The European Commission and African Union set up a joint rural Africa taskforce in May, after agricultural co-operation was one of the key topics as the EU-Africa summit in Abidjan in November 2017. The task force and its 11 experts were tasked with making recommendations in January 2019, with a mandate that focuses on promoting food security, transferring skills, climate change adaption and investment in agri-business.

CTA, in collaboration with PAFO and AgriCord, will hold a presentation on Benefits of digitalisation for smallholder farmers at the Prize Digital for Development (D4D) organised by the Royal Museum of Central Africa with the support of the Belgian Directorate-General for Development Cooperation (DGD) on 4th October 2018.

Cameroon is kicking off the “pure origin” labelling process of the cocoa produced at post-harvest processing excellence centers in the country’s production areas. This will follow a meeting between the Confédération des chocolatiers et confiseurs de France, the Cameroonian cocoa and coffee inter-professional council, the trade minister and the French Ambassador to Cameroon on September 30 in Nkog-Ekogo, the Central region.

The Sahel countries are confronted with numerous challenges which hold back their development potential. The countries in the region have to deal with climate change risks, increasing demographic pressure, an increasingly urban trend and the security crisis shaking the region. Agricultural yields are declining significantly, creating food security issues. In order to get through these issues and allow the region to develop, innovative solutions and research exist.

On the sidelines of the IFTM Top Resa International Tourism Fair 2018, Marie Christine Stephenson, the new Minister of Tourism, invited by the Ambassador of Haiti in Paris, Vanessa Lamothe Matignon, participated at the beginning of the week in a high-level tasting of Haitian chocolate, on a barge moored on the Seine.

Event: Rural youth constitute the majority of the youth population in many developing countries; most of them are engaged in subsistence farming and are increasingly turning their backs on small-scale agriculture.

The 2018 Africa Agriculture Trade Monitor (AATM) just launched.

This report is the fruit of a collaboration between the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA).

Key findings of the Report:

Despite recent growth in agricultural trade deficits, there are promising signs of export diversification, both in commodities traded and trade partners, as well as increasing intra-African trade in agricultural commodities.

The UK currently accounts for 20 percent of the EU’s banana market, leaving African producers concerned that London will opt to import cheaper American banana after Brexit. Britons consume around 1.1 million metric tons of bananas a year, according to African banana lobby Afruibana. There is ongoing negotiations about how the EU and UK could divide food import quotas after Brexit.

This project improves the competitiveness of the banana industry in the face of the tariff preference erosion in the EU market, while ensuring its environmental and socio-economic sustainability in the long run.

The South African citrus sector has informed the European Commission that it will voluntarily suspend part of their citrus exports to Europe as of September 22 due to the risk of spreading the Black Spot disease to the European producing countries.