“WE have the land, manpower and the expertise, and all we need are the machines to change the face of agriculture in Africa.”
This confident affirmation was made by women farmers in the Southern African Development Community and Eastern Africa Farmers Federation (EAFF) regions when they gathered in Johannesburg, South Africa, recently.
The farmers had gathered in Johannesburg to chart the way forward for small-scale farmers, majority of who are women.
The affirmation matched the profound confidence of the women and their critical role in a food- secure Africa.
Around the world, women produce more than half the food. It is a fact that despite the progress Africa has made in eradicating disease, advancing new technologies and improving well-being, it is still difficult to understand why the continent fails to feed its population.
The timing of the affirmation could not have been more appropriate: the African Union has declared 2015 to be the Year of Women’s Empowerment and Development towards Africa’s Agenda 2063. The popular version of Agenda 2063 is the Africa we want.
Nowhere is chronic food insecurity so entrenched as it is in Africa, where one in four people go to bed hungry each night.
But the good news is that this can change and Africa can feed itself and the world.
And agricultural mechanisation has been identified as one of the components that can successfully drive the agriculturE sector in Africa.
“We have the knowledge, the technology and even the resources to end hunger. What has long been missing from the equation is the necessary machinery at the family farming level and the smallholder farmers,” said Janet Bitegeko, executive director of the Agricultural Council of Tanzania.
Ms Bitegeko says agricultural mechanisation is considered one of the essential factors for promoting agriculture and reducing poverty among farm households.
Identifying appropriate support for mechanisation is crucial in many African countries with potentially assorted needs.
However, access to machinery and information has been lacking regarding how best farmers can access funds to buy machinery in order to transform their farming activities.
There is widespread consensus that ending hunger and rural poverty needs increased production of food per unit land.
Increased productivity requires modernisation of agriculture and mechanisation is a key ingredient to increasing food production.
EAFF president Phillip Kiriro says smallholders are the major food producers, therefore modernisation of farming needs to happen on smallholder farms.
“Mechanisation is about more than just tractors. Mechanisation needs to include: planting, crop protection, irrigation, harvesting, processing, manufacturing. And when you look at the statistics, smallholder farmers and family farms are the major food producers globally and not in Africa alone,” Dr Kiriro said.
He said there was huge demand for agricultural mechanisation given the labour costs, seasonality, and dynamics of mechanisation use and agricultural labour demand, and liquidity constraints. All these are important features of many farm households in African countries.
But despite individual success stories, especially among commercial farmers, Africa needs to reverse the hunger status quo that indicates that more than one out of every five of its citizens have no access to food.
“Africa can change this situation,” Uganda’s young farmer, Elizabeth Nsimadala, said, pointing out that most of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world are in Africa and also that most of the economies are agro-based.
The challenge for Africa, she added, is lack of machinery to drive agriculture to its full potential.
“Women farmers are already the main food producers in most countries. They can do even more with the right kind of support. The best way is to create the conditions so they can blossom and contribute to economies, and in turn end hunger,” Ms Nsimadala said.
The use of machines will mean transforming subsistence farmers into efficient and productive actors.
It also means improving access to financial services, training, and technology use that is suitable to the needs of women farmers.
New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) director of programme implementation & coordination Estherine Fotabong says there Is need to move away from the old way of farming.
“We need to move in the 21st century and do things differently if we hope to see more young people getting interested in agriculture. Therefore, mechanisation and technology play an indispensable role,” Ms Fotabong said.
For women, she says, one of their major challenges in agriculture is their heavy workload such as taking care of households and children. Therefore farming tends to take a toll on their lives.
“When it comes to mechanisation of agriculture, we have to consider that the majority of farmers are smallholders. In this context we have to look at appropriate technologies to specifically support small-holder women farmers,” Ms Fotabong said.
The NEPAD Agency has entered into an alliance with five other organisations that promote “climate smart agriculture”, a farming method that involves, among other things, bringing technologies to small-holder women farmers.
Female small-scale farmers dominate the agricultural landscape in most production environments in sub-Saharan Africa.
Yet they constitute the majority of rural actors locked in socio-cultural structures that limit their agricultural productivity, efficiency and effectiveness at all points across the value chain.
Key examples are entrenched inequities in access to productive land, limited access to credit, poor access to markets as well as extension services including agricultural technologies relevant to their needs.
Modern technologies are thus critical in supporting production, as well as in value addition as the need has been expressed by women themselves. PUBLISHED IN THE ZAMBIA DAILY MAIL ON FEB 16, 2015
