By Dr. Agnes Kalibata, President, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa

Here’s a deliberately provocative question to consider in the run-up to this year’s Global Food Security Symposium in Washington. Is focusing intently on food security the fastest way to achieve…food security?

I ask this only because looking at agriculture through the lens of food security sometimes narrows the conversation to issues of hunger and malnutrition. Make no mistake about it, the fundamental role of agriculture is to provide sufficient quantities of affordable, nutritious food, something currently lacking in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where I am from.

But what drives the great agriculture systems of today? Is it a quest for food security or the lure of economic opportunity? For example, there is a renaissance in smallholder agriculture underway in the United States because of the economic opportunity in satisfying growing consumer demand for locally grown produce.

When I travel across Africa today, I see the biggest gains in food production occurring in response to economic opportunity. That fills me with optimism, and not just because it has major implications for the fight against hunger. It’s important because Africans need agriculture to do much more than provide food security: they also need agriculture to provide a strong foundation for generating jobs and income, particularly for impoverished people.

To achieve this, we need investments and innovations on the farm and in the market place so that agriculture can do for Africa what it has done in many other parts of the world. 

What’s encouraging is that if you look around sub-Saharan Africa today, we are seeing a growing consensus that agriculture systems function best when there are strong economic incentives that attract private sector investment. Look at all of the activity around cassava in Africa today. A critical food staple that can grow even in harsh conditions, cassava is being transformed into a major money maker.

In Mozambique and Ghana, thousands of smallholder farmers have a new source of income growing cassava to supply breweries that produce new commercial varieties of cassava beer. In Nigeria and Malawi, cassava is being processed into high quality cassava flour and marketed as an alternative to costly imports of wheat flour. In Malawi, it helped revive local bakeries that were floundering due to the high cost of wheat flour.

There are even efforts underway to use cassava as an industrial product that can help fuel the development of a local paperboard and plywood manufacturing industry.

Note that not all of these opportunities involve producing cassava for food. But they all help produce income and employment for people who are most likely to suffer from hunger. Today, some 70 percent of Africans work in some aspect of agriculture, and that’s where you also find the vast majority of the millions of Africans who still suffer from malnutrition.  The efforts to develop new markets for cassava are expected to generate close to $200 million in additional income, mainly for smallholder farmers and small, local cassava processing operations. Putting money in their pockets is the fastest way to get more nutritious food on their tables.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe food security has been an incredibly important rallying point for attracting international attention to the potential of African agriculture. But food security is just one of many things to be gained by investing in Africa’s food systems. Perhaps the invitation to this year’s symposium should say “come for the food security, but stay for the economic opportunity.”

Follow Dr. Kalibata and AGRA on Twitter: @Agnes_Kalibata and @AGRAAlliance