By: Hana Saada
ALGIERS– Resorting to the country’s immense financial resources to prepare for the post-oil era is what President Abdelmadjid Tebboune has been doing since April 2022. Food self-sufficiency by 2024-2025 is part of this national orientation and Algeria is quite capable of achieving this goal…
The President of the Republic, Mr. Abdelmadjid Tebboune stressed, in a speech delivered, Tuesday, on the occasion of the opening of the National Agriculture Conference, organized at the Palace of Nations, and placed under the theme “Agriculture: for sustainable food security”, on the imperative to achieve food security.
“Our farmers should realize that our food security guarantees sovereignty and independence of our decision… without food security it is impossible to claim political independence,” the president said, stressing that complete self-sufficiency has not been achieved by any country in the world, but we should divest from oil revenues to conduct our business,” said the President.
For Mr. Tebboune, the cereal sector will be the pillar of this strategy. “I think we are not very far from achieving our food independence. A few more steps to take and we will get there surely and without constraint. We will achieve self-sufficiency by 2024-2025”, assured Tebboune.
“Algeria is capable of producing, by exploiting all the potential, a minimum of 60 quintals/hectare on average,” he noted, adding that the sector can “produce significant quantities of cereals, especially in the south”.
He then referred to the excellent results recently recorded by the agricultural sector. The Algerian president indicated that agriculture “contributed more than 14.7% to GDP in 2022 where the value of agricultural production reached nearly 4550 billion dinars, an increase of 38% compared to 2021”.
“Today, we are satisfied with the results achieved by agriculture over the past three years. Agriculture represents 14.7% of the gross domestic product and comes just after hydrocarbons, with 24%. Cereals will be of paramount importance in our agricultural production strategy,” said the President.
The consequence of this improvement: the rate of coverage of the country’s needs by national production has risen to 75%, to add to the fact that the agricultural sector currently employs more than 2.7 million people.
As for the wheat, the President Tebboune pointed out: “We consume 9 million tonnes of wheat a year, and we have managed to produce half that amount, but what prevents us from exceeding half is the lack of rigor in the sector…I would not say indifference,” stressed President Tebboune.
Regarding the vegetable and fruit sector, the President highlighted the initiatives to increase the production of exotic fruits, insisting on the urgency of “a definitive solution to the problem of agricultural land and to focus on the diversification of production in the various agricultural sectors to increase the income of the agricultural sector and consequently our reserves”.
Financing of agriculture-related industry projects up to 90%
“Algeria currently has 19 million head of cattle,” the president said, adding that agricultural production has increased by one thousand billion dinars, or nearly ten billion dollars. Agriculture in the south now requires other measures, including production twice a year. Only the wilayas of the South are able to achieve self-sufficiency in cereals,” noted President Tebboune.
“We will encourage those who carry out agricultural production, twice a year, to benefit from the support and incentives of the State”, affirmed the President, specifying that “we are not far from reaching self-sufficiency, provided that production is carried out with conviction and not under the pressure of official demands”.
“We are ready to finance industrial projects related to agriculture up to 90%,” stressed the President of the Republic.
“We need to digitize the agricultural sector,” President Tebboune stresses
In a related context, President Tebboune also demanded an end to approximations regarding production figures. “Cereal production figures should be accurate. We need to digitize the agricultural sector so that we can control the production figures as well as the use of agricultural land,” he recommended.
The President regretted the approximate figures for the agricultural land exploited which did not exceed 1.8 million hectares while previous assessments put forward 3 million ha. Ditto for the figures concerning animal wealth, often estimated at 20 and 29 million head before the last census reported 19 million.
President Tebboune also regretted the lack of figures that accurately determine our milk consumption. He stressed that emphasizing statistics does not mean that “we want to raise taxes but to develop reliable strategies to accurately determine our potential and our consumption needs”.
