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Africa must invest now to harness future agricultural technologies

By Ousmane Badiane, IFPRI. Cross-posted from IFPRI.org; this post first appeared on the Malabo Montpellier Panel blog.

The latest series of updated country alerts from FEWS Net provides food security and food production updates for several countries in Africa south of the Sahara.

Vulnerability to poverty – the risk of falling into poverty in the future – remains a challenge in developing countries for researchers and policymakers alike. While reducing populations’ vulnerability to shocks that could drive them into poverty is clearly an important step in improving well-being, measuring and quantifying vulnerability is complex and is often further complicated by a lack of accurate data.

A diverse and nutrient-dense diet is key in the fight against malnutrition. However, in many developing countries, poor households are unable to afford an adequately nutritious diet. A recent study by Fantu Bachewe , Kalle Hirvonen , Bart Minten , and Feiruz Yimer of IFPRI’s Ethiopia Strategy Support Program (ESSP) looks at the rising prices of non-staple foods over the past ten years in Ethiopia, where children eat the least diverse diets in all of Africa south of the Sahara and suffer from stunted growth as a result.

This blog originally appeared in the AGRODEP Bulletin .

By Antoine Bouët , Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI

Smallholder farmers play a crucial role in global food security. However, smallholders also often do not meet their production potential, engaging in subsistence-level agriculture instead of producing excess outputs to then sell at market. Such farmers frequently do not have access to the capital they need to reach this higher level of production, nor are they trained in the skills required to successfully manage what is in effect a small business.