Sustainable Agriculture May 2009
Three wishes for agriculture
Five people working in agriculture and rural development
Summary:
Five people - a research institute director, a farmer, a scientist, a journalist and a lecturer - are asked to make three wishes for improving agricultural sustainability in Africa. Their answers include: increasing governmental priority for agriculture; giving farmers access to machinery, markets and fertilisers; preventing deforestation; and transforming Africa's transport and energy infrastructure. What would your three wishes be?
Suggested introduction:
If you were given three wishes to make your life better, what would you choose? A new house, a car, a better job? What about fixing some bigger problems? For example, making agriculture more productive, eliminating hunger, and reducing poverty?
Ghanaian journalist Kofi Adu Domfeh decided to ask five people working in agriculture and rural development what their three wishes would be, if they wanted to improve African agriculture and make it more sustainable. First up is Hartmann, the director general of IITA, Nigeria's premier international agricultural research institute.
Tape in:
My first wish would be for...
Tape out:
...you have not achieved anything
Closing Announcement:
Five people with their three wishes for African agriculture. What would yours be?
Making the most of it:
Get out and about in a market, a school and in the fields and gather some more wishes for agriculture. Then use them in a discussion programme with studio guests - perhaps a leading farmer, a researcher, someone from government, an entrepreneur.
You could also use the first item in this pack, A good idea but what is it?, in the same programme, to get the discussion going about what is happening, or should be happening, to make progress in agriculture.
Transcript
Hartmann
My first wish would be for governments to treat agriculture just as they treat national defence systems, and fund it just like they do national defence systems. I think it is equally strategic and vital to a country. A country with no food, you have chaos. So to me it's almost a defence issue.
Kumar
I'm Lava Kumar. I'm working as a virologist at IITA. The first wish is to build top-class colleges to teach agriculture to the young graduates.
Ogunlade
My name is Odebo Ogunlade. My first wish is access to machinery. If you plant and you do not maintain your field, if you do not weed, the chance that you will get a good result is very slim.
Senghore
My name is Ismaila Senghore from The Gambia. I work for the Gambia Radio and Television Services. My first wish is for every African nation to see agriculture as the driving force of the economy and development and food self-sufficiency.
Akwakwa
I'm Akwakwa, David. I'm a teacher, a university teacher. At the same time I'm a PhD student, a research fellow. To me, one, is proper dissemination of research information to reach the end users.
Hartmann
The second one would be to see a lot of youngsters coming into agriculture, and not to think of agriculture the way it used to be with your parents or grandparents. None of us want to do that.
Kumar
The second wish is to prevent deforestation for the sake of producing food crops.
Ogunlade
(Vernac) I need to have better access to markets. At the moment I have some cassava fields that are due for harvesting. But due to lack of market I've not been able to harvest them. So any assistance in that area will enable me to turn over my investment. Then I can have money to expand production.
Senghore
My second wish is to get technocrats to go back to the land and demonstrate and farm with farmers. Technocrats must also have their farms to show farmers that they know what they are talking about.
Akwakwa
Two, proper application of these research findings. These research findings being put to use, are they yielding the purpose? It's not just enough for us here in the institutes to label and turn out results. They have to be applied in the field to produce results.
Hartmann
The third wish would be for the infrastructure in Africa, that includes energy and transport systems, to be fixed, so that when we produce food in Gambia we can send it to Cameroon without a lot of cost. Right now it doesn't matter if Gambia has tonnes of food, it is cheaper to bring it from New Orleans or somewhere else because transport systems are so bad. And energy systems are killing African entrepreneurs. They cannot be successful with the level of energy and electricity and utilities that they have to depend on.
Kumar
Number three is to improve trade of agricultural commodities. Because I have seen in many countries, they produce enough, but they cannot sell. So we need to create markets.
Ogunlade
The third one is on soil fertility. The soils are becoming infertile. If I can have better access to fertilisers, then to a large extent I should be able to improve my productivity.
Senghore
Then my third wish is of course to be mindful of all the practices that we do. In trying to make sure that we develop our agriculture, let us not destroy nature.
Akwakwa
Thirdly, are we conscious of the impact of agriculture on the human environment that we live in? Because in the end, if you want to make food available, but you jeopardise the lives of the people that you want to make the food available to, you have not achieved anything. End of track.
