Rwandan agrodealer’s shop may still be small, but her ideas are big

By Alice Marks

Odette Dusabuwera in her agrodealer shop

The inability to access inputs is often cited as a major barrier to increasing the productivity of farms and improving the livelihoods of rural farmers. One Acre Fund (OAF), known as Tubura in Rwanda, has served more than 113,500 farmers since it started operations in the country in 2007, and now employs more than 1,400 staff members. One of their programs aims to tackle this barrier by working with agrodealers, providing them with credit for OAF seed and other inputs, such as much-needed fertiliser so that they can stock their shops with good quality products. OAF-supported agrodealers can expect to make US$2000-3000 per year in profit.

On a recent visit to Rwanda, OAF took us to meet Odette Dusabuwera, an agrodealer from Rubengera, in Western Rwanda, to find out how this approach was working for the agrodealers and farmers.

What we’ve been reading this week

This week’s summary on the news stories, reports and blogs that have grabbed our attention. We welcome your thoughts and comments on these articles.

Highlight: the National Smallholder Farmers’ Association (NASFAM) in Malawi, PAEPARD

FAO launches new standards for plant genebanks, FAO

Africa and India cultivate agricultural research ties, SciDev.Net

Who will pay for ecosystem services?, IIED

It’s not the ‘skipping’ three who should be questioned, it’s the wasteful supermarkets, The Independent

Pesticides halve bees’ pollen gathering ability, research shows, The Guardian

Natural Gas and Albacore: What Tuna Says About the Future of Mozambique, New Security Beat

Press Briefing of H.E. Mrs. Rhoda Peace Tumusiime, Commissioner for Rural Economy and Agriculture, PAEPARD

Fertilizer nutrient imbalance to limit food production in Africa, IIASA

Genetic weapon against insects raises hope and fear in farming, New York Times

AGRA’s African agriculture report

Last month the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa launched their first annual report detailing the state of African agriculture, entitled The Africa Agriculture Status Report.

Focusing on staple crops, the report synthesises data from 16 African countries as well as international institutions such as the World Bank and UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. The report highlights some key priority areas for policy makers on the continent:

• Reducing cheap and subsidised food imports, which weaken African agricultural market development, as well as increasing smallholder farmer access to credit, addressing trade restrictions and high transportation costs.
• Addressing the gender imbalance in access to productive resources such as land, credit, agricultural technologies and services.
• Boosting research and development for food security for underperforming countries. Africa as a whole has a mere 70 researchers per million inhabitants (compared to the USA, which has 2,640 researchers per million inhabitants).
• Addressing declining soil fertility, which threatens crop yields and agricultural development. For AGRA this means addressing the high price of fertiliser in many countries of Africa.
• Reviewing and harmonising seed laws and regulations to allow the development of Africa’s seed markets.

The value of the report lies in its synthesis of data and, due to this, of being able to make comparisons between countries. AGRA aims for the report to cover all countries in sub-Saharan Africa within a few years and has high hopes that the report will enable researchers, scientists, farmers and policymakers to access reliable agricultural data in order to make informed decisions relating to food security, data which can often be difficult to access.

 

What we’ve been reading this week

This week’s summary on the news stories, reports and blogs that have grabbed our attention. We welcome your thoughts and comments on these articles.

Status of development, regulation and adoption of GM agriculture in Africa: Views and positions of stakeholder groups, Adenle, A., Morris, E.J., Parayil, G.

Investing in people and evidence for sustainable farming, SciDev.net

World Food Day: New Ranking Tool to Guide Investment in Biofortified Crops Launched, HarvestPlus

Past environmental pressures affect current biodiversity loss, European Commission

Commentary – Innovation for Sustainable Intensification in Africa, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs

Global Hunger Index Calls for Greater Resilience-Building Efforts to Boost Food and Nutrition Security, IFPRI

Report Finds Major Challenges to Meeting Global Food and Nutrition Needs by 2050, Digital Journal

Agricultural Innovation to Protect the Environment

Food security, poverty reduction, environmental protection: increasingly the links between these three global challenges are being recognised. And a recent special feature of PNAS, Agricultural Innovation to Protect the Environment, explored this topic.

As the introductory paper by Sayer and Cassman explains, agriculture is increasingly being required to consider its environmental impact along with ways it can increase natural capital. In part this is because an unhealthy environment can limit our ability to produce food but also because the intensification of food production we require to meet future food needs could have irreversible impacts on water resources, the climate and human health.

Innovation and innovativeness are needed if we are to tackle these interacting challenges. In the past the Green Revolution allowed food production to keep pace with population growth and is estimated to have saved 17.9 and 26.7 million hectares of land but it failed to address issues of sustainability and equitability, and the problems we face now are more complex.

New concepts such as eco-efficiency and green growth, and new methods for dealing with uncertainty are being adopted. New technologies such as mobile phones, biotechnology and methane recovery can be both effective and profitable. Advanced technologies in China, for example, could cut N fertilizer-related emissions by 20–63%, amounting to a reduction in China’s total Greenhouse Gas emissions by 2–6%. The challenge is to enhance the process of innovating and ensure existing innovations are accessible to and have impact for those who need them most.

