The African Development Bank Group- AfDB , President Akinwumi Adesina, has made an urgent call to give farmers across the continent new technologies with the potential to transform agricultural production.
The technology transfer he says is needed immediately and that evidence from countries like Nigeria demonstrated that technology plus strong government backing was already yielding positive results.
”Technologies to achieve Africa’s green revolution exist, but are mostly just sitting on the shelves. The challenge is a lack of supportive policies to ensure that they are scaled up to reach millions of farmers,” Adesina said during a keynote speech delivered at the 2018 Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA) Annual Meeting held in Washington, D.C August 5, 2018.
In east Africa, Several companies have set up to address the challenges experienced by farmers that end up pushing up the food prices in the region. Among them, Kenya’s SunCulture has come in to fix the reliance of rain-fed agriculture by basically creating a solar based solution that is programmed to water plants at the given time frames. Another firm that has come in to address the issue of overreliance eon rain fed agriculture is Hydroponics which practices farming without the use of soil.
Adesina cited the case of Nigeria, where policy under the country’s Minister of Agriculture, had resulted in a rice production revolution in three years.
“All it takes was sheer political will, supported by science, technology and pragmatic policies…Just like in the case of rice, the same can be said of a myriad of technologies, including high-yielding water efficient maize, high-yielding cassava varieties, animal and fisheries technologies,” Adesina said.
The African Development Bank is pointing is currently working with the World Bank, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to mobilize US$ 1 billion to scale up agricultural technologies across Africa under a new initiative called Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT).
TAAT is taking bold steps to bring down some of the barriers preventing farmers from accessing latest seed varieties and technologies to improve their productivity.
“With the rapid pace of growth of the use of drones, automated tractors, artificial intelligence, robotics and block chains, agriculture as we know it today will change,” the President said. “It is more likely that the future farmers will be sitting in their homes with computer applications using drone to determine the size of their farms, monitor and guide the applications of farm inputs, and with driverless combine harvesters bringing in the harvest.”
