Posted on April, 20, 2018 at 10:50 am
By AGHAN DANIEL
The rainy season is here and most farmers have begun to plant across Africa. But one big issue that lingers among researchers is lack of access to certified seed.
At the end of the planting season less than 20 per cent of all farmers would have planted certified and clean seeds. The oft-told story of the seed sector in Africa is that it has always grappled with many challenges, such as farmer apathy to adopting new and better varieties.
It is incumbent upon the sector’s players to engage more visibly among themselves to effectively pressurise governments to keep their promises on allocations to agriculture and other services that impact seed trade directly.
Such engagements must ensure that the seed companies, who are major taxpayers in many countries, hold political and business leaders to account, measuring their actions against their promises.
Bottlenecks that bedevil the sector could, for example, be slainif political leaders kept their promise to allocate at least 10 per cent of their national budgets to agriculture. In the Maputo Declaration of 2003 African presidents declared they will each allocate at least 10 per cent of their total national budget towards agriculture. Fifteen years on and Africa still reports that the average expenditure on Agriculture is 4.5 per cent.
Whenever agriculture is neglected, there is always the risk of malnutrition, which, in the words of Kofi Annan, chairman of the Africa Progress Panel, represents political failure.
Take the case of fruits and vegetables. Many African smallholder farmers in many parts of Africa produce fruits and vegetables alongside their staple food. Yet farmers lose more than 50 per cent of their crops due to lack of cold storage. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption (approx. 1.3 billion tonnes) gets lost or wasted.
Therefore, there is a need for post-harvest handling facilities for both horticultural produces and cereals.
Drones are the new fad and they are revolutionising agriculture. The use of drones for precision agriculture, farming, pest management and crop management is exploding worldwide. Precision agriculture is a farming management concept based on observing, measuring and responding to inter- and intra-field variability in crops.
The seed sector in Africa should keep the authorities on their toes so such a technology does not pass any country by. Many farmers and seed producers would benefit from enhanced sustainable agricultural development and food security by improving the use of ICT
With two-thirds of Africans dependent on farming for their livelihoods, boosting agriculture will no doubt create economic opportunities, reduce malnutrition and poverty, and generate faster, fairer growth.
That African farmers need more investment, better access to financial services such as loans, and quality inputs, including seeds and fertilisers, should not be belaboured but acted upon. The yield is millions of jobs. The neglect of the seed sector has allowed inequality to accelerate.
Africa currently imports food worth $35 billion (Sh3.48 trillion) annually. African farmers should be producing the food and earning this money. The continent could — and should — be feeding itself and other regions too.
The reality on the ground is that it is possible to change the fortunes of Africa’s agriculture. Comparison should therefore be made with changes in the telecommunications sector, which have been described as possibly the greatest modern revolution this continent has seen. Less than two decades ago, 70 per cent of the African population never heard a phone ringing; today 70 per cent have a mobile phone.
This is an inspiration that seed merchants need to use to boost food and nutrition security and the prosperity in Africa.
Communication officer, African Seed Trade Association
Source: The Star