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The continent has the chance to shape its agricultural development differently, says Dr Robin R. Sanders.
Can sub Saharan Africa be the next bread basket for the world and help to address global food security issues?
The answer is yes; the challenge is how.
Sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the developing world have a key role to play in deciding, shaping and leading food security policy for the coming decades. Why? Because of several key indicators that should not be either underestimated or overlooked: population, economic growth, water and land use in sub-Saharan Africa – what I like to call key impact indicators on food availability.
Sub-Saharan Africa has an opportunity to do things differently and earlier on its development and modernization life, something that few other world regions have today outside of Latin America.
Continue reading Raising sub-Saharan Africa’s profile on global food security issues (part one)
The UK has imported food for well over a thousand years. During the industrial revolution, we lost self-sufficiency in basic foodstuffs and have never regained it.
We have always been able to buy food from elsewhere and the global food market has become so efficient that the proportion of UK average income spent on food has fallen from 33% in 1957 to 15% in 2006. If food is cheap, reliable, safe and globally abundant, why should the UK worry about local production?
In my view, there are three main reasons why we should not assume that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.
Continue reading Why should the UK grow food?
