Nairobi — The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa recently flagged off a special project to ease and prioritise trade in staple crops.

The project gives the biggest market access opportunity to date to competitively produced agricultural products in the 400 million people-strong region.

The 13th Comesa Summit held at Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, a few weeks ago endorsed the project, named Alliance for Commodity Trade in Eastern and Southern Africa (ACTESA).

Officials from the Secretariat in Lusaka say ACTESA is the answer to the regions' challenges, particularly those facing agricultural products.

Top of these challenges are poor infrastructure, low productivity, and constraints to technology and policy.

The project seeks to work with individual farmers and organise them into producer and trade networks that, if successful, will be integrated into national and regional markets.

Comesa is now a Customs Union. And for the first time, there is a body taking charge of an industry in which small-scale farmers, who form the bulk of Comesa's population, are employed, says Dr Cris Muyunda, Comesa's senior agricultural advisor.

The body will address issues related to market access -- hence improve food security and farmers' livelihood.

Comesa has a huge and lucrative food exports market, but only 10 per cent of farmers in the region produce for these markets. The remaining 90 per cent are small-scalefarmers.

ACTESA attempts to bring into the trading bracket the majority of farmers who are left out due to poor organisation, unpredictable selling mechanisms and poor infrastructure.

During the summit, Comesa leaders bemoaned the state of infrastructure in the region. In transporting farm produce, for example, fixing the rural road network is critical, as is the warehousing infrastructure. Only then can farmers benefit from this trade opportunity.

Available data shows that $3 billion worth of intra Comesa trade is in agricultural products.

Equally important, all 19 member states spend a whopping $19 billion on food imports.

In spite of that, half the Comesa member states remain chronically food insecure.

For Uganda, one of the bloc's highest staple food producing countries, ACTESA could be a windfall, but only if the country's rural infrastructure is fixed.

Uganda's road network is worrying.

A 2006 study by Comesa revealed that for every dollar injected in business in Uganda, at least 20 cents is lost due to the sorry state of the roads.

The country is not faring any better on warehousing.

There are only three operational warehouses in Uganda's grain baskets of Jinja, Masindi and Kasese.

Nonetheless, Uganda exports substantial volumes of grains, particularly to Sudan and Kenya, both members of Comesa.

In its May 2009 report, the Regional Agricultural Trade Intelligence Network says Kenya bought 9,978 metric tonnes of maize and 12,189 metric tonnes of beans from Uganda.

This was a significant rise from 5,279 metric tonnes of maize and 11264 metric tonnes of beans the previous month.

But the intelligence network warns that supplies to the markets are dwindling due to unpredictable weather in Uganda.

Kenya could, in particular, suffer food shortfalls as more of Uganda's staple crops are channelled to Sudan.

Further, Uganda is hard-pressed to feed 1.9 million people in the food insecure northern and north eastern regions.

The World Food Programme requires 87,883 metric tonnes of assorted foodstuff for this, worth about $78 million.

To ease the infrastructure issues, ACTESA will take a chunk of the bloc's infrastructure budget to improve road networks and to remove other impediments to market access.

At the groundbreaking 2007 Summit in Nairobi, Comesa agreed to a $28 billion fund, to which 10 members are fully subscribed now.

This April, the bloc launched the $2.7 billion North-South corridor project that will stretch from Egypt to Swaziland to ease trade.

Other transport corridors that remain critical to trade within the region are the northern corridor from Mombasa to Goma and Bujumbura via Kampala, the Lamu-Southern Sudan-Ethiopia and the Djibouti-Addis Ababa-Khartoum corridors.