This post is cross posted from the IFPRI website and was originally written by Claudia Ringler, Deputy Director of IFPRI's Environment and Production Technology Division (EPTD). The post first appeared in African Leadership Magazine.
Can Africa south of the Sahara feed itself? This question has been asked for decades, but no satisfying answer has yet been found—and is unlikely to be found in the near to medium-term future. Why?
Africa south of the Sahara is adding more than 1 billion people over the next 30 years. Most of the added population will reside in urban areas and will demand more access to dairy and meat products, cereals, vegetables and fruits, fats, oils, and sugars than the previous generation, which resided largely in rural areas.
This projected increase is contrasted with continued low agricultural productivity compared to the rest of the world. While average cereal yields in America and Asia reach more than 4 tons per hectare, cereal yields in Africa south of the Sahara only achieves 1.5 tons per hectare. Even though the sector in Africa has recently growing at 1.8 percent per year, it would still take the region 55 years to achieve today’s Asian average cereal yield. The region also faces the largest inter-annual variability in precipitation, while climate change is already affecting the region.
Combined with civil strife and unrest in various parts of the region, food insecurity has been rising over the last several years. According to the latest UN reports on Food Security and Nutrition. The number of undernourished people in Africa south of the Sahara rose from 181 million in 2010 to almost 222 million in 2016.
This adverse trend is wiping out much of the progress that has been made over the last decade.
A 2016 study found that for countries in the region to maintain current food self-sufficiency levels of approximately 80 percent, they would need to “radically” accelerate rates of yield improvement—or massively expand croplands thereby risking biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas emissions, or increasingly resort to food import dependency.
A new IFPRI study published in Water International in 2018 assesses the potential role of investments in Africa south of the Sahara in improving food security and self-sufficiency in the growing region.
The study used an integrated biophysical and economic modelling approach to assess the irrigation development potential in Africa and linked the prospective investment with changes in food security and food import dependency. The study focused on drylands, which cover 70 percent of the region’s cropland and are home to half its population—and are also where hunger and malnutrition are most prevalent and crop production most fragile.
The study identified sustainable and profitable irrigated area growth of three percent per year across the region, with fastest growth occurring in Central Africa, balancing slower growth in Eastern Africa. The study shows, that across dryland regions the potential for irrigation expansion is largest in West Africa, followed by East and Southern Africa, and smallest in Central Africa. For individual countries, the study found that the potential is largest in Nigeria, followed by Tanzania, Kenya, and Malawi. Across the region’s dryland areas, up to 14 million hectares could sustainably and profitably be converted into irrigated areas.
For all irrigation expansion scenarios in African drylands, net cereal imports to the region decline, with decreases reaching as much as 68 percent, or 90 million tons, from a baseline net import volume of 133 million metric tons in 2050. The dramatic production increases achieved under the accelerated irrigation scenarios can thus drastically reverse the region’s growing net food import dependency ration. The study found that targeted investments in irrigation in the dryland areas can effectively reduce food import dependency. The resulting national economic growth and rural income gains could substantially reduce the region’s population at risk of hunger.
Achieving these impressive results for food production and food self-sufficiency will require (1) declines in irrigation technology costs; (2) greater availability and accessibility to complementary rural infrastructure such as roads, storage and credit; (3) and access to complementary agricultural inputs in dryland areas. The recent Malabo Montpellier report on Water-Wise Irrigation sums up the way forward:
- Elevate irrigation to a top policy priority;
- Develop “smart regulations” to avoid degradation and pollution from irrigation development;
- Continually innovate with irrigation technologies;
- Invest in support infrastructure; and
- Explore innovative partnership and financing models to support development and growth of the sector.
If Africa south of the Sahara is to feed its growing population over the coming decades, sustainable drylands irrigation will be essential.
Read the original blog post on the main IFPRI website. The post first appeared in African Leadership Magazine.
