Scientific research: Anchor for sustaining agriculture
World food price increases have been taking an unwarranted toll on Ghana’s development agenda for a long while. In 2007 alone, wheat prices on the world market went up by an unprecedented 58 per cent; maize up by 11 per cent; and soybean prices rose by 32 per cent. Since then the global challenge of achieving food security has become even more daunting.
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Thus, by 2011 the FAO highlighted the fact that while some large countries were able to deal with the worst of the world food price volatility crisis, people in many small import-dependent countries, especially in Africa, experienced large price increases that even when only temporary, can have permanent effects on their future earning capacity and ability to escape poverty.
It is therefore not surprising when the recent FAO’s State of Food Insecurity in the World, 2012 reports that “with almost 870 million people chronically undernourished in 2010-2012, the number of hungry people in the world remains unacceptably high. The vast majority of these live in developing countries”.
Food prices on rise
Accordingly, the FAO has continued to caution the world that food prices are still on the rise, therefore, countries should adopt appropriate measures to address the causes.
Some of the factors accountable for rising prices include; drought, flooding, increased demand for grain-fed animal products by the growing middle-income countries such as China and India, diversion of food grain to bio-fuel production, and trade restrictions imposed by several countries to safeguard domestic food security.
Another news of major concern, according to Karl Harmsen Director of the Ghana-based United Nations University Institute for Natural Resources in Africa, is “should soil conditions continue to decline in Africa, nearly 75 per cent of the continent could come to rely on some sort of food aid by 2025”.
In direct reference to Ghana, where rain-fed agriculture is dominant, climate experts say temperature is expected to rise by three degrees Celsius, while rainfall is to decline between nine and 27 per cent during the same period. Empirically, it is quite obvious to many of us that the seasons are no more as friendly and predictable as they used to be.
The extremes of drought and flooding are becoming permanent weather patterns that are wreaking untold havoc, especially on agriculture.
Come to think of it, 2025 is just about a decade away. What we need to do, and do urgently is to turn to scientific agricultural research for the solutions. It would be recalled that at a certain stage of Europe’s development, there was serious foreboding of devastating calamities that awaited their burgeoning populations.
Doomsday economists
Many renowned ‘doomsday economists’, including the likes of Thomas Robert Malthus, held the pessimistic view that these societies would not be able to support their growing populations.
He declared “that the increase of population is necessarily limited by means of subsistence; that, population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increases; and, that the superior power of population is repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice”.
These “doomsday economists” thus justified misery and other pestilences that ravaged millions of lives as the means employed by nature to cull excess human populations. Little did they know that, through the power of scientific agricultural research and trade, Europe would be able to provide enough food for the population and even record food surpluses.
The development and application of agricultural research results then, raised production and productivity and eventually lifted that society from a seemingly predestined trajectory of famine, epidemics, poverty and death into prosperity and made mockery of the “doomsday” predictions.
Similarly, to forestall the calamities that current forecasts say await us a decade or so ahead, we have to confront the challenge by harnessing and applying scientific agricultural research results as a tool for achieving increased food production and productivity, food security, poverty reduction and national development.
I believe that, given the agricultural research outputs of the CSIR as well as other research organisations, there is every assurance that the country can surmount the challenge.
In this respect a lot depends on what our governments choose to do with agricultural research organisations and their outputs, in the quest of moving agriculture, beside export crops, from a dominantly subsistence practice to a thriving commercial activity through modernisation.
Critical interventions
It is in this light that I regard it as truly good news that the government has made some critical interventions in pursuit of raising food production and productivity.
The interventions that readily come to mind are the National Food Buffer Stock Company, which is meant to reduce postharvest losses and regulate hitherto erratic local food prices; the fertiliser subsidy, to raise soil productivity; agricultural insurance programme to reduce the high-level of risk in extending financial credits to rain-fed agriculture; and, the introduction of Youth in Agriculture Programme to make agriculture attractive to the youth.
The initial results of these interventions have been very encouraging. In respect of agri-insurance, the first batch of farmers numbering over 100 received payment on a pilot agricultural insurance policy for failed crops in the Northern Region last January.
Support for agric research
Obviously, these policies, if pursued diligently would go a long way in making the investment into commercial agriculture an outstanding success in the very near future. However, the support of agricultural research institutions is a sine qua non for the sustainability and success of these interventions.
