Good People
I promised to offer solutions to challenges that i posted a few days ago. here we go. First a brief about our Company and solutions after the brief.
Our Business food quality and safety services Ltd in Kenya is full time consultancy company based in Kenya and offering solutions to solve challenges in the Agribusiness and Horticultural Industry in Kenya to make it profitable and attractive especially to the young people. Among others, our main roles include
1. Help drive efficiency and make the farms profitable. This involves looking at everything in the value chain from Land preparation; growing aspects, Growing mix, and Pack house Operations and all the way to the market, and putting the necessary mitigation measures in place from capacity building, GAP compliance among others.
2. Connecting local farmers and companies to both local and international to markets. This ensures that they deal directly with the markets as opposed to Middlemen or Brokers, which in turn ensures high income for Farmers.
3. Work with export Companies and Farmers to put in place the most efficient water utilization methods, from water harvesting, irrigation systems and techniques that will ensure water as a scarce resource is used efficiently, and cost effective. Use of best practices in water management , gained from countries like Israel that are water deficient yet are self-sustainable in food production.
4. Help Export companies with Implementation of Quality, Safety and Environmental standards required by European Union e.g. Global Gap, BRC- (British Retail Consortium Certification), as well individual Buyers (supermarket) standards.
5. Apart from Consultancy in the Horticultural Industry I’m also a serious avocado Farmer farming profitably for the last 9 years.
Proposed Solutions
Africa continues to face food shortages and despite good arable land and conducive climate.
It is in public knowledge that Africa has the youngest population worldwide- ages between 15-35 years
Stated problems and Proposed possible solutions.
1. Continuous reliance on rain fed agricultural farming- climate changes and unreliable rains. Due to unreliable rains famers continue to suffer huge losses. This needs to change and water harvesting- even at rural areas can go along away in harvesting water to farm when it is dry. Secondly irrigation - while quite expensive especially if you do drip system it is the ultimate answers since it ensures efficiency use of water and application of some chemicals in some cases. We also have to embrace trees/ fruits trees planting in our farms as part of measures to reduce effects of climate change.
2. Reducing yields per unit/Hectare in the last 20 years or so and growing costs increasing at the same time making farming a loss making venture. This has been as result of various factors namely, planting uncertified seeds, lack of knowledge on nutritional requirements for crops, failure to rotate and poor land prep among others. The solutions here include, planting certified seeds, regular rotation of crops, governments and local authorities working with farmers to train them on good practices and elimination of middlemen who rake big profits at the expense of farmers.
3. Inadequate Government policies to address challenges in Agriculture. Research institutes need to get more actively involved in coming with solutions affecting yields, varieties and good government support in lowering the cost of inputs will address this challenge
4. Rapidly increasing population- leading to more food consumption.- we have no choice but to grow more and do it efficiently due to declining productive land. How will manage this is a an open complex question.
5. Post-harvest losses in some cases up to 40% of the harvested produce. It is painful that after all the hard work is done we end losing so much due to post harvest losses. One approach that would work well is capacity building and training farmers on post-harvest management way before they harvest their crops, and where possible government and Investors invest in storage facilities for various crops in different regions of the country.
6. Inability to practice good agricultural practices eg adding manure or compost to farms, crop rotation. Due to low level of education in rural areas as well government in ability to train farmers on basic good practices concepts
7. Poor linkages between Agricultural research a organizations and their findings with the people involved in agricultural activities. A visit to Kenya Agricultural Research centres reveal massive grounding breaking research on agriculture, but the farmers who need this information most don’t have it- a way of disseminating information to farmers and other interested parties must be found- otherwise all the good research will add zero value
8. Subdivision of arable land as part of cultural practice of land inheritance and property development in arable areas.... This is complex especially in Kenya where children must inherit their parents land and later pass it to their children - further reducing arable land to un economical units. A government policy to contain this problem in Kenya failed - because land in Kenya is quite emotive - but long term solution will lie around convincing all of us that land subdivision is detrimental to food production and agree on minimum acreage that can’t be divided.
Comments are welcome
Mr. Maina Karuiru