EuropAfrica: Terre Contadine: Advancing African Agriculture 2008

Advancing African Agriculture 2008

On 24 July 2007 the European Commission took the important step of publishing a communication to the Council and the European Parliament entitled “Advancing African Agriculture (AAA): proposal for continental and regional level cooperation on agricultural development in Africa”.

This objective was to provide strategic guidance for the allocation of European Development Fund (EDF) and other EC resources and to serve as a reference document for member states in order to facilitate overall coordination of European support for African agriculture

In reviewing the AAA, European civil society actors (including some partners of the EuropAfrica Campaign), while concurring with the importance of this initiative, pointed to some aspects which appeared to receive inadequate emphasis, including:

-    the fundamental role of multifunctional family-based agriculture;
-    the priority for building and protecting small-scale food producers’ access to local, national and regional agricultural markets;
-    effective participation of the social actors, especially farmers organisations, in developing key regional agricultural policies and building on the experience and partnerships of European CSOs with African farmers’ organizations.

In late November 2007 European civil society organizations (CSOs) brought these concerns to the attention of the Commission and proposed to make an autonomous contribution to monitoring the impact of the AAA proposal in the form of a “monitoring exercise” in close consultation with African farmers’ organizations and other African CSOs. This initiative was welcomed by DG Development.

In October 2008 a monitoring document (with the contribution of several European NGOs including some EuropAfrica Campaign’s partners) was presented as the result of a first, experimental exercise, aimed at highlighting some of the principal issues and the context within which AAA is located (in annex you find a résumé of the monitoring document).

The 2008 monitoring exercise culminated in an EU-CSO dialogue co-organized with DG Development in Brussels on 2 February 2009 that proved possible, with very few resources, to carry out a solid initial monitoring exercise thanks to the involvement of a good number of organizations.

Today the working group is working on the 2009 work plan; the list of issues for the 2009 CSO monitoring exercise on “Advancing African Agriculture” is:
1) Access to land/land reform with a special focus on land grabbing.
2) Food Facility
3) The external effects of CAP