The new emergency plan of the African Development Bank to prevent a food crisis in Africa, of 1.5 billion dollars, will distribute new technologies that allow crops to be grown even in drought conditions, said a vice president of the institution. Writes the Lusa news agency.

The AfDB announced last week a $1.5 billion African Emergency Food Production Plan that will benefit 20 million farmers with seeds and fertilizers, as well as other agricultural inputs to produce 38 million tons of food, worth $12 billion

According to the source, this will include 11 million tons of wheat, 18 million tons of corn, six million tons of rice, and 2.5 million tons of soybeans.

Beth Dunford recalled that the war in Ukraine has left the African continent with an "unacceptable level of food insecurity, which is increasing."

"Millions of Africans go to bed hungry every night," and this is partly because the war "has exposed the vulnerability of the African continent to very expensive imports to supply very basic needs," he told Lusa.

The prices of major staples rose by 20 to 50%, which obviously hits the poorest the hardest, while fertilizers rose by 200 to 300%, he recalled.

Also quoted by the portal, the banker said that this is not the first time that Africa faces a food crisis and, although it may seem more serious because the continent was still recovering from the pandemic, the current crisis has a particularity. It comes at a time when much has been invested in agriculture and there are technologies that did not exist before.

"I'm talking about climate-adapted seeds that didn't exist. These technologies do exist, but they're not reaching farmers at scale," Dunford said, explaining that the Technologies for Africa's Agricultural Transformation (TTAA) program is working to change that.

Using the $1.5 billion plan, ADB hopes to produce 38 million tons of food, Dunford said, when the war in Ukraine has left a shortfall of 30 million.

The banker added that all African countries are eligible to use the facility, and the ADB is already accepting requests from Governments.

"The mechanism has just been launched and we are working on it right now (...). We are launching it very, very quickly, using very fast disbursement methods to get this assistance to the governments that really need it now," he said.

Although it will not produce immediate results, for that there are the humanitarian organizations that provide food assistance, the mechanism will produce them over the next four agricultural seasons.

"It will not be in the immediate term, but in the short and medium term, laying the groundwork for the long term," he said.

The goal, he stressed, is to "lay the foundations for that transformation of agriculture" that the ADB is seeking in Africa.

Agriculture is one of the bets of the ADB, whose president, Akinwumi Adesina, believes that the continent has the potential to become the solution to the global food crisis.

The responsible defends a modern agriculture, with appropriate technology, productivity, and framed with the necessary infrastructures, roads, energy, irrigation, and logistics.

Source: Lusa