Food and Nutrition Security: Challenges and Opportunities for Enhancing the Emerging Bio Economies in Africa

Abstract

Achieving sustainable food security in Africa is one of the main challenges facing African governments and the international community. The current food crisis and ongoing chronic hunger problems clearly demonstrate that millions of people on the continent are dangerously vulnerable to economic, political and climatic shocks that threaten food availability and accessibility. Many African countries are lucky enough to be endowed with an abundant spread of natural resources that includes approximately 60% of the world’s arable land, vast freshwater and marine reserves plus the significant potential for harnessing solar energy. However, resources are unevenly distributed and agro-ecological niches and biomass conditions vary widely across the continent because of constraints on water, land, infrastructure and markets. At the heart of the strategies to build resilience and tackle food insecurity is the need for effective institutional and policy frameworks that can support local innovations while taking into account the biophysical, social and economic constraints within which rural livelihoods operate. A bioeconomy is an ideal that brings together the commercial activity surrounding the use of renewable biological resources such as crops, forests, animals and micro-organisms (like bacteria) to solve challenges related to food, health, environmental protection, energy and industrial processes. In Africa, a bioeconomy has the potential to reinnovate primary production especially in agriculture, the backbone of most economies in the region, and also in sectors like aquaculture, forestry, health and industry. Therefore, adopting a bioeconomy development model, with its components of harnessing biosciences knowledge, technology generation, transfer and uptake, leading to sustainable bioinnovations and accompanying products and services. This paper collates the information on food and nutrition and support the view that for food security initiatives in Africa to be effective, they must embrace solutions that are equitable, generalizable and ecologically sound to ensure sustainability. Ultimately, to improve innovation and technology adoption, a systems approach that allows women and men, wealthy and poor farmers to engage with scientific and political elites in the design and implementation of food-related research and development initiatives must be embraced. There is also the need to develop tools and approaches that can assist smallholder farmers, researchers, policy makers and other stakeholders to share a better understanding of the multiple factors driving food insecurity and hindering the implementation of effective policies and institutions.