From Africa Recovery, Vol.11#2 (October 1997), page 10 (part of special feature on Agriculture in Africa)

ECA focuses on the food security/population/environment 'nexus'

To combat hunger on the continent more effectively, African governments, donor agencies and other development actors need to better understand how food security is interlinked with population growth and the environment, says Mrs. Paulina Makinwa-Adebusoye, head of the new Food Security and Sustainable Development Division of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA). The ECA believes that Africa's past efforts were too narrowly focused on individual sectors, and that these three areas should be treated as elements of an integrated "nexus." "Nowhere in the African continent is the intermix of the fundamental issues involved in the nexus receiving the integrated attention which ECA will give it," says Mr. K.Y. Amoako, the ECA's Executive Secretary.

During the last 15 years, many African countries were "preoccupied with the removal of inappropriate policies involving internal market decontrol, better management of extension and credit systems, and the restructuring and reorientation of agricultural institutions and infrastructures," says Mrs. Makinwa-Adebusoye. Although these initiatives led to "pockets of good performance," in per capita terms, food production in Africa declined by 23 per cent over the last quarter-century, as Africa's population has been growing rapidly. "With the existing traditional low-input levels of production," she emphasizes, "many African countries now find it difficult to feed this growing population." While shifting and long-fallow cultivation practices and seasonal pastoralism were appropriate under conditions of slow population growth, abundant land and limited capital and technical knowledge, such methods are "no longer adequate."

Previously, the ECA had separate divisions on agriculture (jointly operated with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization), population and natural resources. But following wide-ranging discussions with other UN agencies, government experts, non-governmental organizations and the private sector, the ECA decided to bring together into one division its staff from the three old divisions. This was approved by African ministers responsible for economic and social development and planning meeting in Addis Ababa, the ECA's headquarters, in May 1996, and Mrs. Makinwa-Adebusoye, a Harvard Ph.D graduate in population science with considerable experience in food security and the environment, was named to head the new division.

The division, says Mrs. Makinwa-Adebusoye, is "focusing its energies on information collection and dissemination, the identification of best practices now emerging in some food security and sustainable development initiatives in Africa, as well as on advocacy of sound policy with the Commission's member states." The aim is to facilitate "three essential transitions in Africa: the transition to more effective and sustainable land use; the demographic transition; and the transition to environmental conservation." She adds that "partnership and collaboration with all stakeholders in these transitions will be essential and networking will be encouraged, with appropriate emphasis on capacity building."

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