Africa > Agribusiness / Food

Agribusiness / Food in Africa

  • Nigeria: DFID Partners Jigawa On Rice Farming

    NIGERIA, 2015/12/14 Stakeholders in the agricultural sector from Jigawa national met with agro investors in Abuja to iron out grey areas concerning their planned investments in rice and sugar production in the national. The conference looked at responsible agricultural investment (RAI) for Jigawa National taking into consideration issues of land ownership and compensations for displaced farmers part others. Dangote Group is acquiring about 20,000 hectares for rice production to help it achieve the president's self-sufficiency in rice, and the Lead Group wants 10,000 hectares for sugar production in Dagarawa.

  • Rwanda: New IT APP to Help Potato Farmers Improve Incomes

    RWANDA, 2015/12/14 The United States Agency for International Development, through its project, Private Sector Driven Agricultural Increase (PSDAG), is piloting a technology solution and web application that is designed to help increase farmers' productivity and the market competitiveness of Irish potatoes. Dubbed Farmbook, the tech solution is expected to help address challenges Irish potato farmers face such as lack of easy access to market data and low harvest incomes due to separate places of sale. The development follows the Ministry of Trade and Commerce move to set up a new strategy to market Irish potatoes in Rwanda through potato collection centres.

  • Investors Need to Get Real About Climate Change

    WORLD, 2015/12/11 Try sleeping next a one-hour conversation with Kanayo Nwanze. The president of the UN’s International Fund for Agriculture Development is a perfectly affable guy, but his take on how climate change will lead to a fast-increasing number of violent uprisings and refugee crises that will dwarf Syria’s always leaves me decidedly unsettled. “It’s clear if we don’t recognize the signs before, if we don’t make those crucial links, again poverty, migration, hunger and conflict will continue to make headlines,” Nwanze said in Paris over the weekend. With major climate-change talks unfolding in Paris, he’s calling for “policies and investments that can pre-empt next crises.”

  • No Rain and Too Little Drought Aid in Ethiopia

    ETHIOPIA, 2015/12/08 As world leaders and experts discuss climate change, Ethiopia is experiencing a critical drought which has decimated food crops. Food aid agencies warn the number of people in need could rise to 15 million in 2016. A herdsman in the Awash-Fantale district of the bone-dry Afar region of Ethiopia bemoans the death of his cattle from drought. "The last drop of rain fell around Ramadan of last year," he says. Cattle are the major form of currency in this remote corner of Africa's second most populous country. "Since again we have had no rain. So there is no water and no grass. Cattle are dying in great numbers. There is no government help," the herdsman said. He and others appealed to a DW reporter to take a message of urgency "back to the responsible body."

  • Agriculture In Africa Soil wealth: Africa’s potential next growth frontier

    EUROPEAN UNION, 2015/12/02 Despite possessing all of the attributes for agriculture, the African continent continues to spend in the region of $50 billion a year importing food On the topic of agriculture and food production in Africa, experts are as quick to point out the cruel realities that currently prevail as they are the continent’s vast potential for the next. For example, Africans are much additional heavily involved in growing and harvesting their own food than people in other regions, from presently on on average they yield less and still rely heavily on imports. Additional than 70% of sub-Saharan Africans are farmers, compared to just 2% in the US. Although a lot of parts of Africa have crushing poverty rates, and on the whole it remains the poorest continent in the world, it spends up to $50 billion each year importing food from wealthier nations. Still, the growing and selling of food crops in Africa accounts for nearly half of the continent’s economic output and the continent possesses the major resources of unused fertile land in the world, making it an epicenter for the next and for innovations in farming worldwide.

