African Ministers of Finance and Economic Development commit to placing Agriculture at the core of growth policies.
ECA-AU Joint Press Release No. 30/2010
Lilongwe, 31 March 2010 (AU-ECA)-African Ministers of Finance, Economic Planning and Development have resolved to give pride of place to the high potential of the agricultural sector to create jobs, by granting subsidies to small scale farmers through the provision of certain inputs and by adopting measures to stabilize markets for farmers who produce surpluses.
Resolution 11 adopted at the conclusion of the Annual Session of African Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development held on 29 and 30 March 2010 in Lilongwe, Malawi, under the auspices of the African Union (AU) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), reaffirms the commitment of African Ministers to boosting investment in agriculture and allocating a substantial share of national budgets to this vital sector, as provided for in the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) established at the 2003 AU Summit in Maputo.
Bearing the title “Towards Realizing a Food Secure Africa within Five Years”, Resolution 11 calls for a set of concrete measures such as speeding up the implementation of the African mechanism for financing the development of fertilizers.
With a view to enhancing the competitiveness of African farmers, Resolution 11 also stipulates that priority should be given to local producers rather than international charity organization when it comes to provisioning from food aid suppliers.
These African farmer support measures fall within the broader context of articulating appropriate strategies to promote job creation within a framework where the spectacular growth rates achieved in the past decade have impacted only marginally on reducing joblessness in most African countries.
This is the third time running that the AU and ECA are jointly holding the Conference of African Ministers of Finance, Economic Planning and Development. This year’s discussion theme was “Promoting High-level Sustainable Growth to Reduce Unemployment in Africa “ and the outcome was a Ministerial Policy Statement which reaffirmed the centrality of job creation in growth policies.
The Ministerial Policy Statement highlights the need to pay particular attention to such drivers of growth as human capital development, technological innovation and physical infrastructure. In the view of the African Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, the private sector should play a more significant role in job creation within an environment enabled by good governance.
Employment promotion strategies should, accordingly, take into account, as outlined in the Ministerial Statement, the constraints of climate change. They should also be sustained by the development of statistics to improve policy formulation and the institution of effective machinery to combat illicit financial flows which deprive African countries of resources vital to their development.
Particular attention was given to the practical implementation of policies adopted by the Annual Joint meetings of the AU and ECA. It was proposed, in that regard, that member States should henceforth report to each Ministerial session on the effort that they have made to implement decisions adopted at the preceding session.
During the closing ceremony of the Conference, both Mr. Jean Ping, Chairperson of the African Union Commission, and Mr.
Abdoulie Janneh, United Nations Under-Secretary-General and ECA Executive Secretary hailed Malawi’s success in achieving food self-sufficiency and exhorted other African countries to emulate that example.
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