Diplomate et universitaire, Pierre Jacquemot a été ambassadeur de France et directeur du développement du ministère des Affaires étrangères de son pays. Conférencier international, il est membre du comité de rédaction de la revue Afrique contemporaine, expert auprès de la Fondation Jean-Jaurès et administrateur de plusieurs ONG. Il est l’auteur de nombreux ouvrages dont les deux derniers parus sont Souverainetés agricole et alimentaire en Afrique : la reconquête (2021) et Afrique, La démocratie à l’épreuve (2022).
Pierre Jacquemot presents below his latest book: ” Se nourrir, le défi de l’Afrique “, published by Karthala. After providing an uncompromising diagnostic of African agriculture, the author explores potential.
Access to financing remains a major issue for farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa. The lack of credit availability is considered a central obstacle, if not the most significant one, to the.
Across Africa, from Senegal to Djibouti, the world’s longest vegetative wall is being built: the Great Green Wall. It is 7,600 km long. More than just a reforestation program, the.
In December 2019, Kenya decided to authorise the commercialisation of transgenic cotton within the country. “This should help farmers increase revenue thanks to increased levels of production”, explained Head of State Uhuru Kenyatta. The decision has largely gone unnoticed. However, it represents a turning point. The country, which passed a bio-security law in 2009, had banned all imports of transgenic products, including food products and seeds for food production. GM (genetically modified) plantations were banned. Only strictly-controlled research projects were able to take place. On one side, the African Agricultural Technological Foundation (AATF), a pro-GMO organisation based in Nairobi, was lobbying the government to repeal the ban. On the other, Greenpeace was calling for the ban to be maintained to prevent “big business from taking over the food production system”.
Forecasts on the potential of agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa on the basis of which large scale land transactions are being deployed, are based on a rhetoric of the “empty continent”, adapted to establish agricultural policies as well as to justify all manner of greed. This thesis of the existence of “dormant resources” which would amount to approximately a billion hectares in useful agricultural surfaces area is incorrect. This article introduces the concept of actual availability of agricultural land and takes into account all the real estate constraints in order to assess the surface area likely to be actually devoted to agriculture.
