The Agricultural Industry has been receiving constant attention from the various stakeholders including government. The industry is also seen as backbone and economic development through job creation, wealth creation among rural households and national food security. An Estimated 10.5 million hectares out of 75 million hectares of land is currently being used for agri production (14% utilization); 42 million hectares of land classified medium to high potential for agri production (56% agro production potential). This is despite Zambia having; Good water availability but untapped; over 1.7 trillion cubic meters of underground water resources, and about 40% of surface water resources in the SADC region. Agriculture has continued to underperform due to the following reasons; • Limited to credit facilities, inputs, and extension services • Inadequate infrastructure • Poor livestock management • Inadequate attention to research, capacity building and extension needs of irrigation sector • Inconsistency and/or lack of continuity in policies (volatility in government policies) that decimate farmers and discourages banks from lending to the sector due to resulting unpredictable markets and price volatilities; • Distorting subsidies • Spur of the moment import/export bans • Setting floor prices that have little correlation with the cost of production • Lack of value chain infrastructure support i.e. feeder road network, land tenure and administration, communication e.t.c, which creates linkages between supply side and demand side of the sector • Lack of warehouse financing legislation Most of the challenges above cannot be resolved by farmers alone but collectively with other industry stakeholders and partners. However, the route to finding solutions to these problems will need to start with the farmer himself/herself. In Zambia we have a new crop of farmers who are slightly above the traditional rural small holder and below the commercial farmers. These are farmers with farm sizes between 5-100hectares fully on title, fair entrepreneurial or business skills, fairly diversified between livestock and cropping and this is a group that holds the future of farming in Zambia and can graduate into full blown commercial farmers. Most of the members of this forum belong in this category. The biggest challenge for these farmers is access to finance. due to; Poor financial management skills, poor record keeping, lack of legal or governance structure and low yields due to inadequate agronomical skills. In the next few weeks, I will be given tips on how smallholder farmers can improve on the challenges above and enable you to make your farming businesses bankable.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 10:20:39 +0000
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