The winners will gain access to UNDP’s global network of experts, agro community membership, financial support, research, and development opportunities. Other benefits of participating include a collaborative process that ensures commercially viable and investable solutions and partnerships between participating agritech startups.

Cultiv@te Agro Initiative aims at bringing together global-leading agritech startups, experts, and market insights for sustainable agriculture. The participants will be judged based on impact, innovation, relevance, feasibility, and clarity.

Application closes on the 14th of February, and UNDP will announce successful applicants on the 24th of February. In the first stage, UNDP will select 78 teams and shortlist the final 52 teams afterward. Each shortlisted team will solve 1 of 13 challenge statements under three themes;

• Urban agriculture: How do you leverage innovative technologies to rethink and create a sustainable food production system for the urban population?
• Rainfed agriculture: How can you maximize agricultural productivity to meet the challenges posed by climate change?
• Livestock farming and aquaculture: How do you ensure safe, sustainable livestock farming and lessen the environmental impact of current practices?

All 52 teams will have to solve 13 challenge statements targeted at 12 countries, which include Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya, and Sudan. The teams will also attend the Global Launch to hold in Singapore in July. Register for the Cultiv@te Initiative here.

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Photo Credit: spore.cta.int

Technical solutions to food tracking, traceability and distribution are enabling agribusinesses along the value chain to better manage and expand their operations. Such innovations also help farmers and farmer organisations to establish and strengthen links with buyers.

Around the world, new technologies are helping to maximise efficiency in the distribution of fresh produce from farms to markets. Farmforce – one such innovation that’s having a global impact – is a cloud-based mobile and web platform, which supports the professional relationship between smallholder farmers and buyers, enabling increased transparency along the value chain through the collation of detailed farm data. Food companies across 25 different countries in Africa, Asia, Central and South America use the platform to coordinate the activities of over 250,000 farmers and ensure food meets safety and sustainability standards.

In Haiti, Acceso Peanut Enterprise Corporation, an agribusiness built by the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership in 2014, uses Farmforce to help oversee their rural operations. Acceso collects groundnuts from more than 3,000 Haitian farmers at depots located near farming communities, tests the nuts to ensure they do not exceed aflatoxin limits and sells them on to large buyers. The company not only provides a ready market for its network of smallholders at a fair price, but also offers the farmers training in good agricultural practices and inputs on credit, to improve their groundnut yields and quality.

Since its launch, Farmforce has enabled Acceso to manage its daily operations and keep comprehensive records of farm data, training attendance, yield forecasts, loan repayments and harvest purchases. Access to this data from the last 4 years has allowed Acceso to assess the impact of its operations and gain a better understanding of which strategies are the most effective for sustainably delivering higher quantity and quality groundnut yields. “Farmforce’s ability to log geo-references for farmer registration, field visits, and survey responses gives me the ability to see where my team is and what work they are doing in real-time,” explains Patrick Dann Dorzin, deputy operations manager at Acceso. With Farmforce’s help, Acceso has tested and sold 800 t of groundnuts since its launch and has begun to expand its portfolio to include other crops such as lime, mango, moringa, sorghum, sisal and castor.

Enhancing aggregation

The efficient distribution of fresh produce is not entirely reliant on technology; aggregation centres and collection points play a key role in ensuring food supplied by smallholder producers makes it to the market in the safe, fresh and high-quality condition required by buyers. Through its FoodTrade programme, the NGO Farm Africa has focused its support on farmers’ organisations, village aggregation centres (VACs) and satellite collection points in Tanzania and Uganda. The NGO builds the business and governance capacities of these farmers’ organisations and VACs to help them establish long-term links with buyers and sustainably grow their business.

Using digital market information systems, Farm Africa has also enabled farmers’ organisations and VACs to monitor market prices, which ensure the aggregators have leverage to negotiate a fair and competitive price for produce. Improved aggregation and access to market information, has helped supported organisations and VACs sell 104,700 t of aggregated produce and gain higher prices than the value most farmers would previously have received at local markets. At the farmer-level, Farm Africa has worked to advocate the benefits of aggregation to farmers and, in just over 2 years, 72,800 farmers have started aggregating their produce.

Run like clockwork

Kenyan start-up, Selina Wamucii, allows buyers to source, aggregate, and redistribute fresh produce from African smallholders to markets (domestic and export) through its mobile platform. To join the platform, farmers simply text Selina Wamucii a code and, with the data, the company is able to map a farmer’s location, their produce and the volume harvested. Working with over 3,000 farmers, the company organises them into small groups according to crop variety and coordinated by produce agents. At harvest, the crop volume produced is recorded on the platform and farmers are immediately paid via their mobiles; a traceability code is also generated so that the produce can be tracked from its origins to the market.

Selina Wamucii then grades, packages, distributes and markets the produce under 10 different brands, including Mount Kenya Fresh Avocados, Kenya Herbs & Spices and Essential Oils of Africa. “We’re tapping into the power of mobile phones to transform the value chain while passing the benefits of an efficient chain on to the farmers and produce buyers,” explains Kariuki Gaita, co-founder of Selina Wamucii. The company’s success is evidence that with the right technologies and relevant capacities in place, food produced by smallholder farmers across the world can meet the demands of international markets.

