The Resilience of Organisations for Transformative Smallholder Agriculture Project (ROOTS) recently convened a day's information-sharing seminar targeting buyers and producers alongside other key players within the agricultural sector to create better collaboration and market access for them.
Speaking at a forum held at a local hotel in Senegambia, Mamour Alieu Jagne, project director, underscored the significance of the forum, saying the forum, which attracted key stakeholders, was designed for them to better interact and share ideas with view to ensuring that each player got to know what the other wanted.
Marketing of agricultural produce, Jagne went on, is a major challenge in the sector. "So, we are trying to solve that problem by bringing together the buyers and producers with the objectives of ensuring that they know what each other are planning and how they can meet the demand of each other," he said. "We hope that this forum will bring that much needed partnership among them. We call it the '4ps partnership' which is the public-private partnership."
He said that at the level of the root project, they would continue to facilitate such an interface between buyers and producers for them to negotiate agreements including the price, quantity and other bargains.
"Again, I think it is safe to say that not everything that is produced will be marketed or sold immediately," he stated, saying: "That's why we have cold storage facilities with the desire to minimize the post-harvest losses. Again, with the availability of these storage facilities, farmers don't have to sell their produce immediately. They can keep their produce at the storage facilities in order to negotiate. We have already built storage facilities but hopefully, we are planning to build other ones nationwide to ease the challenges farmers are encountering when it comes to storage of their produce."
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Fatoumatta Sanyang, Roots Project Business Development Officer, explained that the forum was aimed at building a relationship between the ROOTs intervention side, producers and the private sector that are represented by SMEs and Commercial-farmer organisations with the desire to create a market for farmers.
"Therefore, it is important we start building relationships between the key players that are the producers and buyers so as to enable farmers to have access to the market, wherein it will not be difficult for our producers to have a market once their produce is ready," she reasoned.
Building the capacity of farmers, he observed, is crucial and the initiative would go a long way in fostering collaboration and networking between the producers and buyers.
"Roots will continue to support across the country especially its intervention sites with the desire to ensure that they overcome their challenges," said Nuha Nyangado, Roots project capacity development, knowledge management and communication officer.