For example, now that farmers are being introduced to insurance policies for agricultural activities it would be in the interest of insurance companies, as part of reducing their exposure to financial risk, to make it a basic requirement for their potential clients to have evidence of support from an agricultural research organisation such as the CSIR.
The evidence should include results for soil quality and suitability test for the crop in question, the supply of quality seeds, and provision of modern agronomic backup as requirement for providing insurance cover. Similarly, all the other interventions need the support of the CSIR’s agricultural research institutions.
The Youth in Agriculture Programme should not be simply run on the basis of creating large or block subsistence farms. They should have the support of modern agricultural technologies in order to achieve higher levels of production and productivity. This would translate into higher incomes, thereby making agriculture attractive to the youth.
Progressive intervention
Another progressive intervention by Government in its determination to raise production and productivity and promote the commercialisation of local agriculture is the declaration restricting food suppliers and caterers of the School Feeding Programme to use only locally produced foodstuffs.
However, in my opinion, an even greater impact could be achieved if the government directed the Youth in Agriculture and any farmer who wishes to supply the School Feeding Programme to adopt and produce the high-yielding special crop varieties, some of which are fortified with enhanced nutritional values that have been developed by the CSIR for the School Feeding Programme.
For example, “CRI-apomden” sweet potato variety developed by CSIR has high B-carotene (vitamin A) content and eating it could supply the Vitamin A required by schoolchildren, thereby saving the financial outlay for vaccination programmes. The “CRI-Otoo” sweet potato, on the other hand, has medium B-carotene (vitamin A) content suitable for feeding infants.
There are similar improved white and yellow fortified Quality Protein Maize (QPM) varieties. Indeed, the government could support and task the research institutes to develop other specific fortified crop varieties for the School Feeding Programme. Thus with such a directive, youth farmers would be encouraged to link up with research organisations to produce for supply to the large School Feeding Programme market.
Besides, the directive would lead to reinforcement of the fight for the eradication or amelioration of certain childhood diseases by supplementing the intake of certain nutrients that are critical for the growth and balanced development of our children. Such a directive could, therefore, enhance the achievement of MDG Goal (4) which is “reducing child mortality rates”, as well as aid in raising healthy children both mentally and physically for the country’s development.
Commercialisation
Clearly underlying these policies is the presumption that production is being targeted at the market. The critical question therefore is, whether it is indeed a necessity that agriculture becomes commercialised in order to raise production and productivity.
It should be understood that agricultural commercialisation is not meant for only commercial farming companies or individuals seeking to eliminate smallholders. It is rather aimed at raising the levels of production and productivity of smallholders, resulting in higher incomes and reduction of poverty among the rural population.
It is therefore the process of overcoming the culture of subsistence farming which has become outdated and backward as far as economic progress and development are concerned.
Agricultural commercialisation would encourage subsistence farmers, who constitute the majority of farmers, to see the wisdom in becoming smallholders, with the main objective of producing for the market by raising production and productivity levels, instead of producing small quantities that are at times below the quantities required to feed the subsistence farmers’ household throughout the year.
And inadequate food is the root cause of pervasive poverty in the rural farming areas. According to the World Bank “chronic food insecurity and poverty are virtually the same”.
Right Incentives
Let us take a leaf from history. Cocoa production was introduced in the then Gold Coast by 1879. It was propelled by smallholders through the existence of an available local market that fed into the global and the critical support of the Central Cocoa Research Station, later the West Africa Cocoa Research Institute (WACRI), the predecessor of today’s Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana (CRIG). It made the Gold Coast (Ghana) the world’s leading producer by 1911 with the exportation of 40,000 tones.
The two critical factors responsible for this outstanding feat, in just 32 years, were guaranteed prices, available market and scientific research.
That is why I agree with a commentator on agricultural productivity in Africa who said, “What is needed in Africa is not a new-fangled scheme to enlighten the ignorant natives, but the right incentives and a framework required for a productive, for-profit private agricultural sector to flourish with the right assistance from government”.
Article by Sematror K. Yiborku
The writer is a Senior Scientific Information Officer of the CSIR.
E-mail: [email protected]
