• Agricultural research, technology dissemination and adoption is the long-term pillar to achieve accelerated gains in productivity and requires:
1. enhanced rate of adoption of the most promising available technologies by linking, more efficiently, research and extension systems to producers;
2. technology delivery systems that quickly bring innovations to farmers and agribusinesses through appropriate use of new information and communication technologies;
3. renewing the ability of agricultural research systems to efficiently and effectively generate and adapt to Africa’s new knowledge and technologies, including biotechnology; and
4. mechanisms that reduce the costs and risks of adopting new technologies.
It was estimated that a budget of US$251,000 million for the period 2002-2015 was needed to successfully implement these four pillars. If Africa were to invest in agriculture the total of about US$22,000 million it spends annually on food imports and food aid, it would take the region less than a decade to implement the four proposed agricultural pillars highlighted in the CAADP. The CAADP budget is slightly less than Africa’s total debt of over US$292,000 million for the period 2000-2002. Africa’s debt burden has been described as a major obstacle to the region’s economic growth and poverty reduction, threatening efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), particularly that of halving poverty by 2015.