Africa's largest gathering on farming closed with a clear message: the era of emergency food aid has reached its limits, and market-driven investment must take over. The African Development Bank and African ministers used the Africa Food Systems Forum to call for a decisive shift toward commercial, investment-led agriculture, according to allAfrica.
From Emergency to Enterprise
The bank pointed to hard results to make its case. Its African Emergency Food Production Facility, launched in 2022, delivered climate-smart seeds and fertilisers to some 20 million smallholder farmers across the continent, and helped Nigeria achieve a four-fold increase in wheat production while Côte d'Ivoire doubled its maize output, according to allAfrica. Even so, Dr Martin Fregene, the bank's officer in charge of agriculture, warned that emergency funding tools would not be enough for a continent whose population is projected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050, the same report noted.
A Forum Built Around Money
The framing matched the event itself. Held in Kigali from 31 August to 4 September and drawing more than 5,000 delegates from over 50 countries, the 20th edition of the forum carried the theme of investing in Africa's agri-food systems rather than aiding them, according to Rio Times. The pressure to deliver was real, since the previous edition in Dakar generated more than $6.14 billion in country investment programmes, led by Nigeria at about $3.5 billion, the same report noted, leaving organisers to show that pledges turn into planted fields, as Africa Agricultural Network observed.
For a country that led the continent's investment pledges and quadrupled a strategic grain, the test is whether that capital reaches farms and, eventually, market stalls. FoodPrices Nigeria tracks verified retail prices for grains and staples across Lagos markets, the practical measure of whether investment-led farming reaches the shopper.
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