'Indigenous Knowledge of African farmers be enhanced'

Dr Ahmed Yakubu Alhassan, the Deputy Minister of Food and Agriculture in charge of Crops, on Wednesday reiterated the need for indigenous knowledge of the African farmer to be enhanced, to achieve food security and sovereignty.

He said Africa had the needed trained human resources in scientific research to contribute to that knowledge or technology development.

Dr Alhassan, who was speaking at the opening of the Fourth Planning and General Meeting of Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) in Accra, said “the era of despair, timidity and sometimes outright cynicism of African agriculture must give way to confidence, mutual trust and co-operation among stakeholders.”

AFSA is a Pan-African platform of 21 networks and farmer organisations championing small African Family Farming/Production Systems based on agro-ecological and indigenous approaches that sustain food sovereignty and the livelihoods of communities.

The three-day meeting is on the theme: "Building on International Year of Soils, Strengthening Family Farming,” and it is being attended by over 30 participants from the continent.

Dr Alhassan said: “African family farms need technology generated by African scientists in Africa to increase productivity. This is paramount in the light of eroding natural resources and therefore dwindling potential for exploitation,” he said.

He said only Science and Technology could sustain the twin challenges of increasing productivity with less water and soil resources, and that explained why African governments were seeking the best technology either from conventional or biotechnology sources, to address the growing problems of climate change and its impact on food security.

That, he said, governments do by creating a level playing field for safe engagement of all technologies in agriculture and “we cannot achieve these objectives by pulling apart, but by pooling our collective strengths as public and private non-governmental sectors for the benefit of enhanced family farm productivity and African food and nutrition security”.

He said evidence suggested that family farmers in Africa were highly vulnerable to poverty, especially considering their limited capacity to absorb shocks, such as climate change and market forces, which had implications for food and nutrition security.

He, therefore, called for a holistic action to effectively put in place appropriate policy environment to help resource poor family farmers, to deploy their productivity potential, and sustainably manage the natural resources to enable them to feed the world and care for the environment.

Dr Alhassan said MOFA in its efforts to address those challenges, had outlined a number of strategies for implementation in its policy document (FASDEP II), including development of appropriate irrigation schemes for farmers to produce throughout the year; and the introduction of high-yielding and short duration crop varieties.

The rest are the development of effective post-harvest management facilities; mainstream sustainable land and environmental management practices in agricultural sector planning and promotion and development of community land use plans among others.

He said the Ministry was also promoting the upscale of improved land and water management practices in smallholder farming communities and agricultural landscapes in 10 districts of the three Northern regions of the country, through the operations of the Sustainable Land and Water management Project.

Examples of technologies being promoted under the project include intensification of mulching, intercropping, conservation agriculture, crop rotation, integrated crop-livestock management, agro-forestry, improved grazing and improved water management being implemented along the commodity value chain.

The Adaptation of Agro-ecological Systems to Climate Change Project is another area of intervention being piloted in 10 smallholder farming communities in the Guinea savannah and Forest-Transitional Agro-ecological zones by the Ministry.

“The project aims at building capacity of both extension staff and farmers for promoting and adopting practices that support climate change adaptation. So far, the project has supported the establishment of a weather information platform, training farmers on good soil management practices (fertilizer and soil conservation) and a community seed development scheme which makes available to farmers high quality seeds of their preferred varieties as a climate change adaptation measure,” he added.

Mr Bernard Guri, Chairman of AFSA, said their concern was to save African seeds, land and African agro-ecological farming practices that had fed Africa, and would continue to feed Africa and its ecology, while enhancing African cultural integrity.