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Tuesday, October 31, 2006 - Web posted at 7:07:10 GMT Agriculture must be pro-poor: PM BRIGITTE WEIDLICHTHE majority of people in Africa live in rural areas and derive an income from agriculture, but they are poor, thus poverty reduction has to concentrate on agriculture, says Prime Minister Nahas Angula. |
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Speaking at the opening of the tenth Africa Forum meeting on agriculture yesterday, Angula emphasised that governments had the responsibility to ensure that agricultural growth was pro-poor. The Prime Minister noted that public spending on agriculture had declined over the years, and so had donor funding. "Statistics reveal that the percentage of official development assistance to Africa declined from 13 per cent in 1995 to only six per cent in 2004, more than a 50 per cent drop in the past decade," Angula said. "Assistance from the World Bank has also dropped - from US$3,5 billion in 1995 to only US$800 million in 2002," he added. In Namibia, equal access to land was necessary to ensure high productivity levels in agriculture, thus the country needed land and agrarian reform, Angula said. Namibia was the driest country in sub-Saharan Africa. If land was not utilised and managed well, it was prone to degradation, desertification and environmental damage. Despite these adverse conditions, Namibia produced a variety of top products such as meat. However, he advocated, production would increase once the land question in southern Africa was resolved once and for all. "Now only five per cent of the (Namibian) population is occupying about 90 per cent of all arable or commercial land," Angula criticised. He did not mention that over 800 of the 4 000 commercial farms in Namibia are already in the hands of formerly disadvantaged citizens through favourable loans. The annual forum meetings started in 1997. This year's theme is 'Programme-based Approaches to Agriculture and Rural Development' and it is sponsored by the German government through its development agency GTZ, the UN and other EU donor countries. The GTZ initiated the annual meetings through its sector network for rural development in African countries. The approximately 300 participants at this year's meeting come from a dozen different African countries to discuss performance and impact monitoring of agricultural support programmes and the importance of the private sector in agriculture. The forum will end on Friday. |
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