“Technologies to achieve Africa’s green revolution exist, but are mostly just sitting on the shelves” -Akinwumi Adesina
Thursday, 16 August 2018 15:28 
(Togo First) - African Development Bank’s (AfDB) President, Akinwumi Adesina, made a call to equip African farmers with new technologies that are able to transform the continent’s agricultural production. “Technologies to achieve Africa’s green revolution exist, but are mostly just sitting on the shelves. The challenge is a lack of supportive policies to ensure that they are scaled up to reach millions of farmers,” said Adesina.
Emphasizing the Bank’s determination to transform African agriculture to unlock new sources of wealth, the President declared: “There is no reason why Africa should be spending US$ 35 billion a year importing food. All it needs to do is to harness the available technologies with the right policies and rapidly raise agricultural productivity and incomes for farmers, as well as assure low food prices for consumers.”
Through its Enable Youth initiative, the AfDB has spent over the past two years around $300 million to develop Africa’s next generation of agribusiness holders and farmer-traders.
“With the rapid pace of growth of the use of drones, automated tractors, artificial intelligence, robotics and block chains, agriculture as we know it today will change,” Adesina said. “It is more likely that the future farmers will be sitting in their homes with computer applications using drones to determine the size of their farms, monitor and guide the applications of farm inputs, and with driverless combine harvesters bringing in the harvest.”
