African Journalists urged to help in agric

October 5, 2009

The Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) has challenged media practitioners in Africa to partner it in its quest to transform agriculture on the continent.
It said the green revolution had the objective of ensuring that the continent positioned itself to feed its people as well as increase their income to end poverty.
Addressing participants at a day’s seminar organised for media practitioners in Bamako, Mali on Saturday, the President of AGRA, Dr Namango Ngongo said Africa’s agenda of a green revolution could succeed if peoples on the continent adopted good agricultural policies as well as the needed political will to transform the sector.
The Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) was established in 2006 to achieve a small holder-based African Green Revolution to transform the continent’s agriculture into a highly productive and sustainable system and enable the continent to be food sufficient and food secured.
AGRA reports indicates that since Mr Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the UN assumed the chairmanship of the AGRA Board in June 2OO7, the organisation is said to have grown rapidly in terms of operations, programmes, partnerships and strategy development.
In his presentation, the AGRA President Dr Ngongi said Africa continued to suffer from hunger because many of the farmers were small scale operators who could not produce enough to feed the increasing population.
“As the global financial crisis bear down on Africa, hunger and poverty grow more acute. Inflation, food shortages and trade imbalances all pose huge social, economic and political risks”, he stated.
The AGRA president expressed his displeasure at a situation where although about 70 percent of the population of Africa dealt in agriculture, countries allocated only about five percent of their national budgets to the sector.
He called for the adoption of modern methods if Africa would want succeed like countries in Asia and lamented that fertiliser use per hectare of land in sub Saharan Africa is considered one of the lowest globally.
The Director of the Institute of Economic Research (IER), Mr Bino Teme said global warning was one of the major challenges facing farmers.
Speaking on “Emerging Challenges Facing Agriculture in Africa”, , he s said other problems included soil erosion, global trade, lack of subsidies as well as tax management.
Mr Teme said African farmers needed to use sustainable strategies to achieve results and mentioned irrigation and the cultivation of improved seeds as some of the new things they could learn.
The Programme Officer of the Programme for Africa Seeds Systems (PASS), Dr Abubacar Toure said AGRA was supporting five West Africa an countries which were Ghana, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Nigeria in the area of improved crop production.
Dr Toure who works in the AGRA office in Ghana said currently the organisation was sponsoring a total of 18 post graduate students in agriculture at the University of Ghana and the Kwama Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi.
He also touched a large number small scale agro-dealers who were being trained by the AGRA to enable the acquire the needed capacity.
Topics treated at the seminar included: Challenges and solutions for boosting food production in Africa; Emerging Challenges Facing Agriculture in Africa; Comprehensive Investments Across the Value-seeds, soils, markets and policy.
The rests were :Working With Partners: Problems and Prospects; the status of agriculture report in West Africa: Challenges and prospects and the role of the media in achieving the Green Revolution in Africa, among other topic.
As part of the seminar, the participants embarked on field trips to a an AGRA sponsored agriculture research centre and to interact with some individual agro-dealers who were practising modern methods