RESEARCH COMMERCIALISATION MARGINALISE AFRICAN FARMERS

The commercialisation of research by the private sector does not help African farmers to increase yields and empowering them to achieve food security, says the chief executive officer of NEPAD agency, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki.

The big problem is that many times there is a disconnection between products of research and the usage by farmers, especially smallholder farmers, he told a gathering of over 1,200 researchers, scientists, research institutions and policy makers at the 6th Africa Agriculture Science Week (July 15-20, 2013), in Accra, Ghana.

'When research products are commercialised it means that the farmers are not beneficiary of the research, the beneficiaries are somewhere else but public spending money went into it which could have been used to empower farmers in a different manner'', he tells SciDev.Net.

He said research needs to be smallholder farmers centred, and needs not to be oriented towards commercialisation or as produced papers.

In effects, Mayaki says research has to be geared towards development issues, 'and has to be a process which allows to build human capital composed by famers and African development can go through that path through empowering smallholder farmers''.

This is very critical to achieving food security in Africa, since 80% of food produced is produced by smallholder farmers, he states.

Mayaki says Africa needs to finalise its demographic transitions especially the demographics of age, since majority of the young population are located in rural areas.

If Africa does not find an effective demographic transition in the next 50 years for many people in the rural areas then it will increase the problem of food insecurity and in governability, he emphasised.

'Agriculture is not a technical issue but fundamentally a political issue because it needs more investment and empowerment and these two processes are mainly related to political dimension, this is why industrialisation in this continent will be agriculture led'', he noted.

Mayaki said there is the need for policy framework that ensures research cannot be independent from the agriculture policy and the agriculture policy should target at empowering smallholder farmers.

Frank Rijsberman, chief executive officer of the CGIAR Consortium says it is necessary for African governments to make more budgets available to agriculture research if Africa wants to have sustainable and intensification of crops meaning more crops per area of land without destroying the environment.

'Farmers cannot do it by themselves, we need to have governments to invest in roads, infrastructure, invest in policies that gives farmers access to market'', he said.

Lydia Sasu, executive director of the Development Action Association (DAA), a Ghanaian civil society organization that works with rural women, says African governments need to invest more agriculture research and make it accessible to smallholder farmers to achieve food security and reduce poverty in rural areas.