West Africa to spend more on farming as food costs bite

from Reuters Africa

By Camillus Eboh

ABUJA (Reuters) - Governments from around West Africa have agreed to increase spending on farming to try to make one of the world's poorest regions self-sufficient and avoid tens of millions of people going hungry.

The 15-member Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) said trade, agriculture and finance ministers had agreed to invest $4 billion between now and 2010, mostly to help small family farmers who form the backbone of the rural economy.

After a meeting in Nigeria's capital Abuja on Monday, the regional bloc said it would also provide $100 million a year to support agricultural productivity through its ECOWAS Bank for Investment and Development.

"These measures ... will ultimately create food self-sufficiency and enable the region to eat what it produces and produce what it eats," it said in a statement on Tuesday.

Basic food like rice and millet, the daily staple for families across West Africa, risks becoming unaffordable for many as a global surge in the cost of major cereals and oil continues to drive up prices at local markets.

The region needed $2 billion in immediate, emergency support for 44.4 million people considered to be living in abject poverty, ECOWAS said, and added that it would take the lead in mobilising international donors to help raise the sum.

Riots and protests have flared around the region, leaving governments scrambling to ease the financial burden on struggling populations by curbing food exports, easing taxes on imports and increasing subsidies for basic staples.

But economists at the ECOWAS meeting warned that such measures were unsustainable, particularly for the region's smaller economies, and instead argued for a structured increase in agricultural spending in the longer term.

TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE

Some development experts say too much aid for Africa has been focused on good governance initiatives in recent years instead of on agriculture, while governments -- faced with rapid urbanisation -- have prioritised spending elsewhere.

As a result, some states which were once net food exporters are now reliant on expensive imports.

"If you say how come we never thought of feeding ourselves, I think this is probably wrong, because it has always been an issue," Nigerian Finance Minister Shamsuddeen Usman said.

"Unfortunately we have not paid as much attention to it as we should have, much earlier," he told reporters.

While the region's larger economies, such as oil-producing Nigeria or cocoa-producing Ivory Coast, have been able to absorb the cost of measures like tax cuts with relative ease, sustained high food prices are more challenging for the poorest states.

In Niger, an arid country on the edge of the Sahara where one in five children die before their fifth birthday, aid agencies fear high prices could put decent nutrition beyond the reach of millions of people even if the next harvest is good.

Ministers at the one-day extraordinary ECOWAS meeting agreed to improve budgetary allocations to agriculture in the long term, including subsidising production, encouraging the provision of credit to farmers, and investing in fertilisers.

The regional body said it would coordinate the bulk purchase of basic food supplies in the short-term to help its worst-hit member states, so as to benefit from a bulk discount.