Farming First

As leaders gather in Kigali for the Africa Food Systems Forum, CGIAR’s Ismahane Elouafi argues that Africa must connect proven agricultural innovation with the finance, partnerships and delivery systems needed to achieve impact at scale. As leaders gather in Kigali for the Africa Food Systems Forum, they face an urgent question: why do so many proven agricultural innovations still fail to reach the farmers and communities that need them most?

Rangelands Rising calls on investors and governments to recognise the world’s largest overlooked landscape and to back 500 million pastoralists who sustain it. Rangelands cover more than half the planet’s land surface, hold a third of its key biodiversity areas and generate benefits worth an estimated US$21–47 trillion a year (up to US$5,000 per hectare). Yet these landscapes remain almost invisible to the people who finance and govern the natural world.

Jordan’s agricultural sector has long demonstrated resilience and innovation despite limited natural resources and challenging climatic conditions. As the country continues to strengthen food security and agricultural sustainability, farmers are increasingly seeking solutions that protect crops while preserving soil, water, and biodiversity. One promising option is biopesticides.

When I first began working with pastoralist communities in the drylands of the Horn of Africa, the challenge before us was not only how to improve production. It was how to protect the animals, assets, and dignity on which families depended when drought came. Answering it, I came to see, would depend on taking risk-informed finance to the people who need it most. For pastoralists, livestock are not simply an economic asset. They are food, income, savings, identity, and the foundation of social life.

The onset of a strong El Niño affects global aquaculture by undermining the largest global producer of fishmeal and fish oil: Peru’s anchoveta (anchovy) fishery. Smallholder aquaculture producers, particularly in developing contexts, are especially vulnerable to feed price volatility, since feed is typically a farmer’s highest operational cost. That exposure is one reason for growing interest in alternatives such as algal oil.

For much of modern agriculture, success has been measured by a simple metric: how much can we produce from every hectare? That ambition has transformed global food production. Better genetics, improved agronomy and advances in plant breeding have helped farmers feed a growing population for decades. But the conditions those crops were bred for are quickly changing.

Every year, unsafe food takes a devastating toll on Africa’s people and economies. Foodborne illnesses and hazards cause an estimated 137,000 deaths and 91 million cases of acute illness annually across the continent, disproportionately affecting children under five. Yet despite these staggering numbers, investments in food safety systems remain inadequate, fragmented, and under-prioritised.

There is a Yoruba song my grandfather used to sing. It speaks of the maize grain (Erire ni T ‘Agbado) that leaves the village as a seed and returns as a full ear with shiny hair (corn silk). As a child growing up in Benin, I did not know that this image would define my scientific career. Today, working at the intersection of two continents, based in Mexico, rooted in West Africa, I still carry that song. And I still ask the question it poses: what happens between the seed and the full ear?

Agricultural leaders, government representatives, agripreneurs, scientists and farmers from across Africa and around the world are gathering in Nairobi this week for DialogueNEXT in Africa, a high-level event to explore and accelerate agri-tech innovations for the continent. Hosted by the World Food Prize Foundation, the conference will focus on how to seize the opportunity of feeding a continent whose population will represent more than one in four people on the planet by 2050.

Agriculture is facing unprecedented pressure from rising food demand driven by population growth, while climate change, land degradation, and emerging crop diseases continue to threaten productivity. Around the world, farmers are tasked with producing more food, using fewer resources and under increasingly unpredictable conditions.