The New Alliance on Food Security and Nutrition: What are the Implications for Africa’s Youth?

The ‘New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition’ (hereafter the ‘New Alliance’) is a partnership which was established between selected African countries, G8 members, and the private sector to ‘work together to accelerate investments in agriculture to improve productivity, livelihoods and food security for smallholder farmers. Its pioneers anticipated that the initiative would simultaneously increase food production/availability and food accessibility/affordability through market conduits, thereby lifting millions of rural Africans out of poverty. To achieve this goal, its proponents put much faith in the private sector as the key driver of the initiative given the sector’s endowments in terms of financial resources, human capital, technological resources, intellectual property, market access, cutting-edge business practices, in-country networks and other expertise related to food security. Some critics of the New Alliance, however, challenged this initiative on grounds that the pursuit of the profit generation and developmental goals are incompatible and mutually exclusive in essence, and the combination of these two can’t and will never work for the benefit of the poor, as the latter will always be adversely incorporated into the former.