Rising to meet new challenges: Africa's agricultural development beyond 2020 Vision is the theme for the 6th African Association of Agricultural Economists triennial conference. The conference will be held in Abuja, Nigeria, from 23-26 September, 2019.
The conference will explore the recent developments in agricultural systems across Africa. Key drivers of change include population growth, rapid urbanization, productivity enhancing innovation, climate change, the rise of agri-preneurship, land reform, as well as policy and investment priorities by governments and development partners. To be relevant in the midst of this dizzying array of new developments, agricultural economists must put these developments in context, present evidence on their causes and consequences, and anticipate the policy challenges that governments will be facing and seeking guidance on in the next few years. This conference will bring together leading scholars, policy makers, agribusiness representatives and development practitioners to examine how these new mega-trends are shaping agricultural development in Africa.
Visit the conference website for more information.
On September 23, PIM will host an invited panel on "The Role of Institutional Capacity Development in Africa’s Agricultural Transformation" moderated by Dr. Frank Place, PIM Director, and Prof. Thomas Jayne, University Foundation Professor of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics at Michigan State University and co-leader of PIM’s Flagship 2: Economywide Factors Affecting Agricultural Growth and Rural Transformation. The session will highlight ways in which African universities and policy institutes need to adapt and respond to the changing skill sets demanded of agricultural economists in the region, especially by a rapidly growing agribusiness sector. For more information, see the session proposal.
Prof. Jayne will also present PIM-supported work on the rise of medium-scale farmers in Africa, co-authored with Dr. Milu Muyanga. A major finding of this work is that farms between 5-20 hectare, while generally accounting for under 10 percent of all farms, have contributed at least 40 percent of the additional value of the national agricultural output between 2005 and 2015 in most of the countries analyzed, highlighting the growing importance of middle-sized farms in African agriculture.
Photo: Ollivier Girard/CIFOR
