Maize Program > Highlights

African Union: Strategic Grain Reserves Agree to Collaborate

Although the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) region is endowed with abundant natural resources, it is one region that is also faced with serious problems of food insecurity. The main causes include chronic droughts, soil erosion, low soil fertility, land degradation, poor government policies and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. At the moment, the SADC region does not have the requisite capacity to deal with such complex issues of establishing and managing Strategic Grain Reserves (SGR’s). It is against this background that the African Union Southern Africa Regional Office (AU-SARO), in collaboration with the European Union (EU), Malawi Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) and National Food Reserve Agency (NFRA), recently organized a regional workshop in Lilongwe, Malawi. The workshop focused on assessing food availability and opportunities for establishing SGR’s at local, national and regional levels. Discussions were also held on strengthening the various capacities to address food emergencies in the region. Maize is the major food crop in the region and some countries rely on producing enough food for themselves and only import when there is a shortfall; other countries such as Botswana, Lesotho and Mauritius continuously rely on food imports. Stephen Njukia of the RATES’s program made a presentation that described how the maize market operates in the COMESA region. The presentation focused on how maize usually crosses borders, despite regional governments’ protective measures that lead to barriers to trade such as imposed imports and export bans and/or high tariffs or levies. This is in contrast to the COMESA governments’ prescribed ideology for free trade among member states. The main argument in the presentation was that by setting up barriers on trade, governments are actually making maize more expensive.

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