Annan to head Gates group to boost Africa food

Cape Town, June 15: Former UN chief Kofi Annan said he would head a new green group bankrolled by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates to help reverse Africa's declining food production and double output.

''I am honoured today to take up this important post and join with my fellow Africans in a new effort to comprehensively tackle the challenges holding back hundreds millions of small-scale farmers in Africa,'' Annan told a news briefing yesterday The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa said Annan would be its first chairman.

The Alliance was set up last year with an initial 150 million dollar grant from the Bill&Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

The group, which is an African initiative, will help small-scale farmers and their families across Africa fight poverty and hunger through sustainable increases in farm productivity and incomes from its base in Nairobi, Kenya.

Annan said the group will work with governments and farmers to strengthen local and regional agricultural markets, improve irrigation, soil health and training for farmers, and support the development of new seed systems better equipped to cope with the harsh African climate.

He said the group would not seek to spearhead the use of genetically modified seeds, which have been a controversial subject in some African countries, but would work to boost disease resistance of existing seeds on the continent.

''We are going to rely on varieties available in Africa and not rely on genetically modified seeds,'' he said at the World Economic Forum for Africa in Cape Town.

''I hope in 10-20 years it will be possible to double if not triple, agricultural productivity. It is not just a dream, it is a dream that will be backed up with action,'' he said.

The Alliance said it backed the vision laid out in the African Union's Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), which seeks a 6 per cent annual growth in food production by 2015.

The group said it will try to replicate farms changes that boosted agricultural productivity in Asia and Latin America.

During his tenure at the United Nations, Annan often drew attention to the link between Africa's failing agriculture systems and its persistent hunger and poverty.

In the past five years alone, the number of underweight children in Africa has risen by about 12 per cent, he said.

Annan, a Ghanaian, last year ended a 10-year term as UN secretary-general.

Reuters >