As Africa’s population inches closer to a quarter of the global total, the continent’s share of world food production in the past decade weighed in at just four per cent – compared with North America and Europe at 48 and 15 per cent respectively.

Africa is in a net food deficit position with food imports growing at 3.4 per cent per year between 1980 and 2007.

“In many of the eastern and central Africa countries, farm holdings are getting smaller and the soils are getting more depleted of nutrients, making it even harder to sustain or increase yields. The yields of major staples such as maize, rice milk and bananas remain far below the potential possible with technologies and innovations coming out of research,” said the Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa (Asareca).

However, agriculture, which employs more than 70 per cent of the population in the eastern and central African region and could help raise production, continues to suffer low investment. Technology adoption is also low, meaning the region is not deriving maximum benefit from available knowledge.

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It only gets worse. Governments’ budget allocations are low, to say nothing of their not supporting research. For instance, contributions from member governments barely account for one per cent of Asareca’s annual budget.

According to Asareca executive director Dr Fina Opio, scaling up investment in agriculture could facilitate the transition to a middle-income status for the up to 80 per cent of rural populations in Africa that exclusively depend on agriculture for their income and basic nutrition needs. Making the sector productive could attract the youth, reducing the huge numbers of unemployed youth in the region.

“Since agriculture is the employer of over 70 per cent of the population, it should be the sector to drive this transformation,” she said during Asareca’s second scientific conference in Bujumbura last month.

To achieve such results, however, governments would need to provide enough funding to enhance agricultural transformation.

Rwanda’s Minister for Agriculture Agnes Kalibata said governments in Africa will need to invest as much as 30 per cent of their national budgets in agriculture for any visible transformation.

“Asian countries invested 15 to 30 per cent in agriculture to achieve the green revolution. However, most African countries are investing below 5 per cent,” she said, arguing that agriculture institutions in Africa needed strengthening.

She said Rwanda had focused on protection and rehabilitation of marsh lands, protection of slopes through terracing and re-afforestation with visible results. Beginning this year, the country will focus on more private sector engagement, applied research and institutional reforms.

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In the Maputo declaration of 2003, African countries committed themselves to raise spending in agriculture to at least 10 per cent of their national budgets by 2015. According to Dr Opio, however, only a few have met or exceeded that target.

“In the ECA sub-region by 2012, only Ethiopia had exceeded the 10 per cent mark, while Madagascar, Sudan and Tanzania were operating at between 5 and 10 per cent with the rest investing well below 5 per cent,” she said, adding that these levels of investment in agriculture were low compared with the 1960s and 1970s, where many African countries were spending up to 20 per cent of national budgets on agriculture.

The African Union has also set a target of each African country to spend one per cent of GDP to support agricultural research and development but only Burundi, Kenya, and Uganda had by 2008 achieved a ratio of between 1.2 and 2.0 per cent.

“This is an encouraging achievement. However, there is a need for the governments of the Asareca member states to re-examine this situation and improve with the aim of becoming middle-income countries by 2025-2030,” she said.

In Burundi, farming accounts for nearly 50 per cent of GDP and employs as much as 90 per cent of the rural population, according to Minister for Agriculture and Livestock Development Kayitesi Odette. But productivity is hampered by poverty, land degradation, low levels of funding and technology adoption as well as poor market access for agricultural produce.

Referring to a 2009 report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development which cited food insecurity as a major constraining factor to development of the third world, Burundian Vice President Gervais Rufyikiri told the same conference that agriculture was growing way below the population, further worsening food insecurity and poverty.

Poor access to inputs, poor adaptation to technology and climate change and inadequate dissemination of research outcomes have maintained the status quo, he added.

“Countries need to pool their technical resources to make farming the catalyst for economic growth. We also need to learn from the past, picking from success stories to formulate policies that shall make agriculture an engine for sustainable economic growth,” he said.

Dr Opio cited the absence of an effective mechanism for providing support to agricultural research and development as a key challenge in Eastern and Central Africa.

According to Dr Charles Mugoya, the programme manager for Agro-biodiversity and Biotechnology at Asareca, most of the knowledge and technologies generated through research are not getting down to end users.

“We have enough technologies but research institutions also need to be recognised and given their due support in order to implement activities such as integrating new technologies in the farming systems,” he said.

But upscaling technology also faces policy bottlenecks in areas such as land reform. Across most of the continent, current land tenure systems encourage fragmentation which defeats upscaling.

“There are other constraints such as the absence of a private sector system that delivers agro-inputs such as fertilisers, herbicides, seeds and other support infrastructure for mechanised commercial farming in a timely manner.

“So there is a range of policy constraints and infrastructure deficits which if not addressed will leave agriculture, performing below potential,” Mugoya said.

Research in agriculture is predominantly facilitated by donors, something that has to change so that African governments commit to putting more money into research and agricultural transformation.

He added: “The people’s attitude towards farming must also change; they need to look at agriculture as a business. If you are using a hoe to do farming, you are not going to make any headway in farming as a commercial enterprise. There are a lot of new technologies that have replaced the hoe but the people’s attitude remains married to the hoe.”

Asareca has implemented more than 90 projects and 310 sub-projects in the region, where a total of 409 technologies, innovations and management practices such as improved varieties, water management practices, integrated soil fertility management, and innovative marketing tools have been generated, benefitting over 1.5 million smallholder households.