The African Union’s Extraordinary Summit, held from January 9th to 11th, 2025, aimed to advance agricultural transformation across the continent. The summit focused on boosting agricultural productivity, increasing public investment in agriculture, and fostering economic growth through agriculture-led development. However, despite these lofty objectives, the summit left little hope for meaningful progress in addressing Africa’s food security challenges.
The summit was convened to discuss the implementation of a 10-year agricultural program, running from 2026 to 2035, designed to tackle food insecurity, poverty, and the continent’s reliance on food imports. Over 280 million Africans currently suffer from chronic hunger, and the continent’s food systems struggle to meet the rising demand due to factors such as climate change, conflicts, rapid population growth, and economic disruptions. The program aims to promote climate-resilient agriculture, improve infrastructure, reduce food waste, and enhance regional trade in agricultural goods.
Despite the rich potential of African soils, abundant arable land, and a significant portion of the population engaged in agriculture, the continent spends up to US$100 billion annually on food imports. The Ugandan Prime Minister, Robinah Nabbanja, expressed concern over this alarming trend and called for concrete proposals to reduce the reliance on imports and ensure Africa can feed itself. This sentiment was echoed by the Commissioner for Agriculture, Rural Development, Blue Economy, and Sustainable Environment at the African Union Commission, who highlighted the importance of the strategy in boosting food production, creating jobs, and building resilient agrifood systems. She emphasized the need for inclusivity, ensuring that women, youth, and marginalized groups have access to resources and equitable participation in the agrifood sector.
However, the summit’s discussions seemed to lack a clear roadmap for achieving these ambitious goals. While there was a strong emphasis on the importance of public investment in agriculture, the focus remained on high-level speeches and theoretical frameworks, with little concrete action. Many African countries continue to prioritize the status quo, allocating substantial portions of their budgets to increase food imports rather than investing in domestic agricultural production.
Ethiopia’s experience with the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) was presented as a model for agricultural investment, with the country having increased its agricultural budget allocation and met the CAADP’s 6% annual growth target. However, such success stories were the exception rather than the rule, and the broader challenge of translating plans into action remained unresolved.
The summit concluded with a call for the immediate implementation of the CAADP Strategy and Action Plan, but the prevailing sense was that the political will to make meaningful changes was lacking. There were calls for advances in technological research, climate-resilient agricultural systems, and agro-industrialization, but without a concrete commitment to addressing the continent’s deep-rooted structural issues, the summit’s outcomes seemed unlikely to lead to the transformative change Africa needs to secure its food future.
In the end, while the summit served as a platform for discussing the importance of agricultural transformation, the lack of tangible commitments and the continued reliance on food imports left little hope for significant progress in the near future. The challenge of achieving sustainable agricultural development across Africa remains daunting, and it will require more than just high-level discussions to overcome the continent’s food security crisis.