  • Agriculture In Africa Soil wealth: Africa’s potential next growth frontier

    EUROPEAN UNION, 2015/12/02 Despite possessing all of the attributes for agriculture, the African continent continues to spend in the region of $50 billion a year importing food On the topic of agriculture and food production in Africa, experts are as quick to point out the cruel realities that currently prevail as they are the continent’s vast potential for the next. For example, Africans are much additional heavily involved in growing and harvesting their own food than people in other regions, from presently on on average they yield less and still rely heavily on imports. Additional than 70% of sub-Saharan Africans are farmers, compared to just 2% in the US. Although a lot of parts of Africa have crushing poverty rates, and on the whole it remains the poorest continent in the world, it spends up to $50 billion each year importing food from wealthier nations. Still, the growing and selling of food crops in Africa accounts for nearly half of the continent’s economic output and the continent possesses the major resources of unused fertile land in the world, making it an epicenter for the next and for innovations in farming worldwide.

  • Local agricultural production cannot cater for Kenya’s food demand.

    KENYA, 2015/11/21 Kenya, like a lot of African nations, is a net importer of food despite having vast areas of arable land and over 75% of the people involved in farming. The country often faces shortages of maize, rice and wheat, the top three consumed cereal crops in the country. Each year Kenyans consume 540,000 tonnes of rice but the country only produces 130,000 tonnes, less than 25% of what is needed. It as well grows a paltry 350,000 tonnes of wheat against an annual request of 900,000 tonnes. It is for these reasons the Kenya Investment Authority (KenInvest), an agency mandated with promoting foreign investment , is seeking investors to partner with local landowners to improve food production. Agribusiness is one of five key sectors the agency will be promoting at a world investment summit planned for Nairobi this November.

  • Mutoba Ngoma is the entrepreneur behind Tapera Industries

    ZAMBIA, 2015/11/20 Any minute at this time next Mutoba Ngoma finished studying aeronautical engineering in the UK, he decided to return to his home country Zambia to start manufacturing biodiesel in his backyard. Almost 10 years later his company, Tapera Industries, has grown into a diversified eco-friendly business supplying biofuel and organic soap. And last year Ngoma was named a Mandela Washington Fellow. But why did a young aeronautical engineer decide to return to Zambia to try his hand at entrepreneurship and biodiesel production? His decision was based on the need to earn a sustainable gain, along with his desire to do work “that really matters”. He had been struggling to find a job in the UK in his highly competitive field at the same time as he came across a documentary on Brazil’s renewable energy advances, particularly in biofuel.

  • Bee farming provides jobs in Cameroon

    CAMEROON, 2015/11/20 Like a lot of educated people in Cameroon, Timothee Awanga found that a college degree did not guarantee him a better life. His life changed for the better at the same time as he learnt to cultivate an abundant natural resource in his home village – bees. He became an entrepreneur selling bees and their by-products, honey and beeswax. Presently he is using bees to transform the lives of a lot of others near Yaoundé. He is teaching hundreds of young people to set up little honey enterprises of their own. Timothee Awanga, 42, teaches 15 Cameroonian youths about honey-bee colonies near his home in Matomb, a village 70 km from Yaoundé. He takes them through his 30 bee hives, each of which holds at least 30,000 bees.

  • Exploring Ethiopia’s Crisis

    ETHIOPIA, 2015/11/17 Food insecurity is one of the majority pressing humanitarian issues in the Horn of Africa, and the situation is expected to deteriorate further over the coming months. Ethiopia, in particular, is faced with a massive crisis. According to the European Commission, “[t]he situation in Ethiopia is at present the majority alarming, where the number of food insecure people has increased from 2.9 million at the beginning of the year to 8.2 million by early October. It is foreseen that these numbers will further rise up to 15 million by the end of 2015. Rates of acute under-nutrition are well above emergency thresholds in a lot of parts of the country, while the response to this situation is hampered by an significant shortage of nutrition supplies. In the worst affected areas in the Northern, Central and Eastern regions hundreds of thousands of livestock deaths are reported.” Moreover, UNICEF warns that a large number of those facing hunger will be children; approximately 5 million children will “require relief food assistance during the last quarter of 2015,” with hundreds of thousands urgently requiring treatment for acute severe malnutrition.
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