By Jennifer Dube

MIDRAND, South Africa — The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) will this week dispatch a delegation to Zimbabwe to explore areas of partnership with the inclusive government in agriculture and related investments, officials said last week. 

The consultations will look at funding opportunities and ways of salvaging the country’s agricultural sector, which has suffered a decline over the last decade following violent farm invasions.

Although members of the delegation preferred to keep details of their visit under wraps, sources within the Nepad secretariat confirmed the delegation would spend two days in the country consulting with the government and others.

The delegation will comprise mostly experts from the body’s agriculture and capacity building departments.
The visit is part of Nepad’s efforts to help African governments boost agricultural production, which the organisation views as one of the ways of shielding the continent from the effects of the global financial and food crises.

“This is our first mission in a long time,” said an official at the Nepad secretariat. “The delegation will basically be consulting with the relevant ministries involved in agriculture and investment.”

Faustin Mwape, the senior agriculture investments and resource mobilisation advisor at Nepad, said Africa was better placed to improve its agricultural production through increasing involvement of the private sector.

“The global experience has shown that governments are not good at running both factories and farms,” Mwape said. “They should allow the private sector including the local businesspeople to make money in these fields and tax them to improve services to the poor.

“Look at the example of South Africa who are now taxing these people to address the imbalances of the apartheid era.”

Mwape also gave the example of Zambia where the government once took over all mines but failed to run them. The mines only started performing well after they were sold back to the private sector.

“Local private sectors have played a big role in the growth and development of agriculture in such countries as China, India, Brazil, Latin America and Australia,” he said.

Many countries in Africa, Mwape said, were still failing to implement the African Union’s 2003 resolution that member states should make 10% budget allocations to agriculture and grow the sector by 6% per annum.

He said although Zimbabwe had reached 15% budget allocation by 2007, the country’s case had proved that more funding was needed to achieve growth in agriculture.

In most cases, the funds allocated to agriculture were eroded by inflation as soon as they were announced.

The country’s political crisis, he said, had stifled the great potential in Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector.

But with the advent of the new government comprising former foes, hopes of collaboration in the sector had increased.

“The problem for Zimbabwe is that the macro environment, business environment and policy environment have not been very conducive for growth.

There is general agreement that most of these were a result of the political environment,” Mwape said.
“We are hopeful that with the new developments Zimbabwe will get back on its feet. It has the infrastructure, skills and a good climate among other requirements.”

Since its establishment in 2001, Nepad has been playing more of a facilitatory role in development initiatives on the continent, but following the organisation’s recent integration into the African Union, it is now getting more involved in implementation of projects.

Among other ways of improving agriculture, Nepad has tabled suggestions for member countries to support small-scale farmers, engage such countries as China, Brazil and South Africa which successfully turned around their agriculture, improve South-South co-operation and seek low interest funding with favourable borrowing conditions.

This story first appeared in The Standard newspaper for the week 23/5/2009 to 29/5/2009

 © The Standard Newspaper 2009   http://www.thezimbabwestandard.com/home.html

By Rudo Makunike

According to a study by the World Bank, a million trees are being cleared and burned every year in Mali.

Mali – which is landlocked see map – depends a lot on agriculture, fisheries and other natural resources, all of which rely on land as the productive natural resource. However, the country is bedeviled with massive land degradation.

Still, there are signs that this situation could change soon. The government of Mali recognises the importance of sustainable land and water management as a foundation of agricultural-led development.

It is in this regard that the government of Mali has requested the TerrAfrica partners’ support to engage a sustainable land and water management (SLWM) programme for the purposes of dealing with issues such as land degradation in a more coordinated and effective manner.

The TerrAfrica partners, through the leadership of the World Bank have responded favorably to this request and are now working closely with the government of Mali to address land degradation issues.

The government has taken the initiative to set up a national SLWM committee with a technical secretariat to formulate and implement the SLWM Country Strategic Investment Framework (CSIF) in consultation with all key stakeholders.

The TerrAfrica partners, through the World Bank are therefore providing technical support in the development of the CSIF in Mali, in support of the government’s efforts to improve policy, financing and institutional elements necessary for investing in and implementing SLWM.

In this regard, plans are underway to conduct Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) and institutional and SLWM Public expenditure Review (PER) studies. These studies will feed into the development of the CSIF.

The government and the World Bank have agreed to undertake these studies following the main recommendation of the SLWM study in Mali that highlight the fact that a stronger understanding of institutions affecting SLWM, public expenditures towards SLWM, and the relative costs and benefits of intervention options to promote SLWM is needed.

Notably, the Government, as part of its emerging effort to move toward a program based approach to SLWM, seeks ways to improve vertical and horizontal coordination of the many institutions, sectors, and policy development processes involved in land and water management.

The importance of this work cannot be overemphasized. It will directly contribute to the on-going collaborative effort led by the Ministry of Environment and Sanitation through the SLWM Institutional Framework for Management of Environmental Issues and the SWLM coordinating committee and will strongly contribute to the finalization of the CSIF.

Rudo Makunike, SLM Research and Development Officer, NEPAD Secretariat

Email: rudom@nepad.org