Ferloo.com -The farmers use mobile technologies successfully to bypass intermediaries – that distort market prices for agricultural products – and access to better seeds, said President Akinwumi Adesina, President of the African Development Bank (AfDB), the second day of the conference on the transformation of African agriculture, Thursday, October 22, 2015, in Dakar.
The new seed varieties and advances in agronomy, fruit of years of research, can also spread to other parts of Africa, through mobile technology.
“Now that we use new search technology to improve the efficiency of agricultural production, we need to find ways to market our crops and control agricultural value chains, “said Mr Adesina.
In a new effort to involve agricultural technologies to marketing chains, ADB announced it would set up a financing facility in the amount of US $ 300 million, designed to help women farmers to make greater use of existing technologies, to increase their crop yields and thus stimulate rapid agricultural growth.
“We must ensure that we give the loans to banks have an impact in terms of development in the area agriculture, “said Mr. Adesina, at a workshop on the sidelines of the conference” Feeding Africa “.
From the time he was Minister of Agriculture in Nigeria, launched Akinwumi Adesina a program supporting the development of growth (Growth Enhancement Support Scheme – GES), which helped to suppress the mercantile intermediaries, and to increase food production by over nine million metric tons in a year. He had also set up an electronic portfolio system, through which small farmers receive electronic vouchers for seed and subsidized fertilizer, directly on their mobile phones; they can exchange them against agricultural inputs from private sector suppliers.
Nearly 6 million farmers have used this mechanism, which allowed to improve the food security of 30 million people living in rural farms. It has also enabled women farmers previously marginalized in the former fertilizer distribution system, achieve better returns through the use of subsidized agricultural inputs, to which they have access via their mobile phone.
To illustrate the obstacles faced by startups in the food sector in Africa, Temi Aroge, a former Nigerian doctor converted in the food, cited difficulties in obtaining titles property for land and guarantees required by commercial banks to get a major -contraintes ready for marketing of agricultural products according to him.
“Capital head to the oil sector and banks development, which require guarantees from commercial banks before lending to the agro-food businesses, are not willing to provide funding in the absence of such guarantees, “lamented Aroge Temi, who directs a large cassava processing company.
The conference is focused on the development of new policies aimed at transforming African agriculture into a lucrative business for mass food production for consumption Local and export.
More than 400 delegates and experts from around the world discuss how to add value to raw materials on the continent, particularly in the so-called cash crops such as tea, coffee, cocoa and cotton – among others – by transforming them into finished products for local and export markets
.
No comments:
Post a Comment