Green Revolution in Africa: How to make banks listen to farmers, by World Bank chief

BY JIMOH BABATUNDE

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) recently released its annual African Agriculture Status Report which focused on climate change and climate-smart agriculture at the 2104 African Green Revolution Forum held in Addis Abba, Ethiopia.

A Nigerian, Dr. Ademola Braimoh, a senior natural resources management specialist with the World Bank, was part of the team which worked on the report. Braimoh, whose   principal area of focus is climate smart agriculture, spoke with Sunday Vanguard after the presentation of the report.
On what Climate Smart Agriculture is all about

Climate Smart Agriculture does three things. It increases agricultural productivity through improved agricultural practices. Two, it enhances adaptation and the resilience of the agricultural sector to climate change; and three, it reduces greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. So three things: increases productivity, enhances resilience and reduces greenhouse gas emission as well as increases carbon in soils and biomass. I should also mention that managing climate risk is central to climate smart agriculture. And of course you have to plan and help farmers make the necessary adaptation to farming systems.

On how it increases productivity

Climate Smart Agriculture increases productivity in a sustainable manner through proven agricultural technologies. One of them is integrated soil fertility management. This means you combine improved seeds, inorganic and organic fertiliser, with good water management. It has proven to increase yields substantially for farmers.

We also have agroforestry – a situation in which you combine trees – those trees might actually be fruit trees – with annual crops like maize, sorghum or millet or pasture on the same land. Agroforestry combines agricultural and forestry technologies to create more diverse, productive, profitable, and sustainable land-use systems.

Another example of Climate Smart Agriculture is conservation farming, This entails the use of crops residues or cover crops, minimal soil disturbance, as well as use of crop rotation. Crop rotation is the deliberate order of specific crops sown on the same field, for instance maize or sorghum followed by legumes. These three things taken together are collectively referred to as conservation farming.

On the success stories of the Climate Smart Agriculture

Climate Smart Agriculture has been applied in many parts of the world including Nigeria. We have example of agroforestry and conservation agriculture in Zambia.  In Niger farmer managed natural regeneration has helped to rehabilitate land expanse of degraded land. We also have examples in Ethiopia through the sustainable land management program. Integrated Soil Fertility Management is embedded in Soil Health Programs across Africa. In all of these places, we have seen increases in yields and improvement in environmental conservation. Erosion has decreased drastically and these are all good examples of Climate Smart Agriculture in different environment. And of course, in Nigeria there is the Climate Resilient Development, and National Agricultural Resilience Framework (NARF) that articulate the strategies to reduce food and nutrition vulnerability whilst enhancing environmental resilience. These are based on climate-smart principles. However, there is an urgently the need to rapidly scale up these technologies given the magnitude of food security and climate change problems in Africa.

On the growth of agriculture in Africa on this scenario

When you are talking about climate change, you see it just adds a new dimension to the challenges that farmers face. Let us start with the problems that we are used to like soil fertility; access to improved seeds; access to fertilizers; access to markets; and access to storage facilities. When you take all of these problems and add climate change, then the problems multiply. Climate change means increased weather variability.  A situation where farmers will now be operating under conditions they were never used to. Rains may come early sometimes, delay at other times and the pattern might be so erratic that the farmers will not just know what to do. There will be increased risks due to increased frequency of droughts and flooding as witnessed in Nigeria in 2012.

Climate change means higher frequency of failed seasons, that is, a situation where more human efforts have been expended than the yields harvested from farmlands.  That is not pleasant for the farmers at all. It means that their income will reduce; it means food security will be significantly curtailed. As a result of climate change, there will be high temperature at times; more than enough for crops and humans to cope with. Estimates by researchers indicate that for every one degree Celsius rise in global warming, yields can decrease by as much as 5%. This means a lot as far as income and food security is concerned.

Taken together, climate change will have severe consequences. One, it will lead to food insecurity, just like I mentioned. It also means that economic growth will be significantly curtailed because if agriculture remains stagnant, Africa will not grow. That is what we are talking about here and that is what climate change will cause. And when you talk about the whole of sub-Saharan Africa generally, currently we have about 240 million that are food insecure, by the time we get to 2050 and if we do nothing we will have over 300 million more people that will be food insecure. So that is a significant problem for the region.

You know that poverty will also increase, because when agriculture yields go down, when agricultural performance goes down, it also means that rural poverty will increase. You know that poverty reduction is very much linked to agricultural growth in Africa.

In fact, growth in the agricultural sector has been found out to be two to four times more effective in lifting people out of poverty compared to growth in other sectors like mining and other industrial activities. So if governments want to invest in development and poverty reduction, they should consider Climate Smart Agriculture.

On the position of smallholder farmers in this

The smallholder farmers are very important; they are in the rural set up and when they have difficulties they tend to migrate to urban areas. But what we have found out is that rural-urban migration is not a guaranteed pathway to moving out of poverty.

What we need to do is to place smallholder farmers at the centre of policy development. What can we do to help them? Create policies that help them to increase yields and access markets; create policies that provide non-farm employments in the rural areas; create policies that help them to improve the production of high value crops, because if they are able to market high value crops their incomes will improve and life will be better. So rather than just encouraging faster rural –urban migration, we should rather encourage faster and quicker rural development.

On his take from the AGRF 2014 and the benefit to small holder farmers

This forum has done some few things. Number one, it has elevated the fact that climate change is real and has enormous impacts on agriculture in Africa. Number two, it has elevated the fact that climate smart agriculture is crucial to addressing the twin problems of food insecurity and climate change. Number three, this forum has also made us aware that smallholder farmers must be at the centre of agricultural development policies. They produce 80% of the food we eat in Africa , so they need support, public and private to move agriculture forward, to improve productivity and reduce poverty in Africa.

On institutionalizing agriculture policies in Africa

Let me commend the Nigeria’s Agriculture Minister, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, for the work he is doing, and the President of Nigeria for giving him the support to transform the agricultural sector.  We have seen changes in the way farmers access inputs, we have seen changes in the storage of agricultural produce and other infrastructure needed for agriculture to grow. So what do we do to continue? There are other areas where we need improvement. We are talking of smallholder farmers, to what extent do they have access to credits? Not many of them have access to credit because they simply do not have the type of collateral that banks require. This is one of the areas in which policies can do better. 

 

Also, can we also create institutions in which farmers are empowered not like cooperatives, but like companies that can access funds from the banks? Banks will listen to companies more than cooperatives. We have so many agricultural cooperatives in Nigeria, but how many of them do banks listen to? In terms of research, climate change will mean that we create a new paradigm for research. We have to strengthen our research institutes to make sure that new crop and livestock varieties that can withstand the challenge of climate change are bred. Then also in the livestock sector, we have to promote competitiveness in terms of dairy and other livestock products. There must be marked improvements across the value chain and we must also emit less greenhouse gas per unit of product. We need to build our institutions, develop their technical capacities, so that they are able to compete favourably.

On GMO

We have to nationally evaluate GMOs and go for the ones that are compatible with our needs. There are well established standards for carrying out the evaluation.
 

-Culled from: http://www.vanguardngr.com