Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa appoints Kofi Annan as its first chairman

Cape Town, South Africa, 14 June 2007 – At the World Economic Forum on Africa, taking place from 13 to 15 June in Cape Town, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa today announced the appointment of former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan as its first Chairman.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum on Africa meeting in Cape Town, where he was due to deliver a keynote address on African agriculture, Mr Annan said he was deeply honoured to be taking up the position and hoped to use it to help drive forward progress on an issue critical to wider African development.

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“I am honoured today to take up this important post and join with my fellow Africans in a new effort to comprehensively tackle the challenges holding back hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers in Africa,” Annan said. “Africa is the only region where overall food security and livelihoods are deteriorating. We will reverse this trend by working to create an environmentally sustainable, uniquely African Green Revolution. When our poorest farmers finally prosper, all of Africa will benefit.”

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, which was established last year with an initial US$ 150 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, seeks to help millions of small-scale farmers and their families across Africa lift themselves out of poverty and hunger through sustainable increases in farm productivity and incomes. It is headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, and will be working throughout the continent on a wide range of interventions across the agricultural “value chain”, ranging from strengthening local and regional agricultural markets, to helping improve irrigation, soil health and training for farmers, to supporting the development of new seed systems better equipped to cope with the harsh African climate.

The Alliance is a response to recent calls by African leaders to chart a new path for prosperity by spurring the continent’s agricultural development and also seeks to help reverse decades of relative neglect in funding for agricultural development for Africa. It strongly endorses the vision laid out in the African Union’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), which seeks a 6% annual growth in food production by 2015.

Source: WEF