Egyptian MP highlights African people’s right in food security

CAIRO – 14 August 2018: MP Raef Temraz, deputy head of the Parliament’s Agriculture and Irrigation Committee, called for establishing a common database for African states to help achieve food security across the continent.

Concluding meetings of the Pan-African Parliament's committee on agriculture, natural resources and food security that took place in Egypt, Temraz affirmed the importance of coordination between the African states to guarantee self-sufficiency of agricultural output.

Temraz said that achieving food security requires spreading technology and establishing common farms that depend on using technology in the field of agricultural machinery in order to help reduce waste.

The Egyptian MP complained that some foreign companies use African lands and export their agricultural production to outside the continent. He asserted the need to deliver the agricultural output of these lands to the African people to ease their suffering.

Temraz called on the Egyptian Parliament’s agriculture committee to follow up on the issue and coordinate with the Pan-African Parliament to face the phenomenon of foreign companies purchasing African lands.

Mai Mahmoud, the secretary of the African Affairs Committee, stressed that the African continent has to provide African people with food.

The meetings that extended from Tuesday to Saturday were hosted by the Egyptian House of Representatives. Saturday’s meeting was attended by Chief Mandla Mandela, the grandson of the former South Africa President Nelson Mandela, and a number of officials from the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA).

In an interview with Egypt Today earlier this month, Mandela said it is the first time for a committee in the Pan-African Parliament, which is situated in South Africa, to visit another country and that’s only because of President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. Egypt is really keen to assist Africans and to enable them to become self-sufficient because Sisi wants to see Africa as one of the continents speaking with one voice.

In August 2017, an Egyptian delegation headed to South Africa to attend the sessions of the Pan-African Parliament (PAP) that took place from August 7 to 11.

The Pan African Parliament was established as an organ in the African Union (AU) in order to ensure the full participation of African peoples in the development and economic integration of the continent. The first Parliament was inaugurated on March 18, 2004 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and its headquarters is in Midrand, South Africa.