The Africa We Want
By Abdelmonem Fawzi
“The day that hunger is eradicated from the Earth, there will be the greatest spiritual explosion the world has ever known. Humanity cannot imagine the joy that will burst into the world on the day of that great revolution,” renowned Spanish poet, Frederico Garcia Lorca, said.
Lorca was the most important Spanish poet and playwright of the 20th century. His work still influences writers and artists throughout the world.
However, can we imagine how it would feel to be part of a society that had taken on and solved, permanently, the problem of hunger?
The main question is that what will we ever do to end hunger?
If we see that there is more than enough food for everyone, that ending hunger would be easy, that it would be joyful, that it would allow hundreds of millions of people to become productive partners with us.
About one out of every eight persons on Earth is chronically hungry. The daily death toll from hunger is around 35,000 people. Sorry to say, most of the victims are children.
Worse still, hunger and malnutrition which manifest in under nutrition, underweight, stunting, wasting, micronutrient deficiencies, overweight and obesity are leading causes of morbidity and mortality in Africa.
When there is hunger and malnutrition in children under five, the damage done to the body is irreversible and the individual will never be normal for the rest of his or her life.
Any time you see adults sleeping at the ceremony, just know that they are all sub-normal human beings due to the nutrient deficiencies at the critical childhood years.
In Africa, we need to check out those people sleeping in high level meetings and those children sleeping in the classes during lessons, including some of them with block heads and failing exams.
These symptoms trace back to the kind of food they were fed during zero to five years of age.
Some of them did not have the opportunity to even breastfeed properly, while others were fed with only corn and carbohydrates during their childhood.
This is why the three-day World without Hunger Conference, organised recently in Addis Ababa by the UNIDO – United Nations Industrial Development Organisation, the Government of Ethiopia and the African Union (AU) with technical assistance from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), was very important.
The opening day of this conference began with an opening plenary to set the scene for high-level discussions on agribusiness, innovation, climate change, and fair trade under the theme “Challenges and Solutions to Combat Hunger and Food Security Issues”.
The plenary was followed by four technical sessions, to bring together representatives from different stakeholder groups, who introduced their contributions and efforts to demystify the current challenges and create a path to a more sustainable and secure food system for everyone.
Under the theme “Mobilising Investments for Sustainable Food Security Initiatives”, the second day featured the Investment Forum.
It demonstrated investment opportunities in agribusiness infrastructure, technology and renewable energy.
The objective of the forum was to create a dynamic platform for governments, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and start-ups to pitch greenfield and SME-based projects, focusing on achieving a world without hunger to potential investors.
The third day of the conference included a high-level government to business (G2B) dialogue among selected representatives.
Finally, the political forum concluded with the Addis Ababa Call to Action for A World without Hunger.
However, UNIDO indicates that a world without hunger initiative needs investment of $50 billion in the coming ten years.
It remains to be said that it is possible to end world hunger. Nevertheless, this will require a global effort to address the many factors that contribute to it.
Some people say that the world has the knowledge, resources, and capacity to end hunger by 2030, but the world is not currently on track to achieve this goal.
Ending hunger is a complex problem and requires short medium and long-term solutions.
We need innovations in the food industry based on sustainable input supplies, local value addition, digitalisation and new financing solutions. Industrialisation needs to be part of the solution.
We can only end hunger by tackling these short and long-term challenges together. This is where sustainable industrialisation comes in. We cannot talk about a food secure future without sustainable industrialisation playing a key part.
Increasing food production and expanding Africa’s food basket will serve both nutrition and resilience objectives.
In this regard, there must be intentional investments toward increased productivity and production of traditional and indigenous crops.
This also requires a new approach to integrate nutrition into resilient and strong health systems and social protection systems.
