Akinwumi Adesina, The President of the Africa Development Bank (AfDB) has disclosed that the bank has invested $25 billion in Africa’s agricultural sector in a 10-year period.
According to him, the best way to improve the way of life of many of those living in rural areas is to make agriculture a wealthy and attractive sector, as agriculture is the major occupation of inhabitants of rural areas.
“When I got to the African Development Bank, the first thing I had to let central bank governors and ministers of finance understand is that, you know, it’s something where you got inflation, and of course, we all know that in macroeconomics it’s pretty straightforward, in times of tightening money supply and you raise interest rate and make people save more money and all that,” he said.
“But the fact is that in many African countries, majority of African countries, is that if you look at the consumer price index, 65% or 70% or 75% of that is the price of food. And so, if I am trying to manage it from just the monetary policy side, you can’t succeed. You therefore have to have a structural approach to that.
“So I am very big on making sure you can drive the price of food down. So that’s why at the African Development Bank, when I became President, I put top priority on Food and Agriculture. And we have invested over a 10 year period, $25 billion into agriculture.
Speaking further, he revealed that he had set up a board that was providing technological support for farmers across Africa to help increase their yield of crops.
“In agriculture, if you can, you have to have high performing technologies to raise the yields of farmers so you can produce more and make more money and lower the cost of production.
“So I set up something with approval of our board called Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation and, I’m not going to go into all the details, but basically what it does is that taking high performing technologies and putting it in the hands of farmers, not hundreds, millions and millions of farmers
“Smallholder farmers, medium scale farmers, but largely 80% of them are smallholder farmers. You know. So, what we did was- I’ll give you an example. In the last five years, that platform has delivered high yielding technologies for 13 million farmers across many African countries.”