Food production: Africa needs to get its act together to avert global food crisis

The right way, argues Alexander Mueller of the FAO, is for farmers in poor countries to boost their yields. This would be better for the countries themselves, since it would make them richer. And it would be better for the world, too, because the potential for higher yields should be greatest where they are now low, especially in Africa. At the moment, cereal yields in Africa are around one tonne per hectare, compared with three-to-four tonnes in Europe and rich Asia. It should be easier to get an extra tonne per hectare by increasing African yields to two tonnes a hectare than by boosting already-fecund European or north-east Asian yields even further (water is more abundant in parts of Africa, too)

The failure of farmers in poor countries to respond to price signals does not mean they are deaf to them. Rather the signals they get are often scrambled or muted. Farmers were frequently not paid the full world price for their crops, because governments were determined to keep local prices low in order to relieve hard-pressed consumers. Some governments also banned food exports.

SHOOT: It is increasingly in the interests of South Africa, for example, to 'inspire' production from inefficient neighbours such as Zimbabwe. Increasingly, it will be in the interests of the world to put under-utilised land to use [and I don't mean forests]. I mean farmland that is 'sort've' being cultivated.

clipped from www.economist.com At the moment, the world’s population is 6.7 billion and 750m people are born each year. Though the rate of increase is declining, inertia means the total will go on rising until 2050, when the population will reach 9 billion. In Ethiopia, for example, 18m children are born every year, rising to 24m a year by 2040. That will double its headcount from 80m to 160m. The FAO reckons that, to keep pace, the amount of food available in developing countries will have to double by 2050, equivalent to a 70% rise in world food production. If that does not happen, fears Joachim von Braun, the head of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, DC, there could be a return to the food conflicts of 2007-08 which caused riots in more than 60 countries and set off a controversial worldwide land grab—a rush by rich food-importers to buy swathes of Africa and South-East Asia on which to grow food.