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Showing posts with label agra. Show all posts
Showing posts with label agra. Show all posts

African Green Revolution Forum (#AGRF) underscores the need to invest in agriculture

Posted by Roxanna Samii Monday, September 6, 2010 0 comments



The African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF), held in Africa for the first time, brought together 800 delegates from around the world in the Ghanaian capital, Accra.

Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan opened the event. The three day Forum included a combination of plenary sessions and smaller private meetings providing opportunities to make new, firm commitments to deliver a better food production system  and a better world for Africans.

The President of IFAD in his discussions with world leaders and delegates focused on need to see agriculture as a whole value chain not just farming and that atttractive opportunities for youth are often in villages, processing. Kofi Annan emphasized stable and predictable policies to attract investors.

Henock Kifle, IFAD's Chief Development Strategist,  highlighted the importance of good macroeconomic management in creating today's favorable investment climate in africa for all sectors but need to invest much more in infrastructure.

Mohamed Beavogui, Director of West and Central Africa, in discussing how to get more banks lending longer term to Africa described IFAD's support for innovative partnerships that connect smallholders to markets and banks and help to share risks in countries such as Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya .

Overall, strong consensus amongst political leaders, farmer orgaanizations, African companies and development institutions on need to focus on agriculture as a business, to look at full value chain, to invest in organization of smallholders, rural infrastructure and need to innovate access to finance.

A series of concrete outcomes of the AGRF, include:

  • empowerment of women throughout the agricultural chain by accelerating access to improved technology, finance and markets
  • backing for the Impact Investment Fund for African Agriculture to scale up access to finance by farmers and agri-businesses
  • investment for science, technology and research for food nutrition security
  •  accelerated access to improved seed by promoting the entire value chain, including support for plant breeding, seed companies and seed distribution systems
  • improved fertilizer supply systems and more efficient fertilizer value chains
  • more inclusive business models linking agri-business, commercial farms and smallholder farmers
  • better water management
  • mixed crop livestock systems


By Farhana Haque Rahman and Steven Schonberger

The Road to Food Security

Posted by Roxanna Samii Monday, August 30, 2010 0 comments


by Kanayo F. Nwanze, IFAD President
Recently, I was on a road in the Southern Choma District of Zambia to meet with Rosemary Pisani, a smallholder farmer and mother of eight who struggled to feed her children prior to joining a farmer’s cooperative to raise goats. Thanks to the cooperative and support from other farmers, she now has a thriving business and all of her children are in school.
On the way to meet her, I passed women walking through mud to the market with large loads of fruit and vegetables stacked on their heads. I imagined how I might be on my way to a very different rural community if the road we were on was paved and well maintained.
Often in Africa, the few paved roads that do exist are littered with potholes and lead to unpaved ones that are nearly impossible to navigate without a proper vehicle. Closer to farming communities, roads disappear entirely. This leaves rural areas, which have the potential to feed the more than one billion hungry people, cut off and isolated. In sub-Saharan Africa, almost 70% of all people living in rural areas live more than a 30-minute walk from the nearest maintained road.
Kofi Annan, Chairperson of the Board of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), has acknowledged this isolation: “The average African smallholding farmer swims alone. She has no insurance against erratic weather patterns, gets no subsidies, and has no access to credit. I say ‘she’ because the majority of small-scale farmers in Africa are women.” Indeed, half of the world’s smallholders are women, and we must keep in mind their punishing task of walking long lengths to get their produce to market.
At the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), we believe that farming, regardless of size or scale, must be seen as a business, and smallholder farmers as small-scale business owners rather than poor people who need handouts. There is growing recognition that these smallholder farmers and their rural communities are a major part of the solution to food insecurity and poverty – but only if they have what they need to do their jobs.
The Green Revolution of the last century had a tremendous impact on agricultural yields and food production, transforming the lives of millions of people. Much of this success stemmed from infrastructure that was already in place. India’s road density at the start of its Green Revolution in the 1970’s was 388 kilometers per 1,000 square kilometres. This compares with 39 kilometers per 1,000 square kilometers in Ethiopia today and 71 per 1,000 in Senegal.
New roads bring other essential services to rural communities. In Ethiopia, only 2% of rural people have access to electricity, and telephone communication is more or less absent. Researchers believe that this is because only 17% of rural communities in the country live within one mile of a paved road.
Together with poor infrastructure, many small farmers in Africa have insufficient access to productive assets, such as land, water, and new technologies. As a result, yields are generally too low to allow the millions of rural households to generate marketable surpluses. Even if smallholders are able to produce a surplus, their lack of access to downstream activities, such as processing and marketing, prevents them from selling it easily.
The cause of these missing, but vital, resources lies in the shameful neglect of agriculture in the past two decades. Both developed and developing countries – caught up in rapid economic expansion and technological development – got distracted. They turned off the tap to agriculture, leaving small farmers to rely on basic farming practices and on government and donor handouts.
That tap must be turned back on. In IFAD’s experience, working simply to double the income of a smallholder farmer who scrapes by on less than a dollar a day is poverty management, because at two dollars a day, he or she still remains poor. But supporting that smallholder in launching a farming business that could generate a five-fold increase in income amounts to poverty eradication.
If smallholder farmers are to be given the opportunity to become viable businesses, it is essential that they be connected to markets. Indeed, support for rural infrastructure – including last-mile roads, electrification, post-harvest facilities, support for agricultural associations and cooperatives, and access to land and irrigation facilities – is a crucial element in the value chain.
Each link in the value chain, from the smallholder to the local trade agents and agro-processors to regional and national markets, needs to be strengthened. We need to link food producers with the people who need their product through viable and well maintained infrastructure. In addition, we need to provide them with research and technology to ensure that they can grow the best-quality produce, and storage capabilities so that they can sell at peak prices.
If smallholder farmers have the basic infrastructure they need to get their goods to market, they will not only be able to feed themselves and their communities, but will contribute to wider food security. We just need to put the pavement down so that farmers like those I saw in Zambia can more easily make their way on the road to food security.
As published by Project Syndicate

