COMING UP!>>32nd Edition: Africa’s Agriculture: the Compelling Impetus of CAADP for Africa’s Integration

32^nd Edition:  

Africa’s Agriculture: the Compelling Impetus of CAADP for Africa’s Integration

We want to use the thirty-second edition of the Africa in Focus show to reprise the very critical discussion of Africa’s agriculture.

Our earlier discussions last year had centred on the role of organisations like AgriPro, which are doing great things around the youth and agric. This year, the focus is necessarily continental, with a focus on what synergies can be created between the AU’s Continental CAADP Programme and the CAADP Country Teams, which are critical in the implementation of CAADP – especially at a time when CAADP has entered the next stage of Implementation and Strategy with a view to a 2025 goal.

From 2013 through to mid-2014, all AU Member States were involved in ministerial meetings, including being involved in eighteen months of consultations at the national, regional, and continental level, to draw up the AU Heads of State and Government Malabo Declaration on Accelerated Agricultural Growth and Transformation for Shared Prosperity and Improved Livelihoods. The Declaration made no less than seven specific commitments to achieve agricultural growth and transformation for shared prosperity and improved livelihoods, including: upholding 10% public spending target; and sustaining annual agricultural GDP at least 6%.

Even more remarkable, however, is how commitments such as the operationalisation of the African Investment Bank; and fast-tracking of the Continental Free Trade Area (by 2017) find themselves as part of the targets. This makes for interesting conversations around how agriculture can continue to cross-cut through African integration dynamics and become a fully-fledged compelling impetus for Africa’s transformative growth.

These dynamics are part of what will animate discussions around Africa’s agriculture for which reason we are happy to speak to two members of Ghana’s CAADP Country Team; an official of the technical arm of the AU Commission; and finally, a technical expert of the West Africa Agricultural Productivity Programme (WAAPP), which is the closest we have come to speaking to the issue of agriculture/CAADP at the regional level. Our efforts to grant an interview to the DG of the Agriculture and Food Agency in Lome, Mr.Salifou, proved futile.

Remarkably, all the organisations we are speaking to on 17 February have one thing in common: they are all linked to CAADP’s Pillar IV.

Now while “Pillar IV” sounds like part of a typical address in Ghana, when located in the context of Africa’s agriculture, it means a whole lot as it refers to agricultural research and technological dissemination and adoption of CAADP.

Join us if you can at 1pm on 17 February, 2015.

Guiding questions

• Why are CAADP Country Teams critical in the implementation of CAADP?
• FARA has been around for 12 years in Ghana. Why has it found it difficult resonating with the Ghanaian public around agriculture?
• How consistent with CAADP implementation is the FARA Strategic Plan 2014-2018?
• What are the synergies between CAADP and WAAPP?

Guests in the studio:

Ø  Kingsley Ofei-Nkansah, Secretary-General, General Agricultural Worker’s Union(GAWU)

Ø  Marjorie Abdin, CAADP Country Team Member

Ø  Mr.Demby, Communications Officer/CAADP Rep, Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa(FARA)

On the line:

·        Dr.Alphonse Belane , West Africa Agricultural Productivity Programme(WAAPP) @13h20