Browsing: Agri-Business

Beyond the COVID-19, the food and agriculture landscape in Africa will change because of the pandemic in terms of processing and value addition, agri-food e-commerce among others according to a report by Selina Wamucii

The report titled “Impact of COVID–19 on Africa’s Agriculture: What the Coronavirus (COVID–19) Means for African Family Farmers and Fishermen”, shows how the food and agricultural landscape across Africa will be shaped by new developments in the future.

   1. Processing and Value Addition

According to the report, due to the COVID-19 pandemic most countries supply chain got interrupted with boarders closing among others, therefore, to ensure this does not happen again in case of another pandemic, countries will seek to reduce reliance on cross-border imports mostly on food and have control of their food own production.

With the closed borders, African countries that export raw and unprocessed fresh produce to other markets have been affected greatly …

The African Development Bank urged development finance institutions, NGOs, farmer cooperatives and the private sector to come up with more effective financing solutions for Africa’s fertilizer value chains.

The Bank’s call came during the Argus Africa Fertilizer Conference held last week. The theme of the conference was Supporting the fertilizer value chain to improve agricultural productivity and economic growth in the region.

“Appropriate investment and financing of the entire fertilizer value chain has become a precondition for achieving our continental objectives in the area of agricultural development,” said Marie-Claire Kalihangabo, coordinator of the Africa Fertilizer Financing Mechanism(AFFM), during a forum on the sidelines of the Conference.

AFFM is a Fund managed by the African Development Bank to accelerate agriculture development in line with the Bank’s High-5 priority, the Sustainable Development Goals, Africa Food Security Vision and the African Union’s Agenda 2063.

Also Read: “Nobody eats GDP” says African Development Bank

The Italian Development Cooperation contributed more than €4.55 million to two United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) projects in Egypt and Iraq.

A signing ceremony to launch the projects took place at the UNIDO headquarters.

The Egypt project was developed after an in-depth analysis of the Egyptian tomato value chain. Egypt is the world’s fifth-largest producer of tomatoes producing about eight million tonnes of fresh tomatoes per year. Suitable climate, dual seasonality and fertile lands attributed to the success of the crop. However, only three to four per cent of the tomato crop is processed, with the processing sector affected by lack of integration with the supply chain.

Also Read: Israel starts exporting natural gas to Egypt

The project will boost the linkages between supply and processing factories, improve the technical skills of workers and managers in the factories, improve the quality of production and processing of tomatoes and expand …