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Roads to combat hunger
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03/2003
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Roads to combat hunger
Hunger in Africa is not an inevitable fate. That is the main thesis of a study titled 'Reforming Agricultural Markets in Africa' by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), which its new director, Joachim von Braun, presented in Berlin on February 14. Only a short while before, von Braun had visited Ethiopia which, like Southern Africa, has been hit by a disastrous famine.
He said three packages of measures must be implemented to improve the people's supply by their own efforts in the countries that suffer regularly from famine. First, their infrastructure must be expanded. In many countries the roads were so bad that harvests could not be transported from one region to another. Second, more money must be invested in farm productivity. "In Ethiopia, practically nothing has happened in either sector in the last 15 years," von Braun said. He added that observers believed that, not least, annual international food aid had reduced the pressure on governments to reform and weakened the people's self-help ability.
Third, agricultural production must be diversified, for in the long run subsistence production had no future and must be supplemented by a decentral smallholder processing industry. That would create jobs and opportunities to generate income. To get such a development underway, land ownership had to be clarified. For instance, in Ethiopia an obstacle to greater self-initiative was that as a rule land was owned by the government, not private property. (uke)
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International Food Policy Research Institute: www.ifpri.org
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