Agribusiness is Africa’s Solution to poverty

The 6th edition of the annual meeting of the Africa Economic Zones Organization (AEZO) was held in Accra, Ghana on Thursday, November 25, 2021.

The conference was organized under the theme “Connecting African Special Economic zones To Global Value Chains At The Era Of The African Free Trade Area (AfCFTA)” and held in partnership with the Ghana Free Zones Authority (GFZA) and the African Continental Free Trade Area Secretariat (AfCFTA) with the contribution of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and African Development Bank (AfDB).

Senior Special Adviser to the President on industrialization, Professor. Oyebanji Oyelaran-Oyeyinka was optimistic that agribusiness will help in eradicating poverty in Africa.

According to him, agriculture has the potential to contribute to a nation’s economy, saying “if agriculture will play its role as it’s supposed to be we need to raise the game by raising productivity, raising the skills of farmers into ecosystems and these are some of the objectives from us at African bank is championing”.

He further indicated; “What the bank is doing is to ensure that we modernize our agriculture sector to move from the old way of farming into modernized farming system, so that is the reason why we are here on this year edition of Africa Economic Zones Organization (AEZO) to talk about Agribusiness in Africa.

“Going forward, we are going to move from our forefathers type of agriculture into Agrictech by getting young people into productivity because there is huge potential for Africa in agribusiness if we move up to value change and change the narrative.”

If we want to solve the poverty problem in African the solution is Agribusiness. We can achieve this by bringing farmers into the modernized ecosystem and also by raising their living standards and ensuring they achieve a better quality of life…Poor farmers are our big target,” he added.