Huambo — The director-general of ADRA, Carlos Cambuta, on Wednesday in central Huambo Province called for the Angolan government to focus more on family farming, with the aim of ensuring the stability of the Strategic Food Reserve (REA).
Speaking to the press on the sidelines of a seminar to draw up ADRA's 2023-2027 strategic plan, Cambuta said family farming would provide responses to food shortages and access to employment, mainly in rural communities and supply stability of the REA through domestic production.
Cambuta said that the ADRA's vision is that the Food Strategy Reserve be supplied through domestic production, with substantive stimulus to family agriculture and not through exports, since the stock aims to meet the food shortage at a national level, with guarantees of nutritional security.
Cambuta added that the stability of the Strategic Food Reserve, through domestic production will also ensure and stimulate the flow of products from small and large farmers in the country.
For that, he asked for the improvement of the roads to motivate transport cooperatives and businesspeople to get increasingly involved in the agricultural segment.
Betting on family farming, he added, implies, among others, encouraging the production of seeds and fertilizers, technical assistance, facilitating access to credit and land titles to expand production fields, with focus on self-sustainability, development of the national economy and reducing hunger and poverty.
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He informed that ADRA's seminar aimed, among others, to compile actions to be developed in the next five years to contribute to sustainable development of families, with actions that serve to combat poverty and access to education, in addition to empowerment for greater self-sustainability.
The REA has been operational since December 2021 and essentially aims to store food, with a view to helping in emergency situations, calamities and, finally, to influence the supply of some goods from the basic food basket in order to reduce prices in situations of rising prices.
It is an initiative of the Angolan government to stimulate an increase in farming and agro-industrial activities in the country, as well as providing for the acquisition, storage and distribution to wholesale traders of various tones of foodstuffs.
The Angolan non-governmental organisation Action for Rural Development and the Environment (ADRA) was created in 1990. It is focused on promoting the country's democratic and sustainable social, economic and environmental development and national reconciliation.
