Dear colleagues,
I am glad to attach my contribution through the detailed answer of the first question.
Kind regards,
Adel
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1) Impact of COVID-19 outbreak in NENA region
The Near East and North Africa (NENA) region is facing key challenges including ending poverty and hunger as well as responding to climate change and the conservation of natural resources to avoid further degradation.
· How does/did the COVID-19 outbreak exacerbate the challenges faced by small-scale family farmers (SSFF)?
As the farm size of small-scale farmers is normally small, it is difficult for them to generate adequate income that can meet the escalating costs of their families. This situation should make the creation of successful cooperatives as an inevitable solution to protect this vulnerable group. In addition, governments, local NGOs and international development organization should work hard to engage small scale farmers in added value activities. This trend is crucial to small scale farmers as the dwarf size of their lands makes the all efforts of increasing land productivity end up with insignificant change in income. Unfortunately, most of small-scale family farmers are lacking successful cooperatives and are not engaged in value added activities especially in developing countries. Therefore, rural women try to help their families by raising chickens, ducks, and rabbits where they sell these products in local markets and also save the money that are spent in providing their families with good animal protein sources. The rural youth get used to travel and live in urban areas or touristic areas as the dwarf size of the farm does not really need that much human capital.
Due to the fatal results of COVID-19, all human activities that witness crowds or gatherings of people have been restricted or banned. As a result, the lockdown of wholesale and retail markets, factories, hotels, restaurants have been executed. In addition, many curfew restrictions were imposed on the movement of citizens and transportation including the transport of agricultural products. All these precautionary measures were hard on small-scale farmers where their sons who were working in urban areas came back home and stay with no work, selling of poultry became harder as it has been limited to neighbors while the transportation and selling of vegetables and fruits to the wholesale markets have faced many disruptions. In addition, due to the overall shrinkage of all economic activities, the entire world has witnessed a decrease in the purchasing power of consumers and consequently a decrease in the demand on all commodities except for the essential commodities such as bread and the like. The decrease of demand has negatively impacted the prices of agricultural commodities that are mainly produced by scale-scale farmers.
It is of great importance to point out that small-scale family farmers were lacking adequate financial resources to meet living expenses. Therefore, they were obligated to ignore non-essential requests to decrease family expenses. For families that raise livestock, selling a cow or a young calf or birds like chickens or ducks was an essential way to get income but some families who do not raise Livestock were obligated to borrow money or sell some of their assists.
· And what are the main areas of interventions that could efficiently build SSFF resilience and ensure sustainable livelihood?
The main areas of interventions that could efficiently build SSFF resilience and ensure sustainable livelihood can be summarized as follows:
- The adoption of aggregation models where small famers need to get together through group marketing as well as group purchasing of inputs or farm supply.
- Improvement of markets at district level & governorate level. Markets should be connected through internet and all markets should display, update and disseminate lists of AgriPrices in a daily basis.
- Support rural women in the establishment and management of small projects such as raising chickens and help them to sell their products through aggregation models.
- Encourage and support rural youth to establish and run SMEs.
- Encourage and support rural women and farmers to establish local NGOs or coops that serve small holders.
- Support the existed local NGOs and coops to enable them to offer better services to farmers and rural women.
- Spread of digital applications that increase the reach out and improve productions and marketing. In addition, it will support the establishment and running processes of small projects.
· Can you share success examples in the region?
The success examples of the region are seen in the digital apps that helped farmers to function under the limiting COVID-19 restrictions. Examples of these apps are the following:
- The FAO app of El Mufeed in Egypt and the app of Morshidak Al- Zerai in KSA that provide farmers with rural advisory services.
- Bashaier app which links buyers with sellers in Egypt too.
- The global apps that help farmers to monitor, identify and report infection of plants in the region. An example of that the FAW Monitoring and Early Warning System (FAMEWS) which is a free mobile application for Android cell phones from FAO for the real-time global monitoring of the Fall Armyworm (FAW).
- The app of "IPhyto Pro" in Morocco that supports agricultural professionals / extension agents to get the information they need to help farmers.
- The Moroccan Bee Agri app which is a social network intended exclusively for farmers. It allows them to discuss issues related to their technical behavior, and discuss their needs and constraints while having adapted and contextualized answers from experienced advisers or other farmers
Dr. Adel Zekaizak