NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) - Sub-Saharan African nations will not be able to
sustain their accelerated economic growth unless they eliminate hunger, the
U.N. said in a report Tuesday.
Many sub-Saharan economies are growing fast but the growth rates have not
translated into significant hunger reduction, said UNDP Administrator Helen
Clark.
Sub-Saharan Africa's growth, this year expected to be more than 5 percent,
is accelerating faster than the rest of the world excluding China and India,
according to UNDP statistics.
According to the agency's African Development Report, nearly 218 million
people on the continent are undernourished and 55 million children are
malnourished, a figure that is projected to rise.
The report says food security can be achieved by several means, including
boosting agricultural productivity and creating resilience against natural
disasters.
Tegegnework Gettu, an assistant secretary-general and regional director for
the UNDP bureau in Africa, said chronic food security in sub-Saharan Africa
stems from decades of poor governance.
"Regimes bent on amassing wealth absorbed the region's resources into
patrimonial power structures," he said. "Self-serving elite quick to profit
from graft and patronage have stood between the leaders and the people,
monopolized state revenues and emptied the countryside, but they have
provided neither employment nor industry."
He said Africa has the knowledge, the technology and the means to end hunger
and food insecurity but lacks the political will and dedication.
"Africa must stop begging for food. That is an affront to both its dignity
and its potential," he said. "If some African countries can acquire and
deploy jet fighters, tanks, artillery and other means of destruction, why
should they not be able to master agricultural know-how? Why should African
be unable to afford technology, tractors, irrigation, seed varieties and
training needed to be food secure?"
The U.K. estimates that between 50,000 and 100,000 people died in last
year's famine in Somalia and drought in Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and
Djibouti.
More than 15 million people are currently at risk of hunger in a zone that
includes some of the poorest countries in the world: Chad, Mali, Niger,
Mauritania and Burkina Faso, as well as parts of northern Senegal, northern
Nigeria and Cameroon.
Gettu said the international community is also responsible for food
insecurity in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Developed countries maintain agricultural subsidies that benefit their
producers while pushing sub-Saharan Africa's impoverished small-holder
farmers to the margins, he said.
Similar sentiments were echoed by local analysts.
Economist James Shikwati, who heads the Kenyan economic think tank the Inter
Region Economic Network, said in the existing global trade system which is
valued at 36 trillion dollars, Africa only contributes 3 percent.
"If the U.N. really wanted to help African farmers, the point would be to
leverage on the indigenous crops and foods in Africa and have them access
global markets so that farmers can also tap in to this 36 trillion dollars
global trade system." Shikwati said.
Copyright C 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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Received on Tue May 15 2012 - 13:31:44 EDT
