Family farming matters in South-South cooperation

Cooperation between countries of the developing South took a step forward with the recent signing of international agreements in Brazil aimed at stimulating public policies to support small-scale farmers. The delegates from Brazil, China, India and South Africa signed the agreements at the meeting of MERCOSUR (Southern Common Market). The agreements include technology and knowledge [...]

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“No more dilly-dallying”

Speaking in Cape Town at the the quarterly meeting between the Minister and MECs for Agriculture from all nine provinces, Minister Tina Joemat Pettersson read the riot act to her officials and provincial MECs. According to the Minister, the major driver for the agriculture should be job creation. The focus of the government should be [...]

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MPesa helps farmers get insurance claims

An innovate insurance programme is coaxing Kenya’s farmers to invest in quality seeds and fertilizer. Relying on the popular mobile money transfer service, MPesa, it promises to process any claims due to crop loss quickly and safely. Kenya’s food insecurity is sometimes blamed in part on the reluctance of farmers to use high-yield farm inputs [...]

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Nigeria’s government to focus on farmlands

From contributing an estimated 80% to the Nigerian economy in the 1960s, agricultural production now accounts for a tiny fraction of the nation’s wealth. Alas, the rise of crude oil as the economy’s backbone left vast farmlands abandoned by rural folks seeking a share of the oil wealth in urban centres. Environmental degradation in various [...]

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Grape farmers want to cut out middleman

A group of small-scale farmers at the Orange River Irrigation Project are panning to make more profit by selling directly to local fruit companies, such as Exotic Grape Company, instead of giving in to the government’s demands to market their produce through Cool Fresh Namibia. Cool Fresh Namibia was appointed by the government to render [...]

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Visit to the ethnic minority women of Bac Kan province in Vietnam

An International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)-funded project is trying to address issues of land to help ethnic minority women in different parts of the world. Read more here.

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TradeMark SA newsletter

The newly-established TradeMark Southern Africa project, and its website, is set to play an important role in promoting closer regional integration in Southern and Eastern Africa. Besides providing technical advice to SADC, COMESA and the EAC on key components of intra-regional trade policy, infrastructure and trade logistics, the project’s website provides users with daily news [...]

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World ‘dangerously close’ to food crisis, UN says

Global grain production will tumble by 63 million metric tons this year, or 2%, mainly because of weather-related calamities like the Russian heat wave, the United Nations estimates. Rising demand and lower-than-expected yields caused stocks of some grains to fall sharply and generated high volatility in world food markets in the latter half of the [...]

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WFP bid for 27 000 small-scale grain suppliers on course

A five-year initiative by the World Food Programme to stimulate smallholder farmers’ production of key food crops has kicked off in earnest. The programme, which involves buying WFP’s emergency food relief directly from Kenyan smallholders, has given 700 farmers contracts against a target of 27 000 suppliers by 2013. If successful, the group is allocated [...]

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Smallholder farmers in Nyanza to benefit from soil carbon project

A group of smallholder farmers in Nyanza are set to benefit from one of the first soil carbon projects in Africa, to the tune of $350,000, funded by the World Bank. The World Bank described the Kenya Agricultural Carbon Project as “groundbreaking” and said that it will improve food security in the region, help address [...]

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