Without agricultural development at the core of Africa’s progress, there will be no development on the continent.

Take your seats: the curtain has risen on a fresh strategy to link small farmers and policy-makers across Southern Africa. Theatre has been chosen as the means to explain agricultural policy to rural areas, and carry voices from the countryside back to the seats of power.

Theatre and agriculture are two words not often seen together. But they are stepping out in tandem across Southern Africa in support of raising farm productivity and incomes.

A play that will soon be put on for rural people and policy-makers alike was performed in Maputo at the week-long dialogue on agriculture policy organised by the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN).

Zenzele Ndebele gets his feet muddy in farmland around Boane.

 

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Hanson Tamfu interviews AMY SULLIVAN, Limpopo Basin Focal Project

The water available in the Limpopo River basin, which stretches across Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe and Mozambique, is both in great demand and highly variable. Managing it effectively and to the satisfaction of all users is a challenge.

Dr Amy Sullivan is the project leader of the Limpopo Basin Focal Project.

If Africa’s farmers had access to modern farming technology – they could easily feed the entire continent.

In Mozambique, differences in rainfall contribute to higher levels of poverty in drier areas.

Poverty levels in drier regions range from 67 to 85 percent, said Professor Firmino Mucavele, Director for Academic Reform and Regional Integration at Eduardo Mondlane University. He was presenting his analysis of agriculture’s true contribution to the Mozambican economy.

Malawi has put an end to subsidy coupon fraud by using farmers to hand them out to those who really need them. Malawi’s food production programme has been praised as a huge success in Africa and earned that country’s president and his government the Food Agriculture Natural Resources and Policy Network’s (FANRPAN) inaugural Food Policy Award in 2008.

Decisions about agriculture should be made in the outdoors, under trees and with the people whose livelihood it is to farm – not with suits in boardrooms.

Whenever policy makers gather to make decisions on agriculture, Linda Nghatshane and fellow members of the Nelspruit Agricultural Development Association in South Africa get frustrated.
Their frustration is not about the purpose of the meeting, but where the meetings are always held – nowhere near the farms.

God is not making any new water. It will not rain anymore in the Limpopo Basin.