Is rural development key to Africa's growth?

23/05/2002 11:56 - (SA)

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Wangui Kanina Da Es Salaam - Improving agricultural practices and targeting aid on rural areas is the key to preventing future famines in Africa, the head of the United Nations agricultural development agency said on Thursday. Lennart Bage, head of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), was in Dar es Salaam for a regional ministerial conference at a time when much of southern Africa is facing its worst food shortage in a decade. Millions of people in Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe are in urgent need of food after crops failed due to severe drought, while Lesotho, Mozambique and Swaziland may also require aid. "How do we make this looming famine the last? Well... by investing more not in any magic, but in very simple things we know work like irrigation, roads, transport, input better technology and credit. It is no secret formula," Bage said in an interview. "Poverty is basically and profoundly rural, 75% of the poor in most countries... live in the rural areas and they depend on agriculture and related services for their livelihood. "So we have to increase agricultural production, we have to increase incomes for the farmers, their standard of living, all the factors that constitute poverty." he said. Bage, from Sweden, said donors and African governments had neglected agriculture and rural development during the 1990s in terms of budget allocation. Foreign aid to rural sectors fell by more than 50% between 1988 and 1999. "It has been a collective neglect, you could say. It needs to be changed, it's as simple as that. We need to allocate more resources to where the poor are," he said.

He said that the two-day Poverty Reduction and Rural Growth in Eastern and Southern Africa conference in Tanzania aimed to get ministers and senior officials dealing with rural development and agriculture to look at the strategy IFAD has developed in the region, and come up with a way to address poverty. According to IFAD, which is charged with directly addressing rural poverty by increasing food production and increasing farmers' incomes, 1.2 billion people worldwide live in extreme poverty on less then one dollar a day. The number is expected to rise to 2 billion by 2015 if current trends continue.