Conference Blog
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Awakening Africa’s Sleeping Giant: Agricultural Development in the Guinea Savannah
By Ian Scoones, FAC Co-coordinator
A fascinating FAC workshop has just finished hosted by FAC partner, SOAS, focusing on the World Bank’s Awakening Africa’s Sleeping Giant report. This argues that a huge area, defined as the ‘Guinea savannah’, stretching across West Africa and with a second belt in southern Africa offers huge potential for a new era of commercial agriculture in Africa, sufficient to supply growing domestic, regional and global markets. The report offers two models for agricultural development of this area – the Brazilian cerrado, focusing on large-scale commercial operations, and northeast Thailand,
where a smallholder led revolution took place. Read more.
Future Agricultures Consortium