Towards productive, sustainable and inclusive agriculture, forestry and fisheries
FAO confirms support to 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development
16 September, 2016, Accra –Interviews with Clayton Campanhola, FAO Strategic Programme Leader, Sustainable Agriculture and Jamie Morrison, FAO Strategic Programme Leader, Food Systems Programme, on a working visit to the Regional Office for Africa (Accra) ahead of the Regional workshop for Africa (Kigali, 19-21 Sept. 2016): Towards productive, sustainable and inclusive agriculture, forestry and fisheries in support to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: the audio interview (by Samuel Nyarko and Liliane Kambirigi, FAO).
The press version
Question: How can FAO and its partners make agriculture and food systems more attractive to the youth in developing countries? With particular emphasis on Africa, what specific measures could enhance agriculture and make it more attractive for the youth to get into agriculture and related sciences?
ANSWER - Jamie Morrison:
Creating jobs for the youth particularly in rural areas is critical, given the high levels of unemployment. So we really need to tackle this problem.
Demand for food in Africa is growing significantly; and it offers an opportunity not to only increase production but also processing, aggregation and distribution of food, each of which requires employment, with particular opportunities for the youth.
FAO has been supporting a number of initiatives in Africa countries, one of which is a programme for youth employment in Nigeria. The N-Agripreneur Programme is essentially equipping graduates, the youth, to be more involved in agribusiness. This is likely to benefit about 18,500 youth.
We can also look at how we can create the facilities for the youth to be more engaged in processing, transportation and logistics by providing access to credit.
Here innovative solutions are required given that finance institutions are often reluctant to lend to youth who are less experienced and do not yet have access to collaterals. One that the FAO has been pursuing is to link training programme for the youth in business skills to the provision of credit. Lenders are then more prepared to provide credit to the youth because they know they have been trained in certain aspects of the business.
Question: Clayton, access to land and natural resources is also putting some pressure on the environmental conditions that are more conducive to agribusiness or agriculture by the youth.
How do you think FAO can help improve those challenges and how can we improve the way we are doing business now for the youth?
ANSWER - Clayton Campanhola:
There is a huge opportunity for youth employment in agriculture. Agriculture is very important for Africa for income generation to many rural people.
Currently, there are about 200 million young people aged between 14 and 25 years in Africa, and it is a challenge but also an opportunity to employ all these people.
Agriculture production is a way of doing that, but we should make it more attractive. It has to go beyond business-as-usual, to be more innovative and more appealing in terms of technology, mechanization, information and communication technology.
However, there is a need for skills development. The youth could become entrepreneurs in rural areas so that they can run agriculture production in a different way, linking their activities to the market and adapting the agricultural production systems accordintly to the demands of consumers. Skills development is a very important issue to young people and FAO can support that.
But there are challenges to be considered, such as poor access to land and credit, and related risks, which are crucial to successful and profitable agriculture production
FAO can also help to better engage young people in the decision making process. They need to participate in the community gatherings and have their role well recognized in the formulation and implementation of public policies as well as be given a position in the governance mechanism.
They can play an important role in bringing innovative ideas to the rural areas considering not only in agriculture production but also in activities and services aggregated to the rural areas. For instance, non-agricultural activities such as natural resources contemplation and practice of sports can be attractive to tourists that visit rural areas.
Agri-tourism is another opportunity for the rural areas that can also add value to agriculture production. Therefore, there are many opportunities that can be added to agriculture production, and that is why l think the youth have many opportunities to work in rural areas that can transform agricultural production.
Question: Gender is high on the cross cutting initiatives. How sufficiently is Gender integrated, particularly the women factor. to address food security at the subsistence level or at home or in the community? What would it take to up-scale their integration into the market at country level?
ANSWER-Jamie:
Let me talk about development of marketing systems in agriculture and in particular, the food value chain. There are many things we can do to ensure that women can also benefit equally from the opportunities that these new developments in food systems create.
For example, FAO is currently supporting greater participation of women in a number of value chains ranging from tubers, fisheries, horticulture in several African countries including Ghana through a Swedish development cooperation project. This has three elements.
One is strengthening the capacity of the women themselves, providing training in managerial aspects and how to conduct business, providing technological solutions which are more appropriate including technology that deals with smaller quantities of certain types of products and can assist in adding value.
The second component deals with the strengthening of the institutions and the policies that affect the extent in which women can participate in value chains. This for example can create the environment in which women can trade across borders more safely and more beneficially to themselves?
And the third area where FAO is providing assistance is in developing knowledge in best practice in regard to assisting women to participate in these marketing opportunities.
FAO has wide experience across many countries and across many regions so we can draw all that together to provide advice to our member countries on how they can help women to participate and to benefit more equally from these opportunities.
