Regional conference discusses food insecurity under a changing climate |26 May 2015

The Southern African Confederation of Agriculural Unions (Sacau), the organisation that groups farmers in the Southern African region, held its annual conference this week at the Savoy Hotel at Beau Vallon.

The aim of the two-day conference was to discuss, share ideas and explore innovative and sustainable options to increase productivity in agriculture and key natural resources on which it depends to sustain production of food for the growing world population.

Topics discussed included the management of soil, water, fisheries, range-lands, forests, other natural resources to feed the world and their effect on productivity, innovative practices and also the adoption of climate smart farming.

Seventeen organisations from twelve Sacau member countries from Southern Africa namely Botswana, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe along with consultants, financial institutions, policy makers, regional organisations such as the African Union (AU), Comesa, among others, took part in the conference which was officially opened by the Minister for Fisheries and Agriculture Wallace Cosgrow.

In his opening remarks, Minister Cosgrow welcomed all the foreign delegates to Seychelles and reminded them that feeding the world has always been a challenge.

However, with the current trends and the many efforts across the globe, significant inroads have been attained in this noble task as sadly, Sub-Saharan Africa, our region according to reports, has the highest prevalence of undernourishment, with only modest progress made in recent years with around 25% of the population still remain undernourished.

“The importance of the political will to place food and nutrition security at the top of the political agenda and to create the environment which will allow for adequate and appropriate investment and stakeholder participation in this effort towards ridding the world of hunger cannot be overemphasised,” he said.

Minister Cosgrow also talked about the Seychelles National Agriculture Investment Plan to be endorsed by the cabinet later.

Sacau president, Dr Theo de Jager, thanked the Seychelles farmers for hosting the conference along with other partners and aids institutions and also welcomed the women farmers for their contributions in the conference. The women farmers had previously taken part in the 2015 regional women farmers empowering conference held during the week ending May 23.

“It is us the farmers that bear and sustain most of the effect of climate change especially in our region and this is why we have to form part in discussions on climate change. In our region we hold the world’s poorest farmers and the world’s most successful farmers. This is what we proud ourselves in Sacau. Our big dream is by the end of this year, the Kyoto protocol must be replaced by a new document in which agriculture has its rightful place but we must have a firm agreement among each other in our deliberations on how we are going to implement climate smart agriculture in our region,” he said.

The chairman of the Seychelles Farmers’ Association (SeyFa) Serge Benstrong expressed his deep appreciation and gratitude to Sacau for its commitments to the ongoing Africas’ efforts to increase food production in the face of climate change so as to reduce poverty and hunger in the region.

“The challenge will need to be met in a world with a shrinking arable land base, less and more expensive petroleum and increasingly limited supplies of water and nitrogen, and within a scenario of a rapidly changing climate, social tensions and economic uncertainty,” he said.

Last year the Sacau conference was held in Lesotho and next year Swaziland will be the host country.