By Martin Mutuku
NAIROBI, June 30 (Xinhua) -- While Africa has the great potential to produce more food and significantly reduce its food import bills, the continent will continue to be troubled by food shortage if the governments take no actions.
The food crisis ravaged the world last year with the African continent hardest hit where people spent more to buy less food due to the skyrocketing prices of food.
Amid the food shortage, Some African countries such as South Africa, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Senegal and Mozambique witnessed mass demonstrations to protest the governments' failure to produce more food for their people, causing a lot of uncertainty across the continent.
The food prices, for the time being, have shown some signs of fading, but food shortage could likely to persist in the continent due to poor rainfall received in most famine-prone regions of the continent.
That African agriculture has enormous potential is an obviousreality. Recognition of this potential is manifested in the current rush for African Agri land by some Arab countries and companies based outside the continent. In recent times, countries in the Far East have been making huge investments in African agriculture including large land acquisitions.
Experts argue that Africa should be self reliant to guarantee the food security by planting more crops and produce more food so as to reduce poverty and realize the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
Kenyatta University don James Kathuri dismissed food aid as a solution to end food crisis for the estimated 28 percent of the Africa's chronically hungry.
In a recent interview to Xinhua, Dr Kathuri expressed his frustration that Africa, a continent full of resources and knowledgeable about hunger, continues to painfully face direct economic cost of hunger.
Dr Kathuri said "Although some blame nature as the source of this crisis, hunger is a product of complex interrelated social ills. It is a disaster made by people and therefore requires people's will and determination to eliminate."
The "food first" strategy for cutting hunger in Africa must take the will to do so. "If all African countries and international partners play politics of 'food first,' hunger would become a thing of the past," he added.
The poor infrastructure in Africa also impedes the development of the agriculture sector in the continent.
Kenyan Minister of Agriculture William Ruto is of the view that his country should embark on new strategies to fight food shortage by developing irrigation systems.
Also in a recent interview to Xinhua, the minister said the Kenyan government would spend more than 1 billion shillings in the coming financial year on reviving five irrigation projects in the country.
The minister also said that the local politicians should stop politicizing the Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) technologies as this is one way of tackling climate change challenges, adding that at any rate most Western countries have already adopted this technology.
According to Dr Akinwumi A. Adesina, the vice president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the rises in food prices have driven more African people into poverty, hunger and malnutrition.
"Today, 300 million Africans face chronic hunger. Net food importing countries suffered as prices rose. High food prices more than doubled Africa's food import bill to over 15 billion U.S. in 2008," Dr Akinwumi said.
"The poor must spend a greater share of their incomes on food. They must spend more to buy less, increasing the ranks of the extremely poor."
Dr Adesina said African countries need to move away from reliance on food imports by investing more in agriculture to securing its food supplies through rapid, sustainable increases in food production.
African countries spend an average of just 4 to 5 percent oftheir total national budgets on agriculture, compared with 8 to 14percent in Asia and much more before the onset of the economic meltdown, he said.
"It is time to invest in agriculture and to do it right. We must unlock the potential of agriculture in ways that allow countries to rapidly boost their national and household food security," he noted.
African farmers also need better access to market while they are increasing production.
Uganda is the second largest producer of bananas in the world, yet it ranks at the bottom of the list in terms of exports.
"Unless farmers can sell what they produce at a profit, poverty will persist (in the African continent)," warned Dr Adesina.
Africa also needs a fair global trade regime to open up overseas markets for what it produces, he said.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that export earnings of the least developed countries have declined by 50 percent over the past 40 years.
A big part of the problem is high tariff and non-tariff barriers that continue to limit the access of African countries to markets. A recent study by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has found that most African countries would need to increase their agricultural spending by 20 to 24 percent per year to cut the poverty rate by half by 2015.
