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For the past 18 months, the UK’s Guardian newspaper has been tracking the development work going on in one Ugandan village called Katine in what it plans to be a three-year project.

The Katine project focuses on five key areas (education, health, water, governance, and livelihoods), all of which influence and are influenced quite directly by agriculture.

The role that agriculture plays in shaping development outcomes for the Katine villagers has already been highlighted in a number of articles, for instance:

- Video: Growing New Strains of Cassava to Improve Livelihoods

In recent years, [cassava] crops have been devastated by viruses leading to two years of severely reduced harvests…’The old cassava used to be affected by diseases.  It used to rot quickly from disease and also it used to take a long time to fully mature.

- Article: Are Big Farms the key to African Development?

as the demand for food and jobs expands exponentially, the question is less whether big farms are necessary to making a country’s food secure than how to get there as equitably as possible.

These two eamples highlight the need to build local access, protect harvests, enable access to markets, and prioritise research imperatives.  This project also aims to help the villagers in Katine get their voices heard by those who might otherwise have little access to their perspectives.  Sharing knowledge and experiences like this is also a key aspect of the Farming First plan.

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Vashee, President of the International Federation of Agricultural Producers (IFAP) and a practicing farmer in Zambia, discusses Farming First’s six core principles and the recent work that the group had been doing to present their priorities to policymakers at the UN Commission for Sustainable Development policy session.

Listen to the the audio file of the Farming First interview here:

Or, go to another recent blog post with a video of Ajay Vashee discussing the Farming First plan at a press conference.

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Dr. Sibanda is CEO of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN), a Southern African network organisation with representation in 12 Southern African countries.

Watch her presentation here:

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He discusses the many challenges that the world’s farmers face in the 21st century and warns the policymakers of the world that new emphasis needs to be placed on how agriculture affects sustainable development:

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The average farmer in sub-Saharan Africa uses only 8 kilos of nutrients per hectare of cultivated land.  This is less than one-tenth the average amount used elsewhere in the world.  What’s more, these inputs are often reserved only for the plantation crops which are then sold in the foreign export markets.

Dr. Eilitta argues that the marketplace for these agricultural inputs is “undeveloped or fragmented”.  Prices for fertilizers in Tanzania are 50% higher than they are in Thailand (and 80% higher in land-locked Mali than in Thailand).  Countries also often lack fertilizer laws for regulating use and holding suppliers accountable.

But Eilitta also offers hope for progress.  In the Abuja Declaration, African leaders agreed to increase average nutrient use to 50 kilos per hectare by 2015.  Eilitta also offers three areas on which further improvements should be based:

1. improve supply systems for fertlizer while opening access to profitable export markets

2. support the people not the products through the use of government-issued vouchers and the monitoring of agri dealers

3. promote multi-country agricultural input markets with harmonized regulations, developed regulatory systems, and reduced tariffs

Watch the video here:

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