A Green Revolution for Africa

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AGRA Takes Certified Seeds to Farmers in War on Hunger
October 2, 2007
Business Daily (Nairobi); excerpt
By Allan Odhiambo

As part of a strategy to radically boost agricultural productivity, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra) envisages to have in place a special grassroots based delivery system in which a farmer would walk to a shop or kiosk in his rural back yard and readily access high quality certified seeds.

"Access to seeds has been a missing link and challenge to merchandisers. In most rural areas you cannot find agricultural inputs yet the main activity there is farming," Fred Muhhuku, an agro-dealer network development officer with Agra told Business Daily in an interview.

A recent study by Egerton University revealed that lack of proximity to stockists was a key impediment to productivity.

"The farmers often travel long distances to purchase inputs, mainly to take advantage of lower prices," the institution's research out fit, Tegemeo Institute stated in a research report titled : " Enhancing Access and Utilization of Quality Seed for improved Food Security in Kenya".

Agra is seeking to reverse this trend in Kenya and thirteen other nations through an elaborate agro-dealer system backed by a private sector arrangement that would ensure direct linkage to farmers at the lowest level and closest to their farms.

The alliance, which was established last year with an initial US$150 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, targets to help millions of small-scale farmers and their families across the continent to lift themselves and their families out of poverty and hunger through sustainable increases in farm productivity and incomes.

AGRA's strategy is designed to firm the vision laid out in the African Union's Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), which seeks a six per cent annual growth in food production by 2015 through increased usage of new technology and inputs such as fertiliser.

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