By Patience Ugochi Joseph, Program Officer SUPIA
The Malabo Declaration commitments are targeted approaches to achieve agricultural vision for the continent. it is an essential document that assists AU members to achieve agriculture-led growth and end poverty and hunger.
In 2003, the African Heads of States and Governments in Maputo in 2003 conceptualized and launched a holistic and robust agricultural programme tagged “Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme” (CAADP) designed to accelerate growth and eliminate poverty and hunger among African countries. CAADP was designed to ensure increase in public spending, accelerating growth, increase food security and eliminating poverty. Member States were expected to dedicate 10% of its annual national budget to agriculture and ensure annual growth rate of the sector by 6%.
Ten years down, in June 2014 in Malabo (Equatorial Guinea), the AU Heads of State and Government adopted seven (7) Commitments in the Declaration on Accelerated Agricultural Growth and Transformation. These Commitments was designed to achieve transformation by 2025. This commitment includes recommitment to CAADP principles and values; enhancing investment finance in agriculture; ending hunger by 2025; halving reducing poverty by half by 2025 through inclusive agricultural growth and transformation; boosting intra-Africa trade in agricultural commodities and services; enhancing resilience of livelihoods and production systems to climate variability and other related risks and mutual accountability to actions and results.
Against above background, Participatory Development Alternatives (PDA) with support from ActionAid through the Public Financing of Agriculture held a one-day event on 15th March 2021 at San Diego Hotel, Abakaliki. Present at the meeting were representatives from Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources; Ministry of Finance; Ministry of Environment; Nigeria Agriculture Insurance Corporation; CSOs and the media. Representatives of Smallholder women farmers were drawn from the 13 LGAs of Ebonyi State. The meeting aimed to publicize to the general public the current country’s Biennial Review performance of the agriculture sector; and to discuss on issues concerning low investment, low commitment, and poor planning in the agriculture sector.
The report shows that the 2019 Second Biennial Review (BR) on the Implementation of the Malabo Commitments and the Africa Agricultural Transformation Scorecard was presented at AU summit in February 2020. The review was carried out to evaluate country performance in achieving agricultural growth and transformation goals in Africa based on 47 indicators under 7 thematic areas and 23 performance categories. However, forty-nine (49) Member States including Nigeria reported on progress in implementing the Malabo declaration during the 2019 biennial review cycle.
Meanwhile, the benchmark set for the 2019 BR cycle for a country to be on track is 6.66, much higher than the 3.94 set for the 2017 cycle. Nigeria’s score is 5.18 lower than the benchmarks of 6.66 and therefore not on track of achieving the 7 Malabo commitments by 2025. Even though Nigeria made significant improvement relative to the 2017 score by 52% there is need for stronger political leadership and commitment from government to attract stakeholders buy-in for financing and implementing all the CAADP indicators.