Question: Why is it that we have difficulty in advancing in that sector of making women more advance in the agriculture sector as a whole, as in policy, as in women organization, in integration into markets, what is it that we don’t know what to do?
ANSWER-Clayton:
Actually FAO has been doing a lot in terms of gender equality, looking at how to better integrate women into the food systems.
There are two particular indicators in the FAO’s sustainable agriculture programme that address women employment and empowerment. They measure access to land, credit, mechanization, new technological practices so that women can be more competitive, reminding that they have to produce not only to feed their families, but also to sell part of their production, as Jamie has just mentioned, so women need to be trained to have better access to market and to run business.
So it is very similar to what we should do with the youth. Today in Africa, women run many agriculture production fields, 40-45% of the total family farms, therefore they cannot be left behind.
FAO is paying more attention to women in agriculture. One of the tools that FAO is using broadly to train women and to promote their access to sustainable practices and technologies are the farm field schools. This methodology was initiated to put in practice integrated pest management, but now it has been expanded to facilitate the adoption of available and most appropriate sustainable practices in a participatory process with the woman producers throughout the growing season.
Women are key to those farm field schools initiatives. This is something that will be considered in our next Mid-Term Plan 2018-21 for gender equality improvement in terms of capacity building and policy development.
Question: We have seen FTT facility oven to dry and smoke fish that is spreading in Cote d’Ivoire and Angola to help women dry and smoke fish and sell. But, to-date, sales are still at the street level.
How can we really upscale this new activity with a new technology up to a point where women can have consistent income and be a part of the market? What is it that is missing there?
ANSWER-Jamie:
The market is not just a single outlet where you can sell your products. There are many market segments as we call them with each providing different prices to different qualities of products and one of the difficulties that women have, is to be able to supply a consistent quality and quantity that are required to access the segments which provide higher returns.
Women, as with many vulnerable groups, often are unable to access these segments of the markets. Therefore, one aspect that can be considered is how we provide the opportunity for women to work together to aggregate their products and ensure quality and safety.
We are working with the producer, in this case the woman transforming the fish to introduce improved techniques and practices and also working with the buyer to build their confidence that the product will be supplied consistently and to a high quality.
Question: How do you make agriculture production for these women intensive, sustainable and stable? So how do you make that chain link up to that stage?
ANSWER -Clayton: They need not only more training and capacity building, but also to have access to new technologies. The way they currently produce requires a lot of physical efforts; so somehow FAO needs to help them to alleviate their hard work with new technologies and new practices to alleviate their labour, such as small machines and equipments. Overall, l think this is the main challenge.
Question: Seven African countries have achieved the MDG goal of halving extreme poverty. How would FAO assist MDG awarded-countries to ensure that the feat achieved is not eroded transiting from the MDGs to the SDGs, in other words keeping up the efforts towards resilience and sustainable food security and nutrition, fitting into Malabo Declaration?
ANSWER-Clayton:
The challenge is on the transition from the MDGs to SDGs and the main difference is that the MDGs were led by the UN system and now the SDGs are led by the countries.
So the countries will decide on where they want to put more emphasis; the priorities they will put more efforts to implement. l think this is the key point and the role of FAO is to inform and support the countries to build the right approaches and to implement them. The recently developed framework for sustainable food and agriculture by FAO can help the countries to look at the components of sustainable agriculture in a comprehensive way so that they can make choices and decide on the trade-offs between them.
So, how well are the countries supposed to do in regards to, for instance, resilience and sustainable food security and nutrition, more sustainable food systems?
This is one of the roles that FAO can play in terms of putting together food security and hunger, improving nutrition, improving sustainable agriculture and then taking care of climate change adaptation and mitigation, taking care of water management and water conservation, taking care of marine and aquatic organisms and so on.
In addition, desertification, soil degradation, land degradation, biodiversity loss and so on. So, all these resources are considered together. So it is much more challenging for the countries to implement the SDGs. They are all committed to do that.
FAO actually has a very important role in the different levels for the different SDGs. However, we are now working on to which sustainable goals should we give more attention because FAO is the custodian organization for 21 of those indicators that countries have to follow to monitor and to report the results.
In that sense, l think the way we are looking at production systems and food systems in a more integrated way can be very helpful to countries for them to look at how to change policies, how to change the governance mechanisms, how they need to change the way they are managing all those issues and what are the new challenges so that they can succeed in terms of implementation of the SDGs.
Question: In very concrete terms, you are heading from here to Rwanda to have a workshop there on this topic.
Actually, how has Rwanda responded?
Rwanda now is known as one of the most advanced countries in terms of the CAADP; and MDGs now going into SDGs, how has that story with Rwanda started?
