2 October 2007
Port Louis — The continent needs to improve its food production if it wants to escape the trap of poverty. For that to happen, basic tools like easy access to credit and fertilisers and a good transport infrastructure are needed.
Reliable credit, subsidised fertilisers and a good transport infrastructure would help African farmers.
Africa's farmers must have reliable access to credit, subsidised fertilisers and roads if the continent's agricultural decline is to be reversed, one of its most successful female agribusiness figures says.
Josephine Okot, who built her seed firm from nothing in 2004 into one of Uganda's largest private seed companies, said Africa produced around 2 tonnes of maize per hectare compared to 10 tonnes elsewhere in the world.
Small farmers were simply unable to get loans to pay for better seed and fertiliser, key to improving yields, she said. Okot said micro-credit schemes, which lend very small sums at high rates of interest to the poorest of the poor and popular among aid workers, simply do not work for farmers as they required weekly or monthly repayments. What farmers need is a system that would allow them to put off repayment until after harvest, she said.
"Micro-credit is designed for traders but does not work for agriculture," she told Reuters at the weekend on the sidelines of the Women's International Net-working conference in the Norwegian capital Oslo. "If we are ever to reverse the decline in African agriculture, that has to be addressed. My farmers have nowhere to go. Some of them have to sell their animals to make repayments."
Okot founded her company in 2004 when Uganda privatised its state seed distribution system and the company now reaches around a third of Uganda's 3 million farmers - a feat that won her an award for contribution to African agriculture from Norwegian
fertiliser firm Yara Inter-national .
Across Africa, farmers are using just 8 kg of fertiliser per hectare against 50 kg in the rest of the world, she said. Fertiliser is such a low-margin product and farmer buying power is so weak, many firms such as hers seldom bother to stock it.
Just as important was to put development aid into improving the continent's shambolic transport infrastructure, she said, with bad roads simply making long-distance exports uneconomical.
"If you improve production but you still cannot reach the market, you are still exactly where you were", Okot said. "That is one of the main reasons Africa remains trapped in poverty."
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