Business Daily (Nairobi)
Allan Odhiambo
2 October 2007
Retailing of certified agricultural seeds may be headed for a transformation as a recently formed alliance to fight hunger and poverty in Africa strives to make access of the key in-put easier at the lowest retail point.
As part of a strategy to radically boost agricultural productivity, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra) envisages to have in place a special grassroots based delivery system in which a farmer would walk to a shop or kiosk in his rural back yard and readily access high quality certified seeds.
The kiosk attendant would also be trained to advise on how to maximise on the returns of his production venture, including aspects such as choice of right seed types, all for free.
"Access to seeds has been a missing link and challenge to merchandisers. In most rural areas you cannot find agricultural inputs yet the main activity there is farming," Fred Muhhuku, an agro-dealer network development officer with Agra told Business Daily in an interview.
Though the number of seed companies has grown rapidly over the past 10 years alone, projections from the industry showed that growers still travelled for about seven kilometres to access the in put from stockists.
A recent study by Egerton University revealed that lack of proximity to stockists was a key impediment to productivity.
"The farmers often travel long distances to purchase inputs, mainly to take advantage of lower prices," the institution's research out fit, Tegemeo Institute stated in a research report titled : " Enhancing Access and Utilization of Quality Seed for improved Food Security in Kenya".
Agra is seeking to reverse this trend in Kenya and thirteen other nations through an elaborate agro-dealer system backed by a private sector arrangement that would ensure direct linkage to farmers at the lowest level and closest to their farms.
"Local boutiques are selling all sorts of things be it Coca Cola, washing powder, cooking oil and airtime. There is no reason why they cannot sell seeds if they are cheap enough for farmers to purchase," the director of Agra's programme for Africa's seed systems, Joseph DevRies said.
The official said past strategies of providing free seeds to farmers through national programmes were not sustainable. "Farmers need access to seeds on an on going basis," he said.
Analysts however said the new strategy of make access to seeds easier at the grassroots by Agra faced a major challenge of quality control.
"We already have fake seed peddlers even at the existing broader levels of merchandising. It would be interesting to see how the new system would cope with monitoring quality at the lowest points," Paul Gamba, a researcher with Tegemeo Institute told Business Daily.
The researcher further said the proposed new system would also demand that other inputs such as fertilisers are also distributed alongside the seeds.
The alliance, which was established last year with an initial US$150 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, targets to help millions of small-scale farmers and their families across the continent to lift themselves and their families out of poverty and hunger through sustainable increases in farm productivity and incomes.
It came as a response to recent calls by African leaders to chart a new path for prosperity by spurring the continent's agricultural development and also seeks to help reverse decades of relative neglect in funding for agricultural development for Africa.
AGRA's strategy is designed to firm the vision laid out in the African Union's Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), which seeks a six per cent annual growth in food production by 2015 through increased usage of new technology and inputs such as fertiliser.
According to the policy framework of the Nairobi headquartered Agra, it is expected to work throughout the continent on a wide range of interventions across the agricultural "value chain," ranging from strengthening local and regional agricultural markets, to helping improve irrigation, soil health and training for farmers, to supporting the development of new seed systems better equipped to cope with the harsh African climate.
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