Agribusiness: Africa’s way out of poverty

It is estimated that Africa’s population reached 1.4 billion in 2010, with resultant consequences for food security, growing urbanisation, and youth employment. African countries urgently need to refocus their agricultural and economic growth strategies. The continent’s agriculture is substantially under-capitalised, with extremely low levels of mechanisation and value addition. Africa’s average of 13 tractors for each one hundred square kilometres of arable land compares unfavourably both with the global average (200) and with the average for other developing regions, such as South Asia (129). The same applies to irrigation: sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has only 4 per cent of arable and permanent cropland under irrigation, compared with 39 per cent in South Asia and 11 per cent in Latin America and the Caribbean. The author argues that a shift to an agribusiness development growth trajectory is crucial for poverty reduction on the African continent.