Target young farmers to improve food security

Oct 16, 2018

We must form farming communities or groups

By Simon J. Mone

Today, October 16 is World Food Day. It comes at a time when a section of the world is staring at hunger daily. The race against the 2030 timeline to address hunger is getting interesting, like the final lap of an eight hundred meters sprint.

It seems too close and yet many people still believe that it is possible to achieve zero hunger in twelve years. You get to a displaced peoples' camp and resettled people have to rely on food rations from humanitarian hearts. What shall be done to soothe these vulnerable people's situation?

Away from the camps, many people still suffer from starvation. Households are yet to become food secure. Farmers on many occasions have had to watch helplessly as their cultivation returns little or at worse, nothing to harvest. A big part of this has a lot to do with the changing climate, that of recent have treated farmers harshly. And this is discouraging always. All of us look to farming for food. Young farmers and rural communities consider farming to be a life saver.

This means we should seriously consider the enablers of successful farming in order to embrace commercial agriculture. On top of that, the agricultural market requires good quality produce for competitiveness. So, we farmers of today have got our work cut out. We ought to learn new and better techniques of farming. Farming as a business, will do a world of good for us. The world needs food.

In many countries, agriculture should account for a big part of their earning. As president Museveni always says, commercial agriculture will be the lifeline for many families and communities. How can we make it our lifeline?

One thing locals must remember is that in order to achieve this, they need to have access to big chunks of land. Gone are the days when small plots of land was adequate for subsistence agriculture. For us in Africa, we know that tradition was not kind to young women. They are always discriminated against when it comes to sharing land among traditional African families.

So, girls and women hardly have access to the amount of land that they require to support commercial agriculture. Unlike their male counterparts, who know that they will inherit acres of land from their grandparents, most women don't have a single chance. But even when boys got this land, many have divided it into smaller plots and sold in order to move to town to start up small scale businesses.

Advise your relatives and friends to refrain from selling their land. And let the elders start to share land with girls as well. Once everybody can have enough land for farming, they can quickly get agro-inputs.

To do this, we must form farming communities or groups. Groupings add voice to lobby for support, like training. By grouping ourselves, we let our benefactors know that we are ready to turn things around. Farming groups are easy to support.

They can benefit from a number of learning; like how to plant properly spaced crops for better yield. And how to manage the fertility of land through knowledge acquired in training. This multiplies production for the betterment of income.

In groups, you get knowledge of how to stop crops from drying. Groups get exposure to better techniques of storing water for irrigating farm lands. Even households will afford small cisterns to irrigate their crops. When in groups skills of managing farm land are easily transferred. It enables speedy, not steady progress.

Group members can get access to savings and loan schemes to improve their entrepreneurial skills. The biggest beneficiary of farming groups could be the young farmers.

So, empower young farmers to be able to manage farming as a group in order to sustain crop productivity and eventually be food secure.

Writer is a civil engineer

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