The Malabo Declaration and agenda 2063: making climate smart agriculture real with conservation agriculture in Africa.

Abstract

Abstract The African Union (AU) has provided the vision and even a hint of the future through Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want, to be achieved, in part, through accelerated agricultural growth and transformation, leading to shared prosperity and improved livelihoods. The promulgation is contained in the Malabo Declaration of the AU Summit held in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, in June 2014. Attaining the ambitious commitments of ending hunger, doubling productivity, halving post-harvest losses and poverty, enhancing resilience in livelihoods and production systems to climate variability and other shocks, and reducing child stunting to 10% and numbers of underweight children to 5% by 2025 requires a definition of the strategies and the operative paradigms. The Declaration also calls for African agriculture to become climate smart. This chapter presents the strategic positioning of Conservation Agriculture (CA) in making climate smart agriculture (CSA) real in Africa and harnessing partnerships, informed by science and analyses of lessons from past interventions. We conclude that investing US$50 per household, in a capacity development programme in CA for 25 million households, has the potential to increase land productivity, produce food surpluses and transform livelihoods, thus attaining the Malabo Declaration targets. The investment in and adoption of CA-based CSA to that magnitude will not only move Africa's agriculture to a new level, where a significant proportion of agricultural land is managed with CA systems, but also supply competitively priced raw materials for transformative industrial and economic growth in Africa.