International Conference of Agricultural Economists: A chance to cement India-Africa partnership in food security

It is interesting to note that the last time India hosted this ICAE was in Mysore in 1958, with Jawaharlal Nehru, the then prime minister of India, as the chief guest. If one digs a little deeper, one finds that ICAE actually has its roots in India. The founding president of ICAE was Lord L K Elmhirst, the British agronomist. Rabindranath Tagore cabled Elmhirst at Cornell in the spring of 1921, requesting for a meeting in New York. When they met, Tagore told Elmhirst of his concern for the villages around Santiniketan, north of Calcutta, which seemed to be on the verge of disintegration. He said that he had already acquired a farm in the village of Surul that could be used as a centre for assisting the villages, but had not yet found the appropriate means of doing this. He invited Elmhirst to join him, which Elmhirst agreed to do. He arrived about a year later, bringing with him a promise of financial help from Dorothy Straight, his wife-to-be.

Tagore made clear his attitude to the villages: “If I can free only one or two villages from the bonds of ignorance and weakness, there will be built, on a tiny scale, an ideal for the whole of India . . . Our aim must be to give these few villages complete freedom – education for all, the winds of joy blowing across the village, music and recitations going on, as in the old days…Our people need more than anything else a real scientific training that could inspire in them the courage of experiment and initiative of mind which we lack as a nation.”

From those roots, ICAE has flourished over time. This is perhaps the biggest congregation of agricultural economists committed to world’s food and nutritional security, which is becoming an increasing challenge in the face of climate change and geo-political conflicts. India’s success in ushering in the green revolution and white (milk) revolution is well known. But the African continent is still struggling to overcome food shortages. Nutritional security, especially of children below the age five, still remains a challenge for India and Africa. Given that the African Union was invited to be a permanent member of G20 during India’s Presidency, it opens the gates for India and Africa to learn from global developments in food and agriculture, and also promote South-South collaboration and learning from each other to overcome their food and nutritional security challenges.

In this context, ICAE has a special session where the experiences of 20 major Indian states were compared with 15 African countries from 2004-05 to 2019-20. The two regions have a lot of experiences to share. The findings of this unique study show that: One, high debt service ratios result in lower agricultural spending relative to social protection; two, African countries consistently underfund agriculture compared to Indian states, hampering productivity and efforts to reduce child malnutrition; three, enhancing public spending on agricultural R&D and extension is crucial, as both regions underinvest in these high-return areas; four, the study suggests reforming subsidies and reallocating resources to infrastructure and R&D to boost agricultural growth and improve child nutrition outcomes. Agricultural investment pays off in poverty reduction and saves on social spending. Food hand-outs have their role in food crises but must not impair growth and job creation in rural areas.

At the global level, in its fight against global hunger, the human and financial costs of complacency are alarming. As a result of recent developments – including growing conflicts, the climate crisis and economic slowdowns – and the lack of concerted global action, achieving the established goal of the United Nations of zero hunger by 2030 seems increasingly infeasible. A new study from University of Bonn (ZEF), Germany, and FAO shows that it would require additional investments of $21 billion annually in agriculture and rural areas to end global hunger by 2040.

India’s G20 presidency last year and that of Brazil this year has had good impact in setting the global agenda focusing on food security and ending hunger and presenting for the first time a strategy paper on bioeconomy for G20. This is now followed up by Brazil even more concretely with G20 nations. China too recently launched its bioeconomy strategy. It is commendable that India facilitated on-boarding the African Union to the G20 platform during its presidency.

It is now all the more important to get the South-South collaboration on vibrant mode. The developed countries of G20 can help to solve the problems of food and nutritional security in the Global South by addressing climate change with support for resilience and by sharing science and innovation for food systems transformation. This is what Africa and South Asia, that together account for almost 3 billion people on this planet, can call for. The investment in climate resilience requires adaptation, mitigation and system transformation, the latter is facilitated by building the bioeconomy which would benefit from global investments, including the Global Climate Fund. The sequence of G20 presidencies over these four years 2022–25 – Indonesia, India, Brazil and next year South Africa – shows indications of change in governance of food systems. A well-functioning global food system is mainly in the interest of the Global South. It shows when they are in the driver’s seats.

We hope the Indian Prime Minister will take this agenda of the south in G20, and also provide dynamism in agri-food relations between Africa and India for the common good of almost one third of humanity.

Braun is former President of International Association of Agriculture Economists, Director General of International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and currently with ZEF. Gulati is Distinguished Professor at ICRIER. Views are personal