Credit: CTA Spore

The post Farm To Fork: Innovations Reshaping Smallholders’ Market Access appeared first on MTFC | Meet The Farmers Conference - Nov 2019 - Dubai UAE.

Agriculture has been Africa’s bread and butter over the last century and it continues to do so. In addition to creating most of the jobs in Africa, over half the population depend on it for their livelihoods. According to Nepad, the agricultural population in Africa stands at 530 million people and is expected to exceed 580 million by 2020. Africa has 33 million farms of less than 2 hectares, accounting for 80% of all farms, and the agricultural labour force is comprised mostly of women. Although poor, Africa has the largest surface area of uncultivated arable land and is regarded as a major player in the global food market.

Nepad’s 2013 paper ‘Agriculture in Africa’ states that agriculture forms a significant portion of all African economies and contributes toward major continental priorities like eradicating poverty and hunger, boosting intra-Africa trade and investments, rapid industrialization and economic diversification, sustainable resource and environmental management, and creating jobs, human security and shared prosperity.

Former African Union chair, Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said Africa would have a population of two billion people by 2050, the majority women and youth. She advised that Africans needed to create wealth and conserve its resources for future generations.

The agricultural sector has continued to absorb a large proportion of the working population and will continue doing so. By 2025, it is estimated that 330 million young Africans will have entered the labour market, with limited opportunities for finding jobs in cities. Agriculture in Africa has great potential for increasing growth and sustainable wealth creation.

Nepad’s chief executive Ibrahim Assane Mayaki in the paper said farmers were the primary guardians of Africa’s natural heritage and environmental assets, and they should be granted opportunities to preserve and build on those assets.

The report found that despite being self-sufficient in the 1960s, Africa had become a net importer of cereals. But since 2016, it’s core ingredient, maize, had been hit by a fall armyworm infestation. The outbreak in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa added further strain to food security, the impacts of which could be catastrophic for Africa, the poorest and most underdeveloped continent in the world.

Also See: Amazing Facts About Soya Bean You Need To Know

The fall armyworm has a reputation for destroying maize but also feeds on more than 80 species of plants including rice, sorghum, millet, sugarcane, vegetable crops and cotton. In sub-Saharan Africa, over 200 million people depend on maize for food security as it is a staple cereal crop grown by farmers.

The pest has already caused more than $13 billion in crop losses. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations revealed that by February 2018, only three out of 54 African States had not reported infestations.

The UK Aid stated in a report that the armyworm could potentially cause maize yield losses in a range of 8.3 million to 20.6 million tonnes per annum.

With the ongoing risks to food security posed by the fall armyworm, innovation could be crucial in finding solutions. Fresh approaches that help farmers identify, treat and track instances of the fall armyworm mean that farmers would have a better chance to protect their crops against the invasive fall armyworm.

Agriculture Research Council CEO Dr Shadrack Moephuli told delegates at the 3rd Global Food Security conference in Cape Town last year that innovations were crucial in assisting both commercial and smallholder farmers with food losses.

“These challenges reinforce the critical role of innovation to make agriculture more competitive and sustainable. Innovation is the new normal in agriculture,” he said.

Agriculture is currently standing on the edge of a second green revolution, according to PwC’s 2016 ‘Africa Agribusiness Insights Survey’. This revolution will entail fundamental shifts in how the agricultural sector utilises and implements innovative technology to improve output in a sustainable manner.

“Advances in technology and innovation are the key to the future of agriculture,” said Frans Weilbach, Agribusiness Industry Leader for PwC Africa in the insights report.

“Innovative technology and advancements in productivity are becoming increasingly important as pressure mounts…The global population is growing rapidly and the climate is ever-changing. Agribusinesses are making changes to go high-tech. From data-gathering drones to artificial intelligence farming, technology is making the agricultural sector more precise and efficient.”

PwC found that the agricultural sector to be one of the most critical industries for the African continent due to its economic potential, and is projected to become a US$1trillion industry in sub-Saharan Africa by 2030.

Taking a keen interest in the fall armyworm threat in Africa, Nesta, on behalf of Feed the Future, Land O’ Lakes International Development (LOL) and the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) decided to roll up their sleeves and immediately search for innovative solutions. They held a competition between March and May targeting innovators from around the globe, in search of digital solutions and approaches that could provide timely, context-specific, actionable information to enable smallholder farmers and those who support them to identify, treat, and track incidence of the pest in Africa. The US Agency for International Development (USAID), together with LOL and FFAR contributed $400,000 in prize awards, and the winners will have a chance to develop their prototypes.

It will be interesting to see what kind of innovative ideas come out from this, and whether any of the prototypes can be developed successfully. After all, Africa — which has the largest surface area of uncultivated arable land — could also be home to the next Einstein. Let us preserve Africa by containing the fall armyworm threat and safeguarding our green revolution through innovative tools.

This article was written by Fayelle Ouane and was first appeared on IT News Africa.

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The post Preserving Africa’s Agricultural Revolution With Innovation appeared first on MTFC | Meet The Farmers Conference - Nov 2019 - Dubai UAE.