Africa’s green revolution will only be achieved if agricultural research gets the political will and support that has been lacking for many years, a leading scientist has said.

Prof. Pedro Sanchez, a former Director General of the World Agro forestry Center (ICRAF), is challenging African political leaders to double their budgetary allocation towards research to accelerate agricultural development on the continent. 

“If Africa intends to realize agricultural green revolution sooner than expected, then we must realize a change in political will and mindset of our leaders,” he said.

Prof. Sanchez said what African farmers need is empowerment that includes the right quantity and quality of fertilizer at the right time, credit support to enhance and expand their holdings, efficient crop processing capabilities to add value to farm produce, and good market outlets to sell their harvests.

Addressing participants at seminar on the millennium villages and Africa’s green revolution at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Ibadan, Nigeria, he challenged scientists to share their research findings with the farmers and other stakeholders in a bid to enable them redouble their output.

 “Since development is a continuum, where the work of the scientists becomes known and not just in research journals but translated into concrete achievements in development,” said Sanchez, who is the Director of Tropical Agriculture and Senior Research Scholar at the Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York.

According to him, the well funded Millennium villages at the grassroots are adopting modern technology at amazing speed and good results from the experimental villages in Malawi, Kenya, Ethiopia and Nigeria are starting to trickle in.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) project is currently working with 78 villages in sub-Saharan Africa. Some of the villages are in Kenya.

The main objective of  this initiative is to impact on the lives of people in 100 000 villages of about 5000 people each in the hunger hot spots of sub-Saharan Africa.

“We have discovered that once these communities are empowered, they begin to achieve the MDGs quickly,” said Sanchez.

In these villages, people are moving towards food security, controlling malaria using mosquito treated nets and transiting from subsistence farming to small-scale entrepreneurs.

In western Kenya, fertilizer and improved maize seeds were subsidized to the tune of 80 per cent value for the villagers in the first year through the MDGs programme. In the second year, the subsidy dropped to 40 per cent, and now it has been reduced to 20 per cent.  Next year, it may go down to zero.

Prof. Sanchez gave the example of the success of the MDG’s intervention in Malawi, which has seen the country move from a food deficit to a surplus one, donating maize to neighboring countries of Lesotho and Swaziland.

 “If Malawi and Ethiopia can do it, then other democratic countries in Africa such as Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Mali, and Senegal can achieve self sufficiency in food production.”

In this country, things have worked because of political leadership.

“The Malawian President is the country’s minister of agriculture, and so he focuses on practicing agriculture the right way,” says Sanchez.

An AWC Feature