The FAO has set up a programme entitled “Urban Food Supply and Distribution” in several African towns in an aim to support urban and peri-urban agriculture, and help them fight famine and malnutrition more efficiently.
Senegal, Gabon, Mozambique, Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, Egypt, Mali and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are part of this programme. In these countries, the FAO is helping three towns to transform 800 hectares of urban land into vegetable gardens in an aim to produce fresh vegetables and supply extra income to 16,000 families, which means about 80,000 people.
The programme, initiated by the FAO, is essential, and WOAgri shares its objectives: to reintroduce a link between towns and rural areas, to stop the rural exodus, which causes the expansion of megalopolises, and to make agriculture central to the DCs’ development strategy.
However this is not a sufficient response to the challenges facing the DCs. Demographic projections issued by the World Bank are in fact alarming: by 2030, nearly 85% of the world population will live in developing countries, 15% of which will be in the least developed countries. Urbanization will increase drastically in the poorest regions, in Asia and Africa. Thus, in 2030, there will be 23 towns in the world with a population of more than 10 million inhabitants, and 19 of them will be in DCs. The population of Lagos, the town with the highest number of inhabitants in Nigeria, will have increased from 13.4 million to 23 million between 2000 and 2015.
And transport infrastructures, which make the transport of perishable products towards towns impossible, will not be adequate for the future demands of urban populations.
This is why only a cooperation on an international scale to initiate world governance for agriculture, as endorsed by WOAgri, will enable us to rise to these challenges. Its mission will be to:
> develop agriculture on a local and regional level.
> encourage and organize intra-regional exchanges through regional agricultural policies.
> enable farmers in DCs to access world and regional markets by investment in infrastructures.
> define profitable prices that enable farmers to make a living from what they produce.
> regulate the liberalization of international agricultural exchanges so that world prices reflect cost and supply and demand structures.
This is how WOAgri will promote the development of agriculture on a local and regional level, fight against famine, and curb the rural exodus that is increasing populations in megalopolises.
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