“Africa has the potential to end food, economic crisis caused by Russia-Ukraine war” – USAID

Wed, Apr 6, 2022

By editor

2 MIN READ

By Kennedy Nnamani

JIM Barnhart, Assistant to the Administrator in the Bureau for Resilience and Food Security U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, yesterday, has said that Africa can be the great solution to the food and economic crisis, which threatens the entire world, stating that it holds large agricultural land potential.

According to him, USAID recognizes the potential that the continent holds and is working to increase productivity, get more per hectare from smallholder farmers that dominate the agriculture sector across the continent through partnering with stakeholders in the government and in the private sector.

“We work with governments, we work with civil society, private sector, and smallholder farmers themselves on how to get more, sustainably, from the amount of land they have, and whether that’s through climate-smart agriculture investments such as drought tolerant maize or flood tolerant rice, and working with these smallholder farmers on improving uses of fertilizer and getting more for less cost, right,” he said.

He also noted that the USAID is technologically involved in “doing biofortified foods, and so improving nutrition for the foods that are being sold” and linking systems so that there is easy, quick and efficient flow from the seed to the market.

“It’s a matter of us maintaining our commitment to steadfast investment, particularly with a focus on those smallholders,” he added

Meanwhile, Africa still receives the hardest blow from the war in Ukraine as some of its countries still depend largely on the imports of food products and fertilizers from Ukraine and Russia.

Cindy McCain, Permanent Representative of the U.S. Mission to the UN Agencies in Rome, alluded to this, noting that countries like Madagascar, Ghana, South Africa, and others already suffer difficulties from the crisis, which is already shortening food sources and inability to transport food to where it is needed the most.

KN