This originally appeared on the Feed the Future Blog.

Forty years ago, Africa was exporting food. Today, it is a net food importer. But there’s no reason African countries can’t achieve greater growth in the agriculture sector to lift their people out of poverty and contribute to global food security.

By 2050, it is projected that we’ll need to increase food production by up to 60 percent to meet the growing world population’s demand for food. And we’ll have to do so with less water and potentially less land than we have now. Enter Africa—with 60 percent of the world’s uncultivated arable land, largely farming-based economies, and vast natural resource endowments, Africa has the potential to feed not only itself, but the world.

Progress in the most impoverished parts of our world creates food stability and new markets. Photo credit: USAID

In 2003, African nations came together under a common vision to increase Africa’s growth, development, and participation in the global economy through agriculture-led development. The African Union’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program was born out of this vision—a program aimed at improving economic growth and food security by addressing key policy and capacity issues affecting the agricultural sector and by increasing government spending on agriculture by 10 percent and agricultural productivity by six percent in each country. CAADP, as it is called, would reverse underinvestment in agriculture and put Africa on a new course toward sustainable development and a greater role in the global economy.

The world followed suit in 2009, urged on by food price spikes in 2007 and 2008 that threatened global gains in poverty reduction. Recognizing the urgency of food security, G8 leaders, led by U.S. President Barack Obama, committed to increasing investments in agriculture, which had steadily dropped in past years.

What followed was a new way of doing development, driven by countries themselves rather than donors, and embodied in the Rome Principles for Sustainable Development. CAADP itself is a country-led and country-owned process. Donor commitments, such as ours, follow the lead of African countries and the priorities they’ve set for achieving their own agricultural development and food security.

So far, more than 20 countries in Africa have developed country-owned investment plans that involve not just government ministries but a broad collection of local stakeholders including the private sector and civil society. One of the tremendous innovations of CAADP, as a regional platform, is the process of peer review of these plans, encouraging learning across the continent that ultimately improves the quality of the plans.

We’ve seen tremendous advances in the way development is being done through CAADP, such that other regions outside of Africa have taken up the process. And we’re thrilled to have been a part of a broader donor network supporting the growth of CAADP and building our own plans for investment around strategic priorities outlined by the countries, both through the U.S. Government’s Feed the Future initiative and the G8 New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. The sustainability of our programs depends on having country ownership so we’ve built our approach to food security in Africa around CAADP.

This week, I traveled to Ethiopia for the annual CAADP Partnership Platform meeting. This year’s meeting emphasized a number of the themes we stressed last year in the New Alliance: policy actions to stimulate greater private investment in agriculture and mutual accountability for results. [continued]

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