By Roger Thurow
Lael Brainard, undersecretary for international affairs at the U.S. Department of Treasury, made an urgent call for contributions to the multi-donor Global Agriculture and Food Security Program. The U.S. commitment was slashed by three-quarters in the latest budget battle, and other countries have been slow to contribute.
In June, she said, the GAFSP steering committee will make its third allocation of grants to fund agriculture development projects in some of the world’s poorest countries. After that, she said, “GAFSP will be without additional resources.”
Sitting in the audience at the Chicago Council’s Symposium on Global Agriculture and Food Security was Samuel Gatembeyi, a smallholder farmer in Rwanda traveling with ActionAid. He could provide personal testimony that an empty GAFSP fund will be a tragedy. For Samuel is a smallholder farmer who, along with thousands of other Rwandan farmers, is benefitting from a GAFSP-funded program to terrace the steep hillside farms of his country. It is a project that was begun by the Rwandan government and depends on additional support to reach its full potential.
The terracing project is increasing the amount of arable land in the countryside while providing a better watershed that doesn’t wash away soils, seeds and plants when the heavy rains fall. Samuel reports that farmers in the western part of the country have increased potato harvests by six-fold. On his homestead in eastern Rwanda, Samuel was able to cultivate “only a tiny part” of his 1.5 hectares before the terracing. Then, the rains would come and wipe out much of that little production. “We were just subsistence farmers,” he says.
Now, he says, “I have a much bigger plot of better-quality land. And the water stays in the soil.” He is planning to plant in two seasons -- maize first, then green beans – rather than just one. And he and neighboring farmers are forming a small cooperative to combine their harvests and seek better prices on the market, which will yield higher income to help with feeding his family and putting his children through school.
“We’re grateful to the (GAFSP) donors because this project is a good solution to our biggest problems,” Samuel told me. “But it hasn’t solved anything. Rwanda isn’t capable of solving all the problems of erosion of the hills all by ourselves. We are a very poor country. We need the donors to continue to support us so we can get to where we want to go.”
If the words of the Treasury undersecretary aren’t persuasive enough, maybe the words of a farmer will be. “If the project stops,” Samuel said, “it will be a tragedy.”
LWH PROJECT WHose farmer is benefitting is tremoundously contributing to the lives of the farmers to overcome hunger.therefore, GAFSP funds are generating impacts t the lives of the people in Rwanda
Posted by: Celestin MUTUMAYI | Friday, May 27, 2011 at 04:56 AM