Only Islam Has the Real Solution for Africa’s Food Security

News:

From September 5th to 8th, 2023 Tanzania hosted the 13th Annual Africa’s Food Systems Forum summit. A hybrid event with more than 350 speakers, more than 3,000 attendees from more than 70 countries, themed “Recover, Regenerate, Act: Africa’s Solutions to Food Systems Transformation” focused on building back better food systems and food sovereignty with youth and women at the center.

Comment:

Africa Food Systems Forum – AGRF is the world’s premier forum for African agriculture and food systems, bringing together stakeholders to take practical action and share lessons that will move African food systems forward.

According to AGRF, Recovery calls for decisive strategies and actions to rebuild food systems, Regenerate emphasizes the need to regenerate natural capital resources with adaptation practices, innovation, and technology for sustainable food production in a changing climate context and Act urges urgent action to accelerate food systems transformation through better policies, practices, and investments.

According to Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program, Africa has about 874 million hectares of land which is suitable for agriculture, 83% have serious soil fertility to achieve high and sustained productivity. Also, it has over 67 major rivers and 63 trans boundary river basin. In short, 65% of world’s arable land and 19% of world’s renewable fresh water are available in Africa.

Regarding sea foods, 27 countries of Africa border Atlantic Ocean, 13 border Indian Ocean, 5 border Mediterranean Ocean and 4 border The Red Sea.

In terms of human resources, Africa is the home of 1.3 billion peoples of whom about 70% of them are young below 30 years. Furthermore, 40% of world’s gold, 90% of world’s chromium and platinum, largest reserves of cobalt and uranium is found in Africa.

Despite all these potentialities, Africa is still facing food insecurity, hunger and starvation. More than 140 million people in Africa are hungry, Somalia has recently reached catastrophic levels with an estimated 6.5 million people experiencing food crisis, 17.5 million people don’t have enough to eat in Nigeria, in Madagascar 7.8 million people are facing food insecurity, and 22.7 million people in Ethiopia are food insecure. Sub-Saharan Africa zone is one of the most alarming food crises in decades of roughly 146 million people suffering from acute food insecurity. Across the African continent, hunger is contributing up to 45% of children’s deaths.

Africa Food System Forum, just like any other initiatives will not succeed to secure Africa and the world from hunger and food insecurity because all initiatives have not reached the real root cause towards food crisis in Africa and so suggest the dignified solutions. Instead are suggesting capitalistic solutions and think within capitalism boundaries, depending on the western colonial solutions for their problems.

Climatic change in Africa has been highly contributed by western capitalist industries causing extreme weather resulting into climate-induced shocks to the food system which are now occurring one about every 2.5 years which is too frequent than ever before. Africa is facing increasing food price and lower price for their agricultural products in the global market due to exploitative colonial economic system in which Africa had been made as the western farm where colonizers come and exploit resources only making it the poorest in the world.

If well organized, African agricultural sector can solve not only African’s food crisis but the world at large, and only through Islam this can be achieved. Under Islamic state, (Khilafah), western colonial states will not have any opportunity to control our agricultural policies, plans and programmes. Islamic agricultural policies such as considering feeding as obligatory, reviving the barren lands, equal distribution of food, financing small and higher agricultural projects etc. Those self-sufficient, independent from western countries policies would ensure abundant food production, increases the Ummah’s agricultural potentialities such as livestock and processed agricultural products industries for feeding hunger and job creation.

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Said Bitomwa
Member of the Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir in Tanzania