Drivers of succes for agricultural transformation in Africa

Despite many challenges facing African agriculture, the sector remains key to rural employment, food security and livelihoods to the most vulnerable.
Growing agricultural productivity attacks poverty from three different directions. It increases the productivity and incomes of the majority of Africa's poor, who work primarily in agriculture. It reduces food prices, which govern real incomes and poverty in urban areas, and generates important spillovers to the rest of the economy.
Thought inadequate in number and scale to counter Sub-Saharan Africa's daunting demographic challenge, African farmers and agricultural policymakers have achieved a series of significant sucesses in agricultural development. Malian cotton production has grown at 9 percent per year for the past 40 years, while Kenyan horticultural exports have increased five fold since 1975. Farmers and researchers have launched literally hundreds of innovatie soil and water conservation initiatives in a wide variety of locations to contend with declining soil fertility and declining fertilizer subsidies. Work by cassava scientists across Africa has countered deadline disease and pests attacks and converted these threats into opportunities for significant subsequent rapid production growth, benefiting tens of millions of small farmers and making it one of the continent's most powerful poverty fighters to date:

Consult the Reader: Agricultural transformation in Africa: Building on successes. and the multimedia resources from leading experts on the subject: http://brusselsbriefings.net/past-briefings/agricultural-transformation…