Strategy for agricultural transformation in africa

 
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Overall, Africa lags behind other regions in terms of the value it captures relative 
to the importance of agriculture to its economies.
Across agricultural value chains, very 
little processing takes place on African soil. For example, Africa produces approximately 70% 
of the world’s cocoa beans by weight, but only ~20% of intermediate cocoa products.
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Similarly, African countries process on average 56% of the soybean they produce, and meet 
further demand for processed soy through expensive imports.
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More generally, Africa is the 
only region for which GDP contribution from agriculture is higher than that from agribusiness; 
there is greater value to be captured downstream from raw commodity production and Africa 
is capturing less than its ‘fair share’ of profits down the value chain.
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While the general lack of processing capacity is a significant reason behind 
Africa’s low agribusiness output, there are other barriers to value addition. 
These can be 
characterized as either barriers to value addition itself, or barriers to selling demanded, 
competitively-priced value-added products. Common barriers to investment in value addition 
across most priority crops include insufficient or inconsistent quantities of feedstock (raw 
crops), lack of access to electricity for value addition processes, lack of skilled labor, and lack 
of affordable and appropriately structured working capital and other financing for storage, 
aggregation, and processing. There are several ‘downstream’ challenges that make supplying 
competitively-priced products to centers of African demand challenging, including: high 
logistics costs arising from poor transport and other infrastructure; high taxes for processed 
products; lack of feedback from buyers to processors and from processors to farmers on the 
necessary quality of product; insufficient or unenforced health and other food standards; and 
insufficient investment in marketing and branding to increase local demand for processed 
products. 
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