Joe De Vries, Director for the Program for Africa's Seeds Systems (PASS) at the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa, spoke to allAfrica at the sidelines of the Alliance for a Green Revolution Forum in Addis Ababa. Here are excerpts from the interview:
Can you elaborate on the relationship between smallholder agriculture and larger agribusiness companies.
I think we heard from the Agriculture Minister of Nigeria Akin Adesina loud and clear that private agribusiness firms operating within a given country are the friend to the policymaker and country leader trying to ensure food security and growth of the agricultural economy.
If anything I think it's just a new concept to people in these countries where the state has been the primary actor with regard to supply of seeds and fertilizer and being the off-taker of the surplus crop. And even in the case of advice on how to get higher yields that has mostly come from the government as well. And so there's a certain sense of unease about the change that's taking place but I think farmers are getting a better sets of goods and services, now than they were in the past. They have a choice now, and nobody's forcing them to buy one or another product from any given company. So if a company does sell a poor quality product they won't be able to do it for long. They'll be out of business.
I think people had similar misgivings when pharmacies originally got privatized and later on the telecoms industry, yet nobody would argue that we need to go back to a government only pharmacy or telecoms sector since we're all communicating and getting better access in Africa than we were before. And the same is playing out with seed. If you talk to farmers now, they'll inform you on that point.
More importantly than that is that yields are increasing and that's been Africa's biggest problem, that it has huge sections of its population involved directly in agricultural production but they were getting such miserably low yields as compared to the rest of the world. For a long time I think people got the feeling that that was as good as you can do in Africa. There was something wrong with the soils or maybe the farmers weren't as hard working, or weren't as well informed as farmers in other parts of the world. But we took a look at that a long time ago and realized that's the furthest thing from the truth. Africa's farmers are smart they're hard working, they were simply held back by a lack of really good adapted seed in large part and then other technologies that help that higher yielding crop seed do better.
Please share the stories of some of the entrepreneurs you've worked with at AGRA ...
I feel really fortunate that in this part of my to be working side by side with so many people who have taken the opportunity to offered to them by and run with it and achieved successes they probably never dreamed of. Let me talk about a cassava breeder in Mozambique named Annabella Zacharia.
She recognized a new disease that had come into the cassava crop in Northern Mozambique in the late 1990s early 2000s that actually caused a localized famine it got so bad, called Cassava Brown Streak Disease.
It's caused by a virus and it became an epidemic. She took aim at that disease and said I'm going to fix that. We sent her off for training, she did her PhD at a South African university on that very topic, genetics and breeding and how to prevent that disease from occurring in a cassava crop.
And even as she was doing her PhD she had her breeding operation back home and she was making crosses between susceptible and local varieties.
She eventually came up with a whole new generation of cassava varieties which were both resistant and could be grown in that part of the country, Nampula Province of Mozambique. Well fast forward to today and just this past year she was given the presidential award for contribution in the field of sciences by the president of Mozambique for her work.
Just the kind of story that brings tears to my eyes and I couldn't be prouder of her. Farmers are the ones who have benefited the most, they have increased their cassava harvest, and new industries have sprung up around higher yielding cassava varieties for example SABMiller started a brewery in Mozambique that uses cassava because they had enough to take it off and make value added products.
I just want to talk about the other side of Africa in a company that was started by Maïmouna Coulibaly. This is a seed company, not a public breeding operation.
But she had accompanied her husband when he went and got a Masters in Agronomy at MidWest in the United States. While she was there she went to work for a seed company, I think she said it was Dekalb, in the accounting division because that's her background. But when she got back to Mali she realized that there was no Dekalb of Mali. There was no equivalent to that kind of company.
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So she got it into her head that she would be the first one to start a private seed company and so AGRA met her and started a conversation that led to us giving her what we call a start up seed grant and that's literally a grant to get seed production started and being bought by farmers.
In her first year I think she produced 10 metric tonnes of seed, that's a good effort for a first year but just to put it into perspective she within four years was producing over two thousand metric tonnes and her business has stabilized and continues to grow.
She's serving thousands of Malian farmers with her seed. So those are the kinds of stories which for me bring tears to my eyes, I know the good that comes out that effort and I know the kind of satisfaction that it brings her to have become an important person in Mali and to be playing a major role in feeding the country.
