Assembly/AU/ 7 (X)I Page 10 18. CAADP, as a common framework for accelerating long term agricultural development and growth among African countries, rests on the following key principles and targets: i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. (b) the principle of agriculture-led growth as a main strategy to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of poverty reduction; the pursuit of a 6 percent average annual agriculture sector growth rate at the national level; the allocation of 10 percent of national budgets to the agriculture sector and the exploitation of regional complementarities and cooperation to boost growth; the principles of policy efficiency, dialogue, review, and accountability, shared by all AU/NEPAD programs; the principles of partnerships and alliances to include farmers, agribusiness, and civil society communities; the implementation principles assigning the roles and responsibility of program implementation to individual countries; that of coordination to designated Regional Economic Communities; and that of facilitation to the NEPAD Secretariat. Overall economic and agricultural growth performance has vastly improved among African countries over the last 10 years 19. Three major periods can be distinguished in Africa’s recent economic growth and performance towards poverty reduction and food and nutrition security: a first period of positive per capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate throughout the first post-independence decade, followed by an almost 20-year period of negative per capita income growth from 1974 to 1993. The decline in per capita income halted in the middle of the nineties, followed by a third period, the longest period (1994-2005) of sustained positive per capita income growth on the continent since the early seventies. 20. Moreover, there has been a steady increase in the level of per capita food production over the past 10 years. The recovery process which started in the late 1990s has accelerated over the last decade and has now reached average growth rates of 6 percent per year for GDP and 4 to 5 percent for agriculture. Unlike in preceding years, the growth in agriculture has been accompanied with a strong growth in overall productivity levels in the sector. Another encouraging development is the fact that the economic and agricultural growth recovery is not just accelerating but is also spreading wider to cover more countries, the number of countries with higher growth rates has gone up considerably over the last 5 years. The evidence of a more sustained and faster growth over the last 10 years compared to the preceding two and a half decades is a positive sign. The challenge is now to sustain this in the medium to longer term, and even accelerate it over the next few decades if the continent is to effect a real transformation of the agricultural sector and reach the CAADP objectives. As a comparison, it is worth noting that India, during the green revolution, experienced growth in agricultural production of 6 percent, very similar to the growth rates many African countries are witnessing today. There are about a dozen countries that grew at annual rates of 5 percent or more between 2003 and 2005, which is very close to the targeted CAADP goal of 6 percent.