Madam, - The announcement last week that former UN secretary general Kofi Annan is to lead a campaign to put Africa's 180 million small farmers at the forefront of development is welcome.
With funding support of $150 million from the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, Mr Annan's Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) will seek primarily to increase agricultural productivity on the continent by improving access to seed stock, expanding irrigation, and similar initiatives.
At Self Help Development International we believe such an approach is central to achieving long-term change for a continent where more than 80 per cent of people rely on small-scale agriculture for their day-to-day survival.
It is important, however, that AGRA does not go for a "quick fix" by opening the door to genetically modified crops, or through an over-reliance on chemicals in crop production. Either would be environmentally damaging and could not be be sustained in the long term.
AGRA needs to support training initiatives, and the use of appropriate technologies such as rain-harvesting and drip-irrigation systems, the crop rotation, diversification and composting.
Although per capita food production has actually declined in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa over the past decade, such an approach, together with infrastructural supports such as the development of farmers' co-operatives, can pave the way for the kind of "green revolution" which has seen food production triple in Asia and Latin America over recent decades. - Yours, etc,
GEORGE JACOB, Communications Officer, Self Help Development International, Hacketstown, Co Carlow.