Africa-Press – Ethiopia. AUC Director of Agriculture and Rural Development Godfrey Bahiigwa has called on global investors to engage in Africa’s close to trillion USD worth of business opportunities in the agricultural sector.
The director said that there is huge money to be made from the agricultural sector in the continent.
There are very many opportunities in Africa’s agriculture, literally at every node of the value chain, he added.
“There is money to be made and there are estimates that Africa’s agribusiness opportunity is equivalent to around one trillion USD. That is the potential for Africa’s agribusiness. So, there is a lot of money to be made by the private sector.”
He stressed that there is a lot of money to be made by the private sector, but they have to identify which node in the private sector they can invest in. There are lots of business opportunities, including in food production ,value addition, and food transport.
Africa can expand and increase food production not only by increasing both the amount of land under cultivation but also by increasing output by unit of land, the director noted.
“The opportunity is there for the private sector to come to Africa and utilize resources that are abundant to produce fertilizers on this continent and sell them to AU member states to support our farmers and raise productivity.”
At the moment, Africa’s fertilizer consumption is around 18-20 kg per hectare per annum, Bahiigwa stated, adding that although the continent put in place a target of 50 kg per hectare in 2006 it has not yet met the target after 17 years.
According to him, “the world average fertilizer is around 135 kg per hectare per annum.
Since Africa is far below the global average, there is a huge opportunity for fertilizer companies to invest in the sector, he elaborated.
“Africa has the potential to feed itself and even the world as 60 percent of the remaining arable land is in the continent.”
However, currently the continent imports more than 50 billion USD worth of food from the rest of the world, Bahiigwa pointed out.
Rather than exporting jobs to the rest of the world when we have unemployed youth on this continent, “we can create jobs on this continent while feeding ourselves instead of importing from the rest of the world and donating jobs and incomes that could stay on the African continent.”
He further underscored that the challenge for all of us is to put in place a system that will feed over 2 billion people by 2025.
In a bid to address that market gap and challenge, availing the best seed is also vital thus creating huge opportunity for the private sector to invest in seed production in Africa.
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