ANSWER-Clayton: The idea was to select 1-3 countries to implement the five principles of sustainable food agriculture adopted by FAO. The government of Rwanda has decided to intensify agriculture production and at the same time to conserve and manage better the natural resources. For instance, they have a program to recover 2 million of degraded land with forest. So this is the main principle behind sustainability that is to better integrate the different sectors of agriculture, namely crop, livestock, fisheries, aquaculture and forestry.
So those are clear examples of integrating crop production with natural resources management and to the advantages of synergistic planning and actions between the Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources with the Ministry of Natural Resources.
The idea of the workshop is to share the experience of Rwanda with the other eight countries of the regional initiative in Africa on sustainable intensification of agriculture and value chain development. It is an opportunity to learn from Rwanda’s experience and how the countries can use Rwanda as an example to look at how they are doing, managing the process and also how they have selected the priorities and so on.
They established a roadmap and are implementing the five principles of sustainability in a specific district called Rulindo. I think this is a good way of working and sharing experience and we need to do more of that in Africa.
We need to share more of the successful experiences to scale them up including in other countries. But the countries have to develop their own priorities and they have to develop their own roadmaps so that they can better implement sustainable food systems.
Question: Jamie, what are your expectations from the Kigali workshop? What major constraints need to be overcome in order to attain those goals and principles?
ANSWER-Jamie:
FAO we have components of work supporting different countries but these are not necessarily connected. Learning from one another across the nine countries under the regional initiative, we can see where we need to add value.
For example, if we are working on the development of a new technology in one country, we can learn a lot by sharing lessons and experiences across the countries as to the conditions that need to be in place for its adoption and try to identify a way of bringing these different components together.
The real challenge for countries is to dramatically improve levels of coordination and collaborations between government and ministries and institutions and between public sector and the private sector, and between both of those and civil society to ensure that the objectives are aligned within the country.
We also have to be coherent in the policies.This is particularly so in the case of agriculture and food systems in the context of the SDGs because developments in these systems are critical to so many of the SDGs, whether in terms of the extent to which food, nutrition and security can be eliminated or whether in the case of expanding employment opportunities to reduce poverty, or in the case of reducing the pressure on natural resources and the environment.
This would also apply to contributing to developing sustainable cities by ensuring that the urban poor have access to nutritious and diverse foods. In every dimension of the sustainable development goals, how these systems has evolved is going to be critical.
We need to work across FAO and across the strategic programs to really help countries to coordinate their actions and to have the best effects. If you look at the collaboration between Ministries of Agriculture and Ministries of Commerce in many countries, there is very little interaction yet the way in which trade policies are formulated can have significant impacts on agriculture sector development. For example, it can create new export opportunities in neighboring countries and in the region or further aside.
But if we get the wrong export promotion policies in place, those opportunities are not going to arise. On the import side, it can determine the extent to which imports disrupt local production. Yet, when we talk about these issues of trade policies, the agriculture ministry is rarely involved and vice versa when we talk about agriculture sector development, issues of what we do with the products and how we market them through trade are all also often ignored.
So what we have initiated in two of the focus countries under the regional initiative in Zambia and Mozambique is a capacity development programme where we try to bring officials both in the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministers of Trade to a common understanding so that they can assess together the implications of changing a trade policy and ensure that it benefits both Ministries and both of their decisive objectives so that their mandates can be achieved.
Question: If l were a woman farmer selling eggs to a five-star hotel whilst my household still needs more food and children have to go to school…what would we gain in terms of development? Where is the balance?
ANSWER-Jamie:
This is a very critical question because in many countries in Africa, the agriculture sector is still characterized by small family farmers whose key objective often is to provide food for their own families.
So there is already a tradeoff between producing to feed the family or producing to sell to generate income and what we have found is that it is not a simple matter of “okay we will retain this amount and we will sell this amount,” but it is a question which involves what type of practices and technologies and practices do we use.
Cassava is one example of a crop which has potential for further commercialization but requires the adoption of varieties with different characteristics. Traditional varieties tend to have very good storage characteristics and perhaps taste better. More modern varieties certainly increase the level of production which is required to produce and consistent supply.but they may not have the same on farm storage capacities or the same taste attributes. So there is a tradeoff there already whereby adoption of more modern varieties required for commercialization can be limited.
Question: Any message you would want to get across?
ANSWER-Clayton:
The challenge is how to produce more with less, how to engage women in a more sustainable agriculture, in a more income generating agriculture and also how to raise the opportunities for the youth to become the key actors for transforming agriculture in Africa.
Useful links:
Fact sheet: Sustainable Production Intensification and Value Chain Development in Africa
(Online)
More regional initiatives here.
Sustainable agriculture in FAO
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