Agricultural technologies, innovations key for agri-business resilience during COVID-19

Dr. Emmanuel Okogbenin

As governments across the globe strive to curb the spread of COVID-19, it is becoming imperative now more than ever to promote agricultural technologies and innovations during these unprecedented times to cushion smallholder farmers and agri-businesses against the negative effects and impacts of COVID 19 pandemic.

Accordingly, African governments, seed companies, and regional bodies should endeavour to collectively create an enabling policy environment for agri-business, support smart agro-input subsidy programmes without distorting market dynamics and promote digital agriculture solutions to ease the effect of the pandemic on food and nutrition security in Africa.

Good and well-implemented policies would have to be enacted or reinforced for firmly targeted impact to include the rapid emergence and growth of SMEs with a good incentive for the private sector to catalyze agricultural value chain developments in Africa.

Agri-businesses are gradually gaining increased prominence and will be pivotal to the processes for the attainment of the African Union (AU) 2063 agenda towards the transformation of the African continent.

Agri-business therefore should be viewed as one of the key economic pathways for Africa where agriculture contributes substantially and significantly among other sectors to the total Gross Domestic Product in most countries on the continent.

Inevitably, as an exigency, Africa needs to create an environment that will enable investment and adoption of best practices that are profitable in agribusiness, also, to rapidly modernise farming to integrate commercially successful innovative technologies to strengthen agribusiness resilience in the wake of COVID-19.

However, agribusinesses in Africa is facing unique challenges among which are high post-harvest losses, poor infrastructure, and limited access to crucial support services such as agricultural finance and insurance.

These challenges have been further compounded in magnitude by other shocks brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic which has resulted in other new additional cataclysmic effects including limited access to inputs, disrupted food production, shortage of labour and closed borders.

Strategies for agri-business development in Africa should adopt a systemic and integrated approach for sustainable impact and good pace in alignment with the goals of the AU 2063 agenda.

Some of the strategies to steer agri-business development include the deployment of resilient products and mechanisation/digital technologies towards commercialising the agricultural sector in addition to reducing drudgery for smallholder farmers, including addressing gender inequalities in agriculture.

The African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) has been on the forefront in promoting commercialisation of adaptable technologically innovative products and exploring social enterprises as a robust model in building agri-business resilience among African farmers for better results and impact.

Access to new production and processing machinery specifically designed to work at the scale of the typical African smallholder farm has been aptly demonstrated in cassava by AATF.  

With the major focus of transforming this hardy, climate-resilient cassava crop into major money-spinner (as food and industrial crop), digital and mechanisation solutions have been availed to over one million farmers and their families to maximise benefit, through improved planting, harvesting and other operations that has boosted yields from 9 tons to 25 tons per hectare with good linkages to the markets which has all enhanced the commercialisation of this crop.

If Africa must rapidly move away and evolve from subsistence agriculture, it is paramount for it to promote and support continuity in investment in new farming technologies—from better seeds to digital tools to machinery—as the best opportunity for transforming African agriculture into an engine for economic growth that will have benefits far beyond the farm sector.

For agriculture landscape to change in Africa, the timely accessibility and availability of quality certified seed is critical and strategic to enabling farmers to raise agricultural productivity, increase income, and reduce poverty.
Facilitating a functional seed system that supports a well-integrated production of breeder and foundation seed that feeds and drive the supply chain for certified seed production is equally as crucial. 

A social enterprise, QualiBasic Seed (QBS) Company, being incubated by AATF is addressing a key bottleneck challenge in the seed system in Africa by offering a commercially sustainable foundation seed supply solution to seed companies who use it to produce quality certified seeds that are sold to farmers. QBS is therefore efficiently bridging the gap between crop breeders (working with national and international research programs) and the local seed companies to improve connections and coordinated integration for a responsive formal seed system.

To fully unlock and maximise agribusiness opportunities, there is a need to provide innovative market systems that offers agribusiness solutions to farmers’ input and output needs towards strengthening more profitable practices.

In the wake of COVID-19, it has become very crystal clear that systems improvement and approach will be an essential requirement and not an option to the pandemic challenges. 

The key requirements will be strengthening infrastructure to improve the delivery mechanism of agribusiness pipelines, creating frameworks to transform Africa into net food exporter for more revenues and by moving more actors to top of value chains for rapid agri-business transformation.

The writer is the Director of Programme Development and Commercialisation at AATF