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World Food Day 2014: What It Means To Feed The World And Care For The Earth—Agro Mindset

Feature Article David Asare Asiamah
OCT 16, 2014 LISTEN
David Asare Asiamah

The UN General Assembly has chosen for this year's World Food Day, the theme: “Family Farming: Feeding the World, Caring for the Earth.” Well done to them for placing recognition on the important contribution of family farmers to world food security. The theme, having been chosen to raise the profile of family farming and smallholder farmers is focusing the world's attention on the significant role of family farming in eradicating hunger and poverty, providing food security and nutrition, improving livelihoods, managing natural resources, protecting the environment, and achieving sustainable development, particularly in rural areas.

Smallholders constitute about 80 percent of farmer populations in Ghana, out of which a significant percentage are old and weak men and women. This cluster has little or no education, unskilled or lowly skilled, mostly unaware of modern trends in the agricultural sector and if they are aware, have not the monetary support and credit to take advantage of such benefits, making them under perform, amidst breaking their backs to till the land and feed a nation.

But the general assumption is that, good investment in agriculture ensures prosperity, and represents tremendous value for money. It is evident, particularly in the advanced economies, that prioritizing agricultural development could yield significant, interconnected benefits, particularly in achieving food security and reducing hunger, increasing incomes; advancing the human development agenda in health and education, and reversing environmental damage. To this end, agriculture is good for our economy, safety and security, as it sustains the current and future generations.

But what is the trend in our part of the world?
The critical role of the agricultural sector to the development of our country is an assertion we appear to have under emphasized for far too long as it is now beginning to appear the spine has been sucked out of the backbone without us noticing, and even more compounding now with the oil-find, a Dutch-disease in disguise. In our view, the huge leaps in the performance of the agricultural sector would not be meaningful if the small holder farmers in the rural areas engaged in small scale agriculture, owning farm sizes less than 3 acres, and struggling to make optimum outputs from their investments are not targeted with similarly enthusiastic policies.

Feeding the world would be about helping smallholders to commercialize. Across the sub-Saharan region, small holders already provide up to 80 percent of our food. Regardless of this feat, product marketing is still mainly informal, amounts supplied are not always reliable and a lack of access to credit is an everlasting problem. Add to this the problems of poor infrastructure, unproductive growing techniques and a lack of technology to augment, explain why so many smallholder producers are caught in a low-yield trap: less produce means less cash, which reduces their appetite to invest or take production risks. This calls for the need to commercialise small holder agriculture if we really want to feed the world.

Going commercial would be about snowballing engagement with markets. It will be about growing fractions of crops and animal products being meant for sale. It will be about increasing inputs and factors of production being acquired from the market: most obviously in machinery and tools, seed, fertiliser, crop protection chemicals, veterinary drugs, animal feed; but also using markets to hire labour, borrow funds, deal in land and obtain technical advice and market information. Indices to measure the degree of commercialisation have been proposed such as the value of farm sales over the value of all farm production. However this and other measures have their dangers since very poor farmers who have to sell much of their harvest to repay debts can appear to be commercial producers.

If this is done, we could see an impact in income and employment effects that are directly reflected in household welfare, health and nutrition aspects usually contingent on the level of income attained through the existing level of commercialization, and lastly their effects are the macro-economic and environmental effects that go beyond household level.

This approach would additionally call for practice of environmental virtues as farmers ought to see tangible advantages in terms of higher incomes, reduced costs and sustainable livelihoods, as well as compensation for the environmental benefits they generate. Policymakers need to provide incentives, such as rewarding good management of agro-ecosystems and expanding the scale of publicly funded and managed research. Action is needed to establish and protect rights to resources, especially for the most vulnerable.

Ghana's role in helping make the theme of this year's World Food Day happen is not above seeking support in sustainable intensification with relevant external assistance to the developing world. And there are huge opportunities for sharing experiences among developing countries through South-South Cooperation.

Today's youth are tomorrow's family farmers and the future of agriculture which we all owe our lives to for food, fuel and fibre relies on the younger generation coming through to provide succession, add enthusiasm, bring fresh ideas and drive innovation. But the alienation of young people from agricultural knowledge and rural life skills at a basic age will deprive agriculture and the youth an opportunity of Ghana having a harvest for its agricultural transformation, if attention is not focused on addressing this issue.

Without a clear policy strategy for engaging this rising group of youth, leaders and the development partners that work with them risk creating an economic time bomb for their successors. But more importantly if policymakers fail to find finance for and include youth in policy and development planning processes, our development legacy in Ghana will be a missed opportunity to transform the lives of this and the next generation.

We are better to produce more and regain our state of massive food exportation which alerts us that producing food sustainably is only part of the challenge. On the consumption side, there needs to be a shift to nutritious diets with a smaller environmental footprint, and a reduction in food losses and waste. Ultimately, success in making the transition to sustainable patterns of production and consumption requires transparent, participatory, results-focused and accountable systems of governance of food and agriculture, across Ghana.

David Asare Asiamah
Executive Director
Agro Mindset Organisation

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