The Partnership will work in four countries within the G8’s New Alliance for Food Security -- Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, and Tanzania
Today, USAID and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) (http://www.agra.org)
announced the Scaling Seeds and Technologies Partnership, a $47
million, three-year partnership intended to accelerate smallholder
farmer access to transformative agricultural technologies. The
Partnership will work in four countries within the G8’s New Alliance for
Food Security -- Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, and Tanzania -- where it
will help governments strengthen their seed sectors and promote the
commercialization, distribution and adoption of improved seeds and other
key technologies. The Partnership aims to increase production of
high-quality seeds by 45 percent in three years and ensure that 40
percent more farmers gain access to innovative agricultural
technologies.
When
the New Alliance was launched, President Obama and others pledged to
leverage technology’s transformative potential by taking innovation to
scale. To accomplish this, they committed to a series of enabling
actions to promote adoption of agricultural technologies: setting yield
targets that support country-defined agricultural goals, identifying key
innovations that can help farmers reach those targets, harnessing
information and communication technologies to support agricultural
growth, and promoting policy reforms to improve the enabling environment
for agricultural investment that will lift millions out of poverty.
The
Scaling Seeds and Technologies Partnership will help deliver on these
New Alliance commitments. By strengthening seed and input sectors, the
Partnership’s efforts will leverage technology’s tremendous potential to
spur agricultural growth in Africa, which in turn can catalyze
broad-based economic growth, improve smallholder incomes, and reduce
hunger, poverty and stunting in children. These gains will also help
partner governments meet the country-determined agricultural priorities
they set during the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Plan
(CAADP) process.
”The
Scaling Seeds and Technologies Partnership will help strengthen seed
sectors, including regulatory systems, and create new local seed
companies, ensuring that game-changing technologies can reach and
improve the lives of millions of smallholders,” said USAID Administrator
Rajiv Shah. “The United States will continue to support this and other
New Alliance efforts through Feed the Future, President Obama’s global
hunger and food security initiative.”
“We
have seen great progress in the development of seeds and other
agricultural technologies in recent years. Crucially, these are seeds
that are suited to Africa’s soil, weather and needs -- they hold
tremendous promise for Africa’s smallholder farmers. AGRA has been
working with our partners across the continent: We have supplied 57,000
metric tons of seeds and released over 300 improved seed varieties. This
partnership with USAID will enable us to scale up this work and ensure
that even more smallholder farmers can benefit from these extraordinary
technologies,” said Jane Karuku, President of AGRA.
By
helping African farmers access improved seeds, inputs, and
complementary technologies, the Scaling Seeds and Technologies
Partnership helps boost agricultural productivity, food security, and
economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa. To kick off its new coordination
role, the Seeds and Technologies Partnership held an inaugural workshop
this week in Nairobi, Kenya, where USAID and AGRA representatives
consulted with key government, research, donor and private-sector
partners on strategies for coordination and collaboration. These
discussions mark the first in a series of in-depth, national-level
dialogues on scaling up farmers’ access to agricultural innovations in
New Alliance countries.
Distributed by the African Press Organization on behalf of Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).
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