RATIN

Africa: Wheat farming to change Africa

Posted on September, 20, 2016 at 10:26 am


Wheat farming has the potential to feed the rising population in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), a senior official with the global maize and wheat research institution said.

Dr. Martin Kropff, the Director General of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), said wheat crop has the potential of forming major part of Africa’s food transformation to self sufficiency.”

It is unacceptable that the region still import wheat valued at 13 billion U.S. dollars yet the demand for the product is growing by five percent every year,” Kropff said in Nairobi on Saturday. He noted that the growing annual expenditure on wheat imports should be a key reason for strengthening collaboration, investing in research and development and putting in place policies that could favor domestic production. Kropff noted that researchers at CIMMYT have developed various wheat disease resistant varieties that thrive well in drought
prone regions of the continent.

In SSA, only 10 percent of land is used for growing wheat with an average productivity of 2.2 tons per hectares that accounts for 44 percent of wheat consumed locally. The balance shows that Africa has a large potential for economically profitable wheat production.

The low adoption is however blamed on the introduction of the crop that positioned it as a large scale crop and non African, hence keeping small scale farmers from growing it.

Its production had been restricted in South Africa, North Africa and the Highlands of Ethiopia and Kenya. But over the past two decades, its consumption increased due to the increasing population.

Source: The Citizen