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Empowering small-scale farmers will improve food security – IDE

Empowering small-scale farmers will improve food security – IDE
By Chiwoyu Sinyangwe
Fri 12 Feb. 2010, 04:00 CAT

ZAMBIA just needs to empower 10 per cent of its over one million small-scale farmers with irrigation facilities to make a serious dent on extreme rural poverty and attain sustainable food security, a senior International Development Enterprises (IDE) official has said.

Announcing the branding of the IDE’s pressure pumps to be called Mosi O Tunya pumps, country deputy director Peter Lungu said Zambia needed to increase land under irrigation through empowering small-scale farmers unlike currently when irrigation farming was the preserve of commercial farmers and a few elitists.

Lungu said it was unacceptable that the country that boasted of 40 per cent of water resources in the southern African region only had five per cent of over 2.7 million hectares of land arable for irrigation farming.

“Right now only 20,000 of the over one million local small-scale farmers have access to irrigation facilities,” Lungu said.

“If only we could grow, increase this number to 100,000, just about 10 per cent, you wouldn’t believe the amount of impact we would make in terms of alleviating the high extreme poverty levels in rural areas and also ensure that the country has sustainable food security throughout the year despite what happens to the weather patterns.”

Lungu said empowering 100 small scale farmers with irrigational facilities would also help the country to increase the area under irrigation from the current five per cent of land arable for irrigation farming to about 33 per cent.

The Mosi O Tunya pumps are distributed in Southern, Lusaka and Copperbelt provinces.

IDE is a local project that works with rural small-scale farmers providing over 8,000 pressure pumps since 1997 to enable farmers grow irrigation crops, especially exotic types, and at the same time help to establish market linkages as a way of helping the farmers with ready market.

Labels: INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES

posted by MrK @ 3:51 PM