by iKml1 | Jun 26, 2024
Introduction
The global crises of COVID-19, conflict, and climate change are increasing the risk of food shortages, inflation, and poverty in Africa, as global food and fuel prices also rise. The Pan-African Quality Infrastructure (PAQI) under the framework of the African Union (AU) has identified cassava as a poverty-fighter capable of spurring industrial development and food security in Africa.
Root-based crops have huge potential to fight hunger and poverty in Africa. Cassava root and its allied products present real opportunities for income generation for the rural population, as well as for diversification and expansion into new growth markets as substitutes for various imported items.
A versatile crop that can be grown in a variety of agro- ecological conditions, cassava is highly resistant to drought and environmental stresses and is consumed as a staple food in many African countries. This contributes significantly to the self-sustainability and economic growth of millions of small-scale farmers in rural Africa.
However, the cassava value chain faces many challenges such as low productivity, poor product quality, limited utilization and market opportunities. These challenges highlight the role that quality infrastructure institutions can play.
This brochure aims to raise awareness of the role of quality infrastructure to support the industry in tapping into the huge potential for the economic development of the cassava value chain in Africa.
Download
by iKml1 | Jun 24, 2024
STRATEGIC CONTEXT
According to the IITA, Maize is the most important cereal crop in sub-Saharan Africa, offering a diet staple for more than 300 million people. It accounts for 30-50% of low-income household expenditure in Africa and over 30% of calorie intake in the continent comes from maize.
MAIZE SUPPLY AND DEMAND IN NIGERIA
According to PwC, Nigeria is Africa’s second largest maize producer and the 14th largest producer globally. Citing the FAO, PwC notes that 11 million metric tonnes were harvested from over 6.8 million hectares of land, a growth rate of 49% from a decade earlier, and cites data from farmers’ association, which puts the production level at 20 million metric tonnes annually. Borno, Niger, Plateau, Katsina, Gombe, Bauchi, Kogi, Kaduna, Oyo and Taraba states account for 64% of the maize production in Nigeria.
According to BusinessDay, poultry feed production takes up about 60% of Nigeria’s maize consumption, 25% going into food and beverage industrial activity and the remaining 15% goes to household consumption.
Download
by iKml1 | Feb 23, 2024
Resilience Building In Nigeria FAO PROGRAMME REVIEW (2024)
PURPOSE:
This document reflects an analysis of ongoing FAO Nigeria resilience building interventions and how they contribute towards the five capacities for resilience building, namely:
• PREVENTIVE: reduce existing and future risks.
• ANTICIPATIVE: act early.
• ABSORPTIVE: the ability to bounce back, overwhelmingly humanitarian (emergency response).
• ADAPTIVE: incremental adjustments.
• TRANSFORMATIVE: make fundamental changes to the system.
The five capacity areas are in most cases overlapping dur- ing specific project implementation, with the classification based on the overarching resilience capacity area.
his review comes at a time when FAO seeks to review its Resilience work in Sub Saharan Africa with the overall objective to systematically capture, document, and dis- seminate insights and best practices related to resilience building within FAO programmes for scaling up. This is intended to facilitate and harness the opportunities, and lessons learned in emergency and resilience program- ming, and integration of emergency, resilience, and de- velopment work into the priorities of Member States.
The initiative is in view of the increasing number of food and nutrition insecure people in Africa, with the Prevalence of Undernourishment (PoU) rising from 19.4 percent in 2021 to 19.7 percent in 2022, and the number of people facing hunger increasing by 11 million people since 2021 and by more than 57 million people since the outbreak of the COV- ID-19 pandemic. A much larger proportion of the population in Africa faces hunger compared to the other regions of the world – nearly 20 percent compared with 8.5 percent in Asia, 6.5 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 7.0 per- cent in Oceania.1 According to the region’s most recent economic update, growth in Sub-Saharan Africa was pro- jected to dip to 2.5 percent in 2023, down from 3.6 percent in 2022. Rising conflict and violence across the region ex- ert a dampening effect on economic activity, with climate shocks poised to exacerbate this fragility. About 462 mil- lion people in the region are still living in extreme pover- ty in 2023 even as growth remains uneven across the continent. While East Africa was set to record a growth rate of 1.8 percent in 2023, West Africa was expected to grow at a rate of 3.3 percent during the same year. Harnessing the potential of natural resources provides an opportuni- ty to improve the fiscal and debt sustainability of African countries. It is envisaged that if Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) can harness its natural resource wealth (oil, gas, and minerals), it can sustainably transform economically and create more job opportunities while transitioning into a low-carbon economy.
Link text
