How can smallholders be empowered to supply and engage with agribusiness?
This is just one of the questions taken up during the AGRF parallel session on linking up smallholder farmers and agribusiness.
While representatives from leading farmers’ organizations from East, West, and Southern Africa filled the panel, the mix of representatives from large and small private companies, policymakers and global funders made for a lively discussion.
“If farmers are to benefit from existing market access models, they need a much higher level of organization,” stressed Philip Kiriro, President of East Africa Farmers Federation. “They need to be legal and legitimate to can mobilize and utilize their own capacity.”
Moses Nyabila from EADD, a 10 year project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
“Banks want to work with us, partners are beginning to invest in the smallholder collective platform, farmers are buying in—we have a triangle of support, which means that is a good project. The model is working. It is a sustainable business. Some villages are bringing in close to half a million dollars a month, which goes into the village. This is a very important platform going forward, and it can be repeated in other African countries.”
“We cannot replace our people with tractors and other things, we need to work with them.”
Session rappateur, Olanrewaju Smith, of Lanrify Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Consulting in Canada was struck by the fact that farmers were communicating with researchers, government officials, private sector folks and other development types on the same level.
According to Smith, this has not been the case.
“NGOs were always the spokespeople for farmers. Now, we have farmers who can put forward their concerns,” Smith said. “One concern is that farmers are not properly organized. If they are not organized they can’t put forward their collective concerns on issues like gender.”
Often, women suffer most by disorganization, since they do most of the farming.
“Any organization that can promote farmers’ organizations will move us one step closer to achieving a Green Revolution for Africa.”
AGRA Blog 
The press release mentions that women often suffer most from disorganization, but they can suffer from selective recognition of organizations, too. How many of the representatives of farmer organizations invited from all over Africa were women? How many of the agribusiness organizations were women? Was the informal sector, where many women entrepreneurs operate, represented alongside the corporate private sector? In West Africa, including Nigeria and Ghana, some of these women traders operate at a comparably high volume of business and supply the formal sector already.
Have you considered working with market traders in West Africa? They are currently the link between food farmers and the urban wholesale yards, and they often agree to provide a steady stream of supplies to contractors from schools, restaurants, prisons etc. They have the track record and offer farmgate pickup, small lot buying, credit both directions in season, and other services that larger coops find difficult to manage. In Ghana they are organized in local groups with national networks, and willing to negotiate with farmers and government. The negotiations between tomato farmers and traders in the Upper East region of irrigated production near the Volta were very instructive (March 2007). You can see suggestions on strengthening marketing institutions from trader and farmer groups in the collaborative book Trading Up, published by KIT (Netherlands) in 2008. They hosted a participative writing workshop in Nairobi with participants from all over Africa.