My name is Mohamed Osman Abdulkadir, I am an agriculturist, researcher and
co-founder of SOMIA-Somali Institute of Agriculture, a newly opened
academic and research institute in Mogadishu.
On the question of 1.1:
Agricultural cooperatives play an important role in enhancing food
security and creating sustainable employment for youth, women and
marginalized small-scale farmers. Small and medium scale farmers gain
tangible benefits from agricultural cooperatives that lead to food
security and poverty alleviation for hundreds of thousands of urban
population.
In Somalia, particularly the southern regions, the communal areas along
Shabelle River made their own cooperative with the aim of utilizing
the water flow of the river. There are no other collaborations like
collective purchasing power, buying farm machineries from abroad,
building local markets for their products and repairing the damaged
roads and transportations shared by these cooperatives.
In some areas, some small group of farmers sting together to support each
other for example by lending money and machinery to each other or even
land to one another.
Although In the past (prior to 1990), COOPs operated in many locations
in Somalia, including both irrigated and rainfed areas. The government
through its COOPs agency and run by hired government officers
controlled the cooperatives. All cooperatives seized functioning when
the Somalia central government collapsed in 1991. Members of COOPs
disappeared and those remaining have been engaged in private fields
since all properties of the government, including their communal
lands, were looted or usurped by gun militias.
My name is Adodo, working as Action-Researcher in West Africa for the 2SCALE program, which is implemented by a consortium composed by IFDC and BoP Inc.
I want to share with the group the experience of maize small farms in Togo.
Before the project, the small maize farmers were mainly producing for their subsistence and in small quantity for the market. Most often, they sold their maize in small quantities after harvesting when they faced a need.
They were producing as individual farmers with very low control on access to input. The project has started as 1000s+ in 2006 and was an incubator of agribusiness initiatives in the area of intervention. It based on the use of an approach called the
CASE: “Competitive Agriculture Systems and Enterprises”.
With this approach, the interveners looked for formation of agribusiness clusters (working on collaboration between groups of farmers, input dealers, banks, traders/processors and business technical services), developing agribusiness value chains and
enabling business environment for them. Then, the project identified the production and commercialization of yellow maize to poultry farmers as business initiative. It supported some of the small maize farmers to become a cooperative and to produce for the
identified market.
Two districts of the South-Est of the country has started to work the project from 2007. This group has been extended to another 5 districts with 9 other small farmer cooperatives. The number of small maize farmers has changed from 67 in 2007 to + 2,000
in 2014. These farmers have gained enough money today from their yellow maize production to poultry farmers to take care of timely input supplying to their members and their training on good agriculture practices (GAP) with their own recruited technical staff,
in addition to the public extension service officers.
They have a very good governance structure, which is useful for them to temper at time emerging tensions.