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How can West Africa become more food-secure?
The global food and fuel price crisis presents a “strategic opportunity” to West African states to become more food-secure according to agricultural analysts, but they will only achieve this by committing 10% of state budgets to agriculture and better exploiting their comparative advantage.
In the face of on-average 45% cereal price rises since mid-2006, ECOWAS trade, finance and agriculture ministers met in Nigeria from 18 - 19 May 2008 to discuss a strategy to boost food security across the region.
“Each country needs to work to its own proven advantage,” said Tshikala Tshibaka, senior policy officer at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) who attended the meeting. “And this idea is relatively new for the region.”
And it will cost.
“This is a strategic opportunity for countries like Mali, Burkina Faso and Nigeria to decide if they want to become the bread-basket of the region, but it will take them some serious investment to get there,” said John Staatz, professor of agriculture, food and resource economics at Michigan State University.
