Participants at the ninth edition of Agriculture Summit Africa (ASA), have agreed that Africa must move beyond producing raw commodities to owning the processing, storage, trade and finance that capture value at home.
They added that the finance industry must be redesigned to match the long cycles of agriculture.
“The scale of what is at stake is not in dispute, as Africa spends more than $100 billion a year importing food it is capable of producing, “the Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Senator Abubakar Kyari, told delegates.
Speaking, Group Executive, Corporate and Investment Banking at Sterling Bank, Dele Faseemo, distilled the summit’s central thread into a warning that food had become a security question. “Simply put, food security is national security,” he said. “Real and sustainable sovereignty depends as much on food security as it does on physical security, on law and order.”
Faseemo urged the sector to move, “from potential to execution, ideas to scalable solutions, fragmented interventions to coordinated action, and from declarations of intent to measurable results.”
The Minister of Livestock Development, Idi Mukhtar Maiha, used his address to press for finance built for biological assets, arguing that conventional short-term, high-interest lending is mismatched to animals that must be bred, fed and brought to maturity. “We cannot finance biological assets as though they are fast-moving consumer goods,” he said.
Sterling Bank’s Group Head of Agric Finance and Solid Minerals, Dr. Olushola Obikanye, said the continent’s constraint was not its land or its harvests but what it does with them.
“Africa’s challenge is not a lack of agricultural potential, but the ability to convert that potential into productivity, into value, and, more importantly, into power. For decades, agriculture has been viewed as a sector focused on production,” Dr. Obikanye said.