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A pro-poor agricultural development

Excellencies, Commissioners, ladies and gentlemen

First let me thank you for this opportunity to address the challenges of youth and employment in Africa. Let me go straight to my comments.

I do agree that it is important to promote private sector development in Africa. However, I fear the draft focus too narrowly on promoting enterprise and business development and will point to three important areas that I believe should be included in the analysis and in the initiatives that we recommend.

The first initiative that I believe we should support is pro-poor agricultural development. Definitely farmers are within the private sector, and should be treated as such and there is in the draft a focus on agricultural production for processing and export. However, a key challenge for Africa, as stressed by several commissioners and by the World Bank, is strengthening small-holder agriculture and rural communities where more than 2/3 of the Africans live and work. This challenge is critical also to enhance employment possibilities for women and youth and to tackle the food crisis and the climate crisis. Agricultural development translates into food production, growth, employment both in agriculture and in rural enterprises and most importantly it translates strongly into less poverty. To do this we must tackle the major obstacles that farmers face - lack of access to markets, technology, innovation, information and infrastructure. This has been the strategy behind the growth success of countries like China and South Korea - and it has been so for Denmark. It is becoming the strategy for growth and employment in many African countries - just see the recent success of Malawi. This should be supported.

So I would propose that this is reflected not only in the introduction but in the initiatives that we support. Elements could be:

• Country based schemes to increase the availability and accessibility of inputs for instance vouchers or subsidies for seeds and fertilizers targeted towards the poorest farmers both women and men.
• A substantial increase in research and extension in pro-poor, job creating and sustainable agricultural production systems. Supporting African and international agricultural research networks, institutions - creating center’s of excellence.
• Land reforms that improve the distribution of land and strengthens private ownership of land not least for women. It could be support to studies, initiatives and policy dialogues on the experiences of land reforms in Africa and concrete steps to implement land reforms.
• Institutional and management reforms of waters systems, water user’s associations, participatory watershed management and community-based rain water harvesting. Support for research on water-saving and yield-improving technologies - also to adopt to climate change.
• Promote well-targeted and innovative cost-effective crop-insurance policies to protect farmers from drastic supply and price shocks - and insurance schemes for lending to farmers..
• Promote rural infrastructure, institutions and not least rural education to support rural enterprises.

The second major topic I would like to see included is to strengthen the civil society for sustainable growth.

I believe we must take an initiative to strengthen civil society organisations and promote cooperation between the private sector and civil society. This will foster entrepreneurship. A survey done by 200 Danish company managers showed that almost 80% of them had been working in civil society organisations for more than four years. The civil society breads entrepreneurship and good managers. Civil society also builds social capital and has been quoted as the key reason for Northern Italy to be so rich and southern Italy relatively much poorer.

A strong civil society is vital to build good governance, which again is vital for private sector development. A strong civil society will ensure pro-poor growth strategies including a stronger focus on gender equality, improvements in health and education services and improved environmental awareness and policies.

I will stress the importance of organizing women - and young women - and in light of our focus on youth an important initiative is to support and promote the involvement of youth and youth organisations in policy formulation and implementation. Here I will strongly support the voice you heard from the African Youth Panel.

Finally it would like to focus on creating not only employment, but promoting decent working conditions in Africa.

We need an initiative that focus on improving working conditions in the private sector in Africa. Promoting basic labour conditions including minimum wages, non-discrimination, safe work environment and HIV/AIDS workplace policies. Working with labour unions is key and promoting tripartite negotiations critical.

A concrete initiative could also be to strengthen corporate social responsibility for companies investing in Africa. Here many companies - for instance within coffee and cocoa production - have shown strong commitment to corporate social responsibility and positive results. We must ensure that the jobs created in Africa and for the young people in Africa, create real benefits for the people, the workers and for the poor.

These where my three comments to the synopsis:

• Pro-poor agricultural development
• Civil Society involvement - not least of youth organisations.
• Promoting decent work conditions.

For each of these I would propose that we develop concrete initiatives.

Thank you.

Christian Friis Bach, Dan Church Aid