Speaker Mukabalisa commends FAO’s work to achieve food security
The Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies in Rwanda said that the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) continues to be a pivotal partner in the country’s quest to end hunger and promote food security for all. She made the remarks while hosting in the audience the outgoing FAO Representative in Rwanda, Mr. Gualbert Gbehounou. The Speaker also bid farewell to him after a successful four-year stay in the country.
“We appreciated first of all the good collaboration, good cooperation, and good partnership of FAO Rwanda and the government of Rwanda. We commended his leadership in successfully implementing different projects and programmes that contributed a lot to promoting the agriculture sector in our country” Speaker Donathille Mukabalisa, said.
Conducive Agricultural environment
The agriculture sector accounts for about a third of Rwanda’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and it employs more than 70 percent of the country’s workforce. The country’s efforts to make the sector a business that changes the lives of farmers recently saw the launch of a $350 million agriculture financing facility. The facility will help farmers get affordable loans at less than a 10 percent interest rate. The outgoing FAO Representative in Rwanda applauded different sound policies and the overall conducive environment that makes FAO’s work doable.
“ Rwanda has a conducive legislative environment that facilitates and makes our work quite easy. FAO as an Organisation of the United Nations is very much supporting agriculture as a business which means that farmers like any other business person should be able to become rich from their agriculture activities. And we have in Rwanda a conducive environment for that.” said Gualbert Gbehounou, FAO Country Representative in Rwanda
Youth in Agribusiness
Young people in Rwanda constitute more than 40 percent of the entire population. Generally, Rwanda’s population has grown more than five times in the past 60 years. (the REMA’s State of Environment and Outlook Report 2021 )In July 2021, the population was 12.9 million, a 2.3 percent increase from 2020. With this annual growth rate, Rwanda’s population could reach 25.8 million by 2050, with a gross density of around 1,000 p/km², the highest in Africa.
To mitigate climate change challenges and other shocks the agriculture sector faces and to meet the food demand for this growing population will require moving from subsistence agriculture to technology-driven agriculture and to achieve this goal, more young farmers need to be brought on board. Youth will undoubtedly find their own way of having climate-smart agriculture with resilience capacities, preventive, anticipative, and adaptive capacities. Mr. Gbehounou says that as he leaves, he is content that enticing more youth to become agripreneurs is one of the gains FAO and Rwanda is greatly registering.
“many of the activities conducted by the FAO in Rwanda are in line with attracting youth into agribusiness. For example, we have developed a platform that we call ICT for Agriculture, where farmers can go and look for information on the weather that tells them when they can start planting their crops, information on livestock that teaches them to take good care of livestock, when and which food to feed them to avoid any disease that can come and reduce production, the platform also provides market information as well as information on nutrition. Furthermore, FAO in Rwanda has provided support on e-commerce strategy.” He said.
Integrated Crop, livestock, and aquaculture production
As Mr. Gualbert Gbehounou leaves Rwanda, he says in order to keep up the pace of promoting the food system farmers need to embrace the integrated farming of fish, crops, and livestock wherever possible. He explained “ it means that farmers that are growing let’s say vegetables, if possible they would add to that livestock production, and wherever water is available, that will be completed with aquaculture; fish farming in the Rwandan context. We had a very successful pilot in Rulindo district, with farmers who are in Yanze river basin”
The importance of this model is that it is sustainable at the three levels of sustainability (1) Environment sustainability, Economic sustainability, and Social sustainability. In the environment, when farmers are integrating crop production with livestock, with fish farming, they are careful about the use of pesticides because too many pesticides would harm their livestock or even kill their fish. The model is economically sustainable because if for one reason or another other prices collapse, in the crop sector, or in the livestock sector, or the aquaculture sector, farmers who have been integrating all the three sectors still have one or two sectors to catch up with. So their income remains relatively stable.
“In addition, the integrated crop, livestock, and fish farming model promotes good nutrition as farmers eat from what they produce. So for a farmer who is only focusing on crop production, the immediately available food is from the crop production, and when he integrates crops, livestock, and fish farming, he has crop proteins, he has livestock proteins and he has fish proteins so he is able to have a balanced diet, for his household,” Mr. Gbehounou said.
South-south cooperation
The outgoing FAO Representative in Rwanda is leaving for Guinee-Conakry, where he is going to continue his service to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations as the Country Representative.
“ I have learned a lot about how Rwanda defied all odds to be where it is today on its development journey and they are undoubtedly many lessons I think other countries should learn from Rwanda. As far as promoting agriculture is concerned, this is not the end of the road, through South-south cooperation I believe we will be able to do a lot together in knowledge sharing and other tangible joint activities” said Mr. Gbehounou.
I am leaving Rwanda, but Rwanda will always live in me
“ I only have good memories, the friendship, the network that I have built here, a beautiful landscape that I will be missing, good climate, a great country of thousand hills, …As I always say, I will be leaving Rwanda but Rwanda will be living in me, forever,” Mr. Gbehounou said waving goodbye to the journalists after the interview.
With the concurrence of the Government of the Republic of Rwanda, Gualbert Gbehounou has been appointed FAO Representative in Rwanda, effective 21 June 2018. He came to Rwanda from FAO headquarters, Rome, where he has been serving as Agricultural Officer in the Agriculture and Consumer Protection Division (AGP) being also part of the Sustainable Agriculture Programme Management Team (SP2). FAO Representation in Rwanda is a fully-fledged office since 11 July 1985.