The UN Secretary-General's special adviser for Africa believes that it is necessary to break with the decades-long political discourse on the primacy of agriculture on the African continent that does not coincide with the results. Cristina Duarte told UN News in New York that the current moment is to change the way we think about the food crisis caused by factors such as the war in Ukraine and the effects of covid-19 on the economy.

Cristina Duarte is hosting the Africa Dialogue series 2022, which runs until the end of this month. The theme of the event is "Building resilience in nutrition: Accelerating human capital and africa's socioeconomic development." The undersecretary-general explained how the crisis generated by the conflict between Ukraine and Russia can be seen as a window of opportunity.

"It brought out, painfully, the high food and cereal dependence of the continent. In other words, it has brought out a paradox: a continent that has all the conditions to be a global player in the global cereal market equates with a situation of extreme dependence. This should appeal to us all. Not just the policymakers, but everyone. Every African there is. What I think is that we, in the case of this external shock, cannot focus on problems with a logic of dependency, but we have to focus on solutions with a logic of independence."

Among the issues addressed at the event are food, social protection, nutrition and food chains. For the interviewee, this series issues priority topics for the African Union invites the leaders of the region to put the people of the region at the center of policies.

A study by the African Development Bank reveals that global food production has increased by 145% in four decades. But Duarte pointed out that production on the continent dropped by a tenth even before the combined crises of Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine that increased poverty.