Partnership for Increased Food Production

Fri, Jul 5, 2013

By publisher

4 MIN READ

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Four African countries benefit from a programme that will give small time farmers access to new technologies in food production

|  By Maureen Chigbo  |  Jul. 15, 2013 @ 01:00 GMT

JULY 1, will remain memorable to smallholder farmers in four African countries namely Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, and Tanzania. That was the day USAID and the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa, AGRA, announced the Scaling Seeds and Technologies Partnership, a programme that will accelerate smallholder farmer’s access to transformative agricultural technologies through the $47 million, three-year partnership programme.

The partnership will work in the four countries within the G8’s New Alliance for Food Security, where it will help governments to strengthen their seed sectors and promote the commercialisation, distribution and adoption of improved seeds and other key technologies. The partnership aims to increase production of high-quality seeds by 45 percent in three years and ensure that 40 percent more farmers gain access to innovative agricultural technologies.

The Scaling Seeds and Technologies Partnership will help deliver on these New Alliance commitments. By strengthening seed and input sectors, the partnership’s efforts will leverage technology’s tremendous potential to spur agricultural growth in Africa. Which, in turn, can catalyse broad-based economic growth, improve smallholder incomes, and reduce hunger, poverty and stunting in children. These gains will also help partner governments to meet the country-determined agricultural priorities they set during the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Plan, CAADP, process.

By helping African farmers access improved seeds, inputs, and complementary technologies, the Scaling Seeds and Technologies Partnership helps to boost agricultural productivity, food security, and economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa.  To kick off its new coordination role, the Seeds and Technologies Partnership held an inaugural workshop last week, in Nairobi, Kenya, where USAID and AGRA representatives consulted with key government, research, donor and private-sector partners on strategies for coordination and collaboration. These discussions mark the first in a series of in-depth, national-level dialogues on scaling up farmers’ access to agricultural innovations in New Alliance countries.

”The Scaling Seeds and Technologies Partnership will help strengthen seed sectors, including regulatory systems, and create new local seed companies, ensuring that game-changing technologies can reach and improve the lives of millions of smallholders. The United States will continue to support this and other New Alliance efforts through Feed the Future, President Obama’s global hunger and food security initiative,” said Rajiv Shah, USAID Administrator.

“We have seen great progress in the development of seeds and other agricultural technologies in recent years. Crucially, these are seeds that are suited to Africa’s soil, weather and needs — they hold tremendous promise for Africa’s smallholder farmers. AGRA has been working with our partners across the continent: We have supplied 57,000 metric tons of seeds and released over 300 improved seed varieties. This partnership with USAID will enable us to scale up this work and ensure that even more smallholder farmers can benefit from these extraordinary technologies,” said Jane Karuku, president of AGRA.

The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition was announced by Obama at the 2012 G8 Camp David Summit, the New Alliance now includes nine member countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Tanzania. Senegal is slated to join the New Alliance in the fall of 2013. In these countries, the New Alliance matches market-oriented regulatory reforms with more than $3.75 billion in commitments from the private sector in agriculture.

When the New Alliance was launched, United States President Barack Obama and others pledged to leverage technology’s transformative potential by taking innovation to scale. To accomplish this, they were committed to a series of enabling actions to promote adoption of agricultural technologies: setting yield targets that support country-defined agricultural goals, identifying key innovations that can help farmers reach those targets, harnessing information and communication technologies to support agricultural growth as well as promoting policy reforms to improve the enabling environment for agricultural investment that will lift millions out of poverty.

Feed the Future is a U.S. Government’s global hunger and food security initiative. With a focus on smallholder farmers, particularly women, Feed the Future supports partner countries in developing their agriculture sectors to spur economic growth and trade that increase incomes and reduce hunger, poverty and under nutrition.