IMF Says Food Crisis Good Opportunity For Cameroon

By Christopher Jator Njechu

International Monetary Fund, IMF, Special Adviser for Africa, Eugene Nyambal, has said the current food crisis in the country is an opportunity for the government to regain its food self-sufficiency.

Cameroon can rely on  its own food production 

Nyambal said Cameroonian authorities should be able to use the challenge to produce and depend on locally produced foodstuff.To him, importation measures must be precautionary. But food sovereignty and self-sufficiency is good.

The IMF official urged Africa to rethink of providing itself with an opportunity for development and exhort subsidising farm inputs and consumption of locally produced food.
The financial expert, who is also author of Afrique: Les Voies de Prosperite,(Africa: Ways and Means To Prosper) said the February strike in Cameroon, like in other parts of Africa, was not a surprise to him.

Hear him: "They are a reflection of the predictions and main conclusions of my book on the loss of impetus by the development policies that have been implemented for some decades now. Africans' standard of living is currently subject to a triple pressure.

Firstly, there is an imported inflation, which is attributed to food dependency. Unlike the other continents, Africa has not succeeded in linking up its cities to its countrysides so that development can kick off.

"The purchasing power of major African cities goes to sustain the farmers of other continents while African countrysides are being deserted because of the absence of regular incomes. It is an unbearable situation."

"Secondly, Africans are victims of domestic inflation, which is linked to the reinforcement of the situation of private incomes that started in the 1990s when the state disengaged itself from sectors such as water, electricity or telecommunications without setting up an adequate regulatory environment.

"Finally, the rise in the cost of living is taking place in a context where economic and social policies are generating little growth and employment."During a chat with The Post in Yaounde recently, the IMF official said the current inflation cycle may be a long-lasting one, with the risk of extreme hunger on the entire continent.

"The surge in the prices of basic commodities is not a temporary phenomenon. It is a structural crisis that requires Africans to radically change their policies and behavioural patterns. Africans have to learn again to consume what they produce. They will have no excuse if they are hard hit by famine.

How can it be explained that Africa is unable to feed its population despite the fact that it is the continent with the highest percentage of rural population? The increase in prices of agricultural produce is linked to the changes in world economy.

"With regard to supply, we can cite oil price hikes, which contribute to the addition of the cost of agricultural and transportation inputs as well as the bad weather conditions in leading rice and wheat producing countries.

With regard to demand, we may cite the increases in consumption in emerging countries like China and India, the misappropriation of part of the agricultural production to manufacture bio-fuel in the US and Europe, and speculations on international capital markets with a view to protecting themselves against a drop in the dollar."

Concerning its impact, The Post learnt that all African countries are not in the same boat. Oil producing countries will simply have to grapple with an increase in budgetary expenditures, while poor countries will need more assistance from the international community to avert situations of famine.

Comments

[Fonngang]

About Mr Nyambal's book and the IMF,
I have never read the book. It seems I don't need to because it simply highlights what is certainly the obvious so far as developmental issues are concerned.
At the conclusion of the WFP summit in Rome this month a joint declaration emphasised on the need for Africa to boost domestic food supply.
When the UN organises meetings where serious global issues are discussed one would be expectiing them to come up with decisions or solutions which must be really not only novel but also revolutionary. Does it take a whole UN and the minds of the leaders of the whole world to recognise that African food supply should and can be boosted? In Cameroon the former President Ahmadou Ahidjo made as his conerstone domestic policy to improve on agriculture from the subsistence level to commercial farming. That was in the seventies. It was termed GREEN REVOLUTION. It worked wonders and even decades after this irreponsible fellow called Paul Biya who suceeded him abandoned the policy, Cameroonians would have been worse off if not of the effects of the GREEN REVOLUTION that are still lingering today.
Did it need a food crises and rioting to know that food insufficincy and then poverty can be alleviated by simply increasing food supply without the UN even spending a quater of what it does now on food aid? Mr Nyambal rightly mentioned the absence of roads connecting the rural farming communities to urban centers where farmers could sell crops and earn some badly needed money. In Anglophone Cameroon in the seventies, those type of roads were called FARM TO MARKET ROADS. Is it a new idea to the UN and to Mr Nyambal?
Subsistence farming in most of Africa was supposed (as it did before) to form the backbone of what should be AFRICAN TRADITIONAL AGRO ECONOMY. This is when Africans majority of whom are still in rural areas as they were before independence, survived from subsitence farming. Global food trends should have very insignificant effect on domestic food supply in Afrcan countries. If this economy had been sustained, encouraged as Ahidjo did, and improved upon, most of Africa would not be poor. With a good road network, what would it have taken for food to be transported from the abundance of the evergreen equatorial regions of Africa to the arid areas of the Niger Mali, Bourkina Fasso etc. which frequently suffer from droughts? Anybody who can feed hinself can never be considered poor. What makes people controlling these big organisations take simple situations and complcate it with so much high sounding language only to arrive at a simple solution which had been there all along?
What is so difficult asking the developed countries to stop giving food aid to Africa and instead improve on the distribution methods like good road networks to and from the rural areas? Is there no policy the UN can come up with that can encourage governments to improve on their internal road neworks just as they have succeeded to put a stop to the slaughter of certain wild animals?
Have a nice day
Fon