lacking in key enablers such as access to technologies, inadequate financing services including insurance, the fragmentation in the food markets and the generally low levers of income, on one side, and high levels of risks and uncertainty, on the other.
11. One key feature of African food systems is the role of women. Women play critical roles across African food systems from production, processing, selling, and as consumers. Women comprise more than 50 percent of the agricultural workforce in the region and are also the predominant labour providers in agribusinesses and agro-industries. Yet, in many parts of Africa, women continue to face significant social and economic discrimination. They often lack access to productive resources, agricultural inputs, information, finance, services, markets, and social protection. Africa recognises that closing the gender productivity gap would yield production gains of between 2 and 11 percent in most countries. State of food and nutrition security in Africa
12. Globally, significant traction has been achieved by reducing hunger and poverty and improving food and nutrition security. However, with over 795 million people still suffering hunger and some two billion people suffering from micronutrient deficiencies and/or other forms of over-nourishment, the issue remains of great concern. In Africa, progress against hunger had been made but has been declining since 2014 with about 256 million people in the continent remaining hungry in 2018, representing an increase of some 44 million people from the 2014. The AU CAADP biennial review report of 2019 revealed that Africa was not on track to meet its goal of ending hunger by 2025, noting a deterioration in food and nutrition security on the continent since the inaugural report in 2017.
13. Africa on average imports about 40 percent of its food under unfair terms of trade that have eliminated tariff protection at frontiers. Accordingly, African countries have neither a regional nor a continental market that is stable which, therefore, persistently keeps smallholder farmers in the continent in perpetual ‘poverty’. In this regard, achieving intra-continental food security will begin by correcting these imbalances within the continent, and this could be the first and significant achievement that AfCFTA could deliver. This could allow locally grown food crops essential level of protection as well as develop and build-up intra-Africa regional markets.
14. Expanding Africa’s food basket will serve both nutrition and resilience objectives. In this regard, there must be intentional investments towards increased productivity and production in traditional and indigenous crops. These are normally lowcost nutritionally important in food systems. They are often managed by women and include vegetables, grain legumes, root crops and climate resilient crops such as sorghums, millets and cassava, all of which have for a long time suffered massive under-investments. The fisheries and aquaculture sub-sectors provide affordable, nutritious food to millions of Africans and have to be promoted as key sectors contributing to nutrition-delivering food systems as well as offering income (job and entrepreneurship) opportunities for local populations.
Africa’s one trillion-dollar business is in agriculture and agribusiness
15. African Agriculture is projected to generate a US$1 trillion agribusiness by 2030. Africa’s food imports are projected to soar to US$90 billion by 2030. This trend has implications on several areas, including undermining economic growth of small-scale food producers and Africa remains in the unfavourable balance of trade and trade deficits.
16. With a 60 percent global share of arable land, Africa is in a strategic position to cement global leadership in agriculture and agribusiness and become the food and agribusiness centre of the world. But realizing this dream requires appropriate and strategic investments supported by an enabling policy environment.
17. The African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) offers the continent a promise of US$2.5 trillion in combined GDP. Agribusiness is expected to significantly contribute to this growth. To realize this growth in agribusiness will require a concerted effort to increase production and value addition as well as to ensure adequate quality infrastructure and food safety standards to supply and grow local and regional markets.
18. Africa’s current agro-industrialization models pathways need urgent re-examination and re-alignment, through necessary reforms and action in key policy and investment as well as science-innovation and human capital areas. This also includes energy and communication and transport infrastructure, trade facilitation, financial and insurance services. Advancing the AfCFTA and Africa-Industrialisation side-by-side is key in creating a critical-mass of much-needed jobs and entrepreneurship opportunities for local populations. This should focus on incentivising local food- and agro-industrial growth along food systems values chains through tailored trade-agriculture policies to advance, among others, (a) commercialization of smallholder agriculture through enhanced access to technological and management innovations including digitalization and machine learning; (b) expansion in commodity range including traditional-indigenous food crops, livestock, fisheries – aquaculture and marine food products; (c) effective integration of farmers and frontline SEMs into expanded domestic, trans-national and regional supply and demand value chains. Africa will need to balance technological innovations and labour-intensive practices to increase productivity and enhance globally competitive agro-industrial performance, within continental frameworks promoting crosssectoral and integrated growth across identified economic growth corridors while prioritizing home-growth technological and management innovations.
Resilience in Africa’s food systems
19. For the last two and half decades, climate change has received attention as a disruptive challenge to Africa’s food systems and constitutes a significant threat to food security and poverty reduction efforts on the continent. The continent’s food systems and those directly dependent on them are still vulnerable to environmental degradation and climate change shocks such as droughts and floods, which are projected to increase in both frequency and intensity. These extreme weather events have a high cost and threaten crops, livestock, and people, thereby risking millions of Africans’ food security. Environmental degradation due to destructive use of both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, inappropriate development, and inadequate waste management has further reduced the resilience of Africa’s natural productive ecosystems to continue to provide goods and services that support our food systems.