Climate change worsening farming’s trade-related woes

These techniques include the rotation and diversification of crops, as well as the plantation of crops in immediate proximity to forests.

The former helps to reduce the depletion of soil; the latter contributes to a better management of water and to capture nitrates.

The French projects have also focused on improving the collection and storage of rain water.

Gérard Renouard, head of the Association of French Farmers for International Development, an NGO which cooperates on such research programmes, argued that to pursue such techniques on large scale in Africa, “mass investments are needed in the education of farmers, infrastructure and in the technological modernisation of the food industry”.

Renouard mentioned that African farmers needed irrigation systems, roads and silos to transport and stock production.

For the modernisation of the food industry, pasteurisation and systems to bottle products are needed, he said.

Renouard told IPS that African farmers also need “fair prices for their products to encourage them to invest and increase production.

But these fair prices can only be obtained if “African agriculture is protected from the competition of cheap products from abroad”.

It is precisely OECD state subsidies that fuel such competition.