What we’ve been reading this week

This week’s summary on the news stories, reports and blogs that have grabbed our attention. We welcome your thoughts and comments on these articles.

Can market solutions unlock Africa’s agricultural potential?, Thomson Reuters Foundation

Scientists’ Consensus on Maintaining Humanity’s Life Support Systems in the 21st Century, Ideas for Sustainability

A soiled reputation. Adverse impacts of mineral fertilizers in tropical agriculture, Heinrich Böll Foundation and WWF

Can a Growing World Feed Itself Without Genetically Modified Crops?, Brain Heap

Target, Giant Eagle, H-E-B, Meijer Say No to Genetically Engineered Salmon, Center for Food Safety

Declining agricultural diversity a ‘threat to humanity, Farming Online

Cassava’s huge potential as 21st Century crop, FAO

Seeking Food Ingredients That Aren’t Gene-Altered, The New York Times

Non-GM canola oil demand has crusher scrambling, The Western Producer

Mapping the Way to Even Healthier Rice, USDA

Could African Crops Be Improved With Private Biotech Data?, The Salt

Can climate-friendly development survive a fossil fuel boom?, Thomson Reuters Foundation

Preserving the Soil and Reaping Greater Harvests, IPP Media

What we’ve been reading this week

This week’s summary on the news stories, reports and blogs that have grabbed our attention. We welcome your thoughts and comments on these articles.

Improving child nutrition. The achievable imperative for global progress, UNICEF

The World Needs Genetically Modified Foods, The Wall Street Journal

Grassroot-level innovations may hold the key to global challenges, The Guardian

World food prices rise 1 pct in March – FAO

Primary commodity prices and global food security. Why farmers still struggle when food prices rise, Thomas Lines, Green House

Millions face starvation as world warms, say scientists, The Guardian

Half a million Kenyans and Ethiopians face conflict, hunger due to dam – AlertNet

Biofuels: ‘Irrational’ and ‘worse than fossil fuels’, BBC News

World Bank: Africa’s economic growth to outpace average, BBC News

Dr Akinwumi Adesina: Building resilience in Nigeria

On 4th of March 2013, the 30th edition of the Brussels Development Briefing took place, the topic being “Agricultural resilience in the face of crisis and shocks”. Organized by CTA in collaboration with the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States (ACP) Secretariat, the EC/DEVCO, Concord, and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and hosted by the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), in Brussels, international experts and agriculturalists, including Gordon Conway discussed the concept of resilience and proven approaches to achieving it.

The keynote speaker, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, Honourable Minister of Agriculture of Nigeria, outlined his plans for increasing resilience and boosting agricultural productivity. He began by reminding us how susceptible we all are to the forces of nature be they climate, health, market or environment related. Food security is a key component of ensuring humans, households and systems are resilient to the impact of stresses and shocks.

Nigeria, in order to build resilience and tackle food insecurity through raising agricultural productivity and food production, launched the Agricultural Transformation Agenda in 2012. The overall goals are to add 20 Million tons (Mt) of food to the domestic food supply by 2015; to create 3.5 million jobs and to become a net exporter of food.

Dr Adesina outlined six policy areas for improving resilience.

1)    Access to affordable inputs.

Nigeria launched a database of farmers for the country, registering 4.2 million farmers in 2012 and hoping to expand to 10 million this year. The aim is to know the country’s farmers better in order to target policies to support them.

Also launched in 2012 was the Growth Enhancement Support (GES) through which farmers receive subsidised seeds and fertiliser via vouchers on their mobile phones. The government was taken out of the procurement and distribution of these inputs, ending corruption in the sector. In the first three months, 1.2 million farmers received subsidised inputs through their mobile phones and the target is to reach 5 million in 2013. The GES has incentivised seed and fertiliser companies to develop value chains to supply directly to the farmer and in 2012 fertiliser and seed companies sold $100 million worth of fertiliser and $10 million worth of seeds directly to farmers, as opposed to the government. Increasing accessibility to farm inputs, in the words of Dr Adesina, unleashed an agricultural revolution, and food production rose by 8.1 Mt in 2012.

Closing yield gaps through nutrient and water management

Could ‘sustainable intensification’ be the solution to meeting future food needs and reducing agriculture’s negative impact on the natural environment? Gordon Conway has defined this approach simply as ‘producing more while using fewer resources’, and the practical implementation of the term has been increasingly scrutinised and the subject of controversy. Indeed it is the topic of an upcoming Chatham House Food Security 2012 conference in London entitled, Sustainable intensification: miracle or mirage?

A recent paper in Nature discussed the possibility of agricultural intensification and specifically of closing yield gaps – the gap between yields which are attainable and yields which are observed – for 17 major crops. The variability in yields achieved for different crops was found to be largely due to differences in fertiliser use, irrigation and climate.

Authors of the paper found that closing the yield gaps by 100% would result in an increase of crop production for most major crops of 45% to 70%. Significant opportunities for intensification of major cereals exist in Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. Reaching this level of yield gap closure would, however, require increases in irrigation and nutrient application, actions that are not necessarily in line with the paradigm of sustainable intensification. Sub-Saharan Africa does, however, have large untapped water sources that, if used responsibly and, yes sustainably, could improve food production.