Posted on February, 19, 2025 at 10:36 am
On January 11, African presidents adopted an ambitious and transformative agricultural development strategy for the continent. The Kampala CAADP (Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme) Declaration was adopted during an extraordinary African Union summit held in Uganda. This landmark declaration aims to revolutionise African Agriculture to achieve zero hunger by 2035.
Africans have committed to increasing agrifood outputs by 47 per cent by the end of 2035. This will be achieved through the use of sustainable agricultural technologies in addition to addressing the effects of climate change. The technologies are broadly grouped into suitable equipment, high-value genetic material, farming practices and inputs. And whereas many are not new, they are touted as effective vehicles for national development.
Since the mid-20th century, numerous development partners have supported Kenya in generating various technologies to increase yields, produce nutritious crops, and reduce environmental shocks and labour demands. These agricultural technologies have evolved from simple domestication to conscious or unconscious selection and hybridisation of plants and animals, to the more recent application of precise inputs, pest and disease management, and the effective running of farm operations. All these improved practices assure enriched decision-making for farm profitability and sustainability. Most important is the capacity to create many other off-farm jobs along the different agricultural value chains, thus absorbing unemployed youths.
We need to involve the youth in agriculture through biotechnology, mechanisation and digitisation, as well as financially empower them to think agribusiness.
However, despite the acknowledged place of technological innovations for farm productivity and agricultural development, Kenya is replete with cases where due to vested interests, several beneficial technologies have suffered misinformation, resulting in cultural and socio-economic resistance, and consequently delayed adoption. This has slowed the momentum towards transforming agriculture, increasing productivity and conforming to international commitments.
Several studies have attempted to quantify and attribute the costs of non-adoption of specific technologies to national development. A broad analysis of the waves of technology outlay in Kenya shows that from 1940 to 1965, the Green Revolution was presented to developing countries. This was a conglomeration of technologies to achieve high crop yields through the provision of cereal hybrid crop varieties, increased mechanisation, irrigation and fertilisers. The Asian and Latin American countries that embraced this technology experienced remarkable increases in productivity. However, Kenya, which had just gained independence, lacked the commensurate infrastructure to fully profit from the technology.
The second wave of technology happened between 1974 and 1975 with the introduction of the popular Roundup herbicide, later followed by twin-rotor combine harvesters. The harvesters allowed the separation of yield from stover during crop harvests, saving farmers considerable time, energy and other resources. However, the same curse hit again - 50 years after the introduction of farm machinery, only about 30 per cent of the operations on small farms are done using tractors and motorised equipment.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Ministry of Agriculture actively promoted farm mechanisation, often involving public machinery imports. Nonetheless, most of these efforts failed due to governance challenges. Mechanisation was surrounded by myths such as: “it leads to unemployment”, or “smallholders cannot benefit from the use of machinery in agriculture”.
This is without recognition that on-farm mechanisation is a stepwise process and can either reduce labour for some activities or increase for others. Many practitioners now know that most of these notions are not supported by conclusive evidence.
To overcome the waning interest of youths in agriculture, we need to overcome the “hoe and cutlass” culture.
The third wave is the commercial availability of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) since 1996. This followed years of testing for safety and performance, and it is therefore not surprising that the Kampala Declaration is re-emphasising its potential. For more than 29 years, scientists in Kenya have been carrying out all-inclusive research on cotton to develop a variety that is resistant to insect pests and cassava and maize varieties with resistance to insects and diseases, tolerance to drought, salinity and low soil nitrogen. However, the approval of commercial cultivation of GM crops has suffered headwinds despite the country having competent regulatory and institutional capability to process the safe use of biotechnology.
Bioengineering of crops is critical because conventional breeding practiced by man for thousands of years cannot match the evolving pressures from pests, weeds, diseases and adverse weather.
The new understanding of plant genomes, coupled with modern techniques like marker-assisted selection, data science and predictive analytics, opens possibilities for precision breeding to deliver crops with better yield potential and resilience.
The inherent gaps in public knowledge and the resultant misinformation are very costly. Several quantifiable estimates show that due to the five-year delay in the biotechnology adoption from 2019 to 2024 for Bt Cotton and maize, Kenya may have lost upwards of more than 157 million dollars.
But, even as we lag, the rest of the world doesn’t pause to wait for us. Instead, the evolution of technology is continuing at a voracious pace, currently stampeding towards the new frontiers of Genome Editing, Gene Drives and Synthetic Biology.
The fourth wave was the use of satellite technology for agriculture, initially introduced in 1994, but later upgraded to mobile devices and their applications (Apps) and other complimentary technologies like ground-based and unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) in the 2000s. This was further upgraded by embracing the currency of ‘data’ to accelerate and revolutioniSe agricultural technology in the 2010s. This whole range of digital technologies potentially enabled farmers to map their fields, and more recently, do crop scouting, seeding and spraying, while recording farming practices and tracking the amount of carbon stored in the soil as a critical step in the fight against climate change. The Kampala Declaration has inadvertently re-emphasiSed the place of digital agriculture and precision farming, potentially opening unprecedented opportunities for smallholder farmers to reach new levels of precision and efficiency in crop and livestock production.
It is clear that without novel technological innovations, the rate of national agricultural development would be seriously hampered. As a country, we have long suffered the curse of technological lag. We missed out on the green revolution and mechanisation, and currently, we are staring at missing out on biotechnology, precision and digital agriculture – the vehicles driving production. Downplaying the critical role of technological advancement has serious implications for government policy formulation, resource mobilisation and allocation. Therefore, as the Kampala Declaration comes into effect on January 1, 2026, Kenya needs deep soul-searching on what should be done to guarantee food security and agricultural growth.
Source: The Nation