How can you overcome challenges in developing country agriculture?

Agriculture in developing countries faces enormous challenges. To effectively address them is to identify and tackle the issues associated with the challenges. As it has been rightly pointed out, low productivity continues to bedeviled agriculture in the developing countries. Although, some degree of progress has been made over the years. Low productivity can be traced to issues such as low yielding crop varieties and animal breeds, high incidence of diseases and pests, poor soils, lack of feed in the dry season, poor management practices, etc. In addition to these limiting factors, is our continued perception of agriculture as a source of subsistent living and not as a business enterprise. This need to be corrected through education.

Le renforcement de capacités des acteurs est fondamental pour améliorer la productivité. Cela doit passer par des programmes de formation intégrés qui auront une dimension sociale économique et environnementale.

In the modern world, people are drifting towards urban areas at a very rapid pace. Although that makes sense given the better job and lifestyle opportunities, it keeps the general public away from the basic knowledge of agriculture - how our food is grown, who grows it, what challenges growers face, and how modern agriculture enables growers across the world feed and nourish our people and environment? Getting the general public closer to agricultural technology through education and outreach can help our community be better informed and fuel future innovations to continue to overcome challenges that impact global food security.

Dans les contextes des pays en développement où l’on note de fortes pertes post-récoltes, un meilleur accès aux marchés permettra un développement des différents maillons des chaînes de valeurs agricoles tel que la transformation et la conservation/conditionnement par exemple.

I agree. We need investment in public goods that make agriculture thrive. However, we also need to lobby global policy. For example agricultural subsidies in Europe and America are destroying African agriculture. Subsidized commodities find their way into African markets and since they are cheaper local commodities cannot compete. Farmers risk losing their livelihoods.

Políticas territoriales, basadas en la realidad de cada región o zona de producción. Es importante que el Estado asuma un rol articulador entre las empresas y los agricultores; por otra parte será importante desarrollar e implementar metodologías participativas y vivenciales para los procesos de extensión agraria. Finalmente es fundamental contar con sistemas de información de mercados, se trata de producir lo que se vende no vender lo que se produce.

Technology and innovation is picking up in the smallholder farming community. But, there's a mentality that needs to be fixed - first with developers. Build products with farmers; don't try to fix farmers. Farming has been here for ages, with knowledge being passed down from one generation to another - a wealth of it. There could be nothing new in the space. What is needed is working with farmers to digitise the knowledge and technologies. With this, the adoption and PMF for ag innovations will be an easy find. Key to this, however, is the importance of communities. This is what smallholder farming is anchored on. No need to re-invent the wheel, just digitise what has already been proved to work for farmers.

Inclusion should also feature persons with disabilities. Right from access and freedom to make decision for utilisation of assets and resources, and considerations when designing products and services in the agricultural space.

In sub-national context under vulnerable and fragile state, land ownership is one of the main challenges coupled with peace stability may might trigger recurring displacement and uprooting of farmers and their families from their communities. Insecurities is further aggravated by weak local governance and strong presence of warlords and feuding clans. Further, government support on the provision of strategic and common postharvest facilities also affect the low profit of the farmers resulting to non availability of disposable income making the farmers locked in poverty thus affected negative human development indices in the countryside. This further triggers migration of people to urban areas leaving the farms barren and unproductive.

We need to delve deeper into our land tenure systems. For smallholder farmers, production lands are growing smaller by day, aggravated by the growing population. Additionally, incapacitated rural landholders opt to lease or sell out lands to non-residents, resulting to low food production in the community. Policy interventions are urgent - possibly creating community farmlands to ensure sufficient food is produced for the community and communal poverty alleviation schemes are initiated.