Roads not handouts for farmers

Posted by Roxanna Samii 0 comments

by Kanayo F. Nwanze, IFAD President

Smallholder farmers need roads and financial services not handouts.

If words and good intentions could feed people, there would be no hungry children in the world. But as those working in development know all too well, malnutrition, hunger and poverty are bound tightly together in a Gordian knot that requires collective action to cut.

The June G8 and G20 meetings in Canada focused on children's and women's health. World leaders must take care not to fall into the trap of seeing these things as a single resolvable issue. You cannot guarantee good health without a nutritious diet, you cannot ensure a nutritious diet without freedom from poverty, and you cannot free most of the world’s poorest people from poverty without taking a systemic approach to improving the lot of small farmers. Most of the world’s 1.4 billion extremely poor people live in the rural areas of developing countries and depend on agriculture for their livelihoods.

Helping developing countries to address food security and to become major food producers is the key focus of a public-private partnership meeting in Accra, Ghana, on 2-4 September. The African Green Revolution Forum is trying to build a consensus to grapple with agricultural deficiencies in Africa.

Feed children, feed their minds

The land farmed by poor people in developing countries is rarely bountiful. Less than 2ha of productive land is the norm for farms in Asia and most of Africa. In rural areas, many poor people do not produce enough food to feed themselves and their families. Instead, they are net buyers of food. With incomes of less than $1.25 a day, they cannot afford to buy much.

It is one of life’s ironies that three-quarters of Africa’s malnourished children live on small farms. In Asia and Latin America, farm children also often go hungry. Children who suffer from malnutrition early in life are forever deprived of their full physical, mental and social development potential.

Think small

But what if households could boost their productivity, gain access to new markets and ensure the kind of financial returns that would have demonstrable impact on development?

To break the link between malnutrition, hunger and poverty, rich and poor countries must support the poorest smallholders, creating the conditions for the transition from subsistence to commercial farming.

Numerous studies show that GDP growth generated by agriculture is at least twice as effective in reducing poverty as growth in other sectors. Experience repeatedly shows – in China, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Ghana, Burkina Faso and elsewhere – that smallholders can lead agricultural growth.

Small farms are often more productive, per hectare, than large farms, when agro-ecological conditions and access to technology are similar. Small farmers have a strong incentive to get the most from their land and their own labour. Indeed, there is ample research to show that there are few economies of scale in the production end of farming. Family farms have very low management costs and are labour intensive, while large farms are either heavily mechanised – offering few employment opportunities – or have high costs for managing the workforce.

Creating a green revolution also means not treating poor rural people paternalistically by doling out handouts. Smallholders need financial services to pay for seeds, tools and fertiliser. They need the protection of insurance. They need secure access to land, water, roads and transportation to get their products to market. They also need agricultural research and technology to improve their resilience to rapid economic and environmental changes. These are all things that governments and the donor community, with the support of the private sector, can put into place for small farmers.

Don’t stop now

A public policy environment that appeals to investors, combined with new commitment from the private sector, will lay the ground for a better agricultural sector for Africans and a route away from poverty.

Creating the conditions for rural poor people to develop profitable businesses, by reducing the cost of finance and by fostering their entrepreneurial spirit, will help to establish a vibrant rural sector across the value chain.

A dynamic rural sector will generate demand for locally produced goods and services. This will spur sustainable non-farm employment in services, agro-processing and small-scale manufacturing. With better access to higher quality food in childhood, young people will be able to contribute more to their societies. And with a greater range of rural employment options, rural youth will have an incentive to become the farmers of tomorrow instead of looking for work in the cities.

In recognition of agriculture’s power to improve developing economies and the need to grow enough food to feed the 9.1bn people who will be living on the planet 40 years from now, G8 leaders pledged around $20bn towards food programmes and sustainable agricultural development at the L’Aquila summit last year.

At a time when budgets are tight, countries may mistakenly think it prudent to cut back on investments in sectors such as agriculture and development. This would lead to greater world food insecurity and slower economic growth.

Progress at the African Green Revolution Forum in Ghana could set a good example for other regions. If the leaders of nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America take the necessary steps to create vibrant rural economies and the international community assists those countries that are making real efforts to help develop, they will be able to cut the ties that bind malnutrition, hunger and poverty.