Agriculture, food security, AfCFTA critical to Africa’s post-COVID-19 recovery: AEC panelists

The African Development Bank has provided much-needed financial and technical assistance to the sector, including small scale agribusinesses.

The agriculture sector is among the most vulnerable. Agriculture is important not only for food security issues but also for inter-regional food integration," African Development Bank (AfDB.org) Director of Macroeconomic Policy, Forecasting and Research, Hanan Morsy, said during a news conference on the opening day of the African Economic Conference 2020.

"We see this as an area that needs particular support, an area of opportunity going forward to increase inter-regional integration and to increase resilience against external shocks," Morsy noted.

The African Development Bank has provided much-needed financial and technical assistance to the sector, including small scale agribusinesses. In June 2020, the Bank launched the Feed Africa Response to COVID-19 (FAREC), a strategic roadmap to safeguard food security against the pandemic's impact by supporting agriculture and creating regional food self-sufficiency.

The three-day annual conference, which opened Tuesday was hosted virtually. It is being organized by the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), the African Development Bank, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), under the theme, "Africa beyond COVID-19: Accelerating towards inclusive sustainable development."

Earlier, during a high-level panel session titled Africa beyond COVID-19: How to move towards inclusive and sustainable development, participants proposed tapping renewable sources of energy, adopting new technologies, and leveraging the African Free Trade Agreement as some of the ways African countries are working to build back better from the COVID-19 crisis.