Africa's Young Farmers Seeding the Future

MOROGORO, Tanzania

Preserving the Soil and Reaping Greater Harvests

By Orton Kiishweko
Smallholder farmer Peter Mcharo, from Morogoro Region in eastern Tanzania, has a reason to smile. His fields are full of green, healthy maize plants, he has richer soil and he spends less time farming now than he did two years ago.

Malawi’s Maize Shortage Hits Women

By Mabvuto Banda
Each night Esnart Phiri, a widow with five children, sleeps outside the gates of the state-run maize trader or Admarc market, in Malawi’s capital Lilongwe, as she waits for days on end to buy maize.

Cameroonian Farmers Find Justice in Fair Fruit

By Monde Kingsley Nfor
The fruit farmers in Njombe, a small town in the coastal Littoral Region of Cameroon, learned a life lesson about “making lemonade out of lemons” - or rather “dried fruit out of fruit” when their land was taken from them by the government and leased to an international farming company.

Green-Fingered Mauritian Farmers Go Green

By Nasseem Ackbarally
By Kritanand Beeharry’s side are thousands of watermelon seedlings that he has grown in small pots without the use of chemical fertilisers. As the farmer prepares his half-hectare piece of land in Soreze, near Mauritius’ capital Port-Louis, to plant the two-week-old seedlings, he takes a minute to admire his achievement. “Look at these, they look solid and better grown -- it’s the compost,” he says.

Mozambican Farmers Fear Foreign Land Grabs

By William Mapote
Mozambican farmers’ unions believe that soon land will become very scarce for locals as the government leases more and more of it to foreign agribusinesses – thus displacing thousands of rural communities and smallholder farmers with no official title deeds to their land.

Market Gardening Provides Livelihoods for Refugees in DR Congo

By Taylor Toeka Kakala
Standing behind her market stall in Masisu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which overflows with cabbages, carrots and onions, Marceline Dusabe does not fit the traditional profile of an internally displaced person. She, unlike many others displaced by the internal conflict in North Kivu, is not in need of food aid.

African Smallholder Farmers Need to Become Virus Detectors

By Wambi Michael
Unless African smallholder farmers, who comprise the majority of food growers on the continent, are given the tools and knowledge to cope with the increased occurrences of plant virus diseases, the livelihoods of millions will be at stake, according to Nteranya Sanginga, the director general of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture.

Increasing Uganda’s Cotton and Coffee Production

By Will Boase
Cotton was once one of Uganda's key cash crops but a collapse in world prices in the 1980s led to a slump in the market and production. However, cotton production doubled in the 2010/2011 season and brought in 48 million dollars in export earnings.

The Rise of Uganda’s Tobacco Production

By Will Boase
Over the years with the demise of cotton production, tobacco has become one of Uganda's key exports. Six years after British American Tobacco set up regional headquarters in this East African nation, it has become a key tobacco producer for the company.

The Industrialisation of Africa’s Smallholder Agriculture

By Ed McKenna
Africa’s smallholder farmers, who contribute 80 percent of food and agricultural production in sub-Saharan Africa and much of the world’s food supply, are being encouraged by big business, governments and NGOs to become less subsistence based and more entrepreneurial by tailoring production to market forces.

Bumper Grain Harvest Expected in Southern Senegal

By Souleymane Gano
Farmers in Médina Yoro Foula, in Senegal's southern Kolda region, are expecting a good grain harvest this year, and hope to sell thousands of tonnes of grain in the local and regional markets.

Artificial Insemination Means More Milk in Mauritania

By Mohamed Abderrahmane
Cattle herder Mohamed Ould Bouthiah has seen the future, and he likes what he sees. "Five of my cows are crossbreeds with a European variety, and those five together produce 80 litres of milk a day."

Cottoning on to Outsourcing Farming

By Nebert Mulenga
Five years ago, Forbes Gwilize, 52, a cotton grower from Musena village, 80 kilometres north of the Zambian capital Lusaka, was hardly able to earn a living from farming maize.

From Doha to Dakar, Food Insecurity is the Norm

By Mantoe Phakathi

Qatar may be one of the richest countries in the world, but it has something in common with its African counterparts – food insecurity.

Striving to Increase African Food Productivity

By William Lloyd-George
For decades food security and self-sufficiency in Africa have been seen as a distant dream. The Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme, however, hopes to make it a reality, and while it may have begun with a slow start, its coordinators are confident it will produce more positive results in the coming years.
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