Mrs Evelyn Opare, Gomoa District Director of Agriculture has appealed to farmers to take advantage of the Export Marketing Quality Assurance Project (EMQAP) to boost their income.

The project, an intervention of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) is to help farmers to adopt good agricultural practices to enable them produce high quality products to meet export standard.

The African Development Bank is the financier of the Project.

Addressing a farmers’ forum at Gomoa Enyeme, the District Director of Agriculture said government had realised that for farmers to come out of poverty, they need to go beyond production for only the local market.

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Small-scale dairy farmers are set to benefit from a piloting project that seeks to develop 8,000 domestic biogas plants in rural areas. The five year programme is aimed at strengthening Kenya’s biogas sector into a viable market through financial and technical upgrades.

Kenya has the potential to sustain about 4,923 biogas units for every district – making a total of 172,312 biogas units in 35 technically stable districts.

Kenya National Federation of Agricultural Producers said biogas, apart from being used as a source of energy, also produces digested biomass which is an environmentally-improved and more efficient fertilizer compared to raw manure.

Farmers can maximize their crops’ uptake of nitrogen by spreading digested livestock manure onto fields during the growing season. The decomposition process in the biogas plants turns soil nutrients into food which the crops can take up more easily. The digested biomass can be separated into a fibre portion and a liquid portion (slurry).

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Dar Es Salaam — MAJOR agriculture projects to be executed in the southern highland regions, the country main food basket, are underway. President Jakaya Kikwete said in Dar es Salaam that the government and the private sector are on the drawing board for the ambitious projects whose costs are yet to be known.

Mr Kikwete who was addressing local and foreign media attending the 20th edition of World Economic Forum (WEF) on Africa Conference which begun today, said the corridor which runs between Rukwa region through Mbeya, Iringa, Ruvuma and Morogoro has huge potential to feed the country if necessary investment was made.

“This area has huge agriculture potential and we want to partner with the private sector to invest in this area heavily,” said President Kikwete who was accompanied by International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD), President Dr Kanayo Nwanze, said.

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Johannesburg — A PILOT project in rural Limpopo in which emerging farmers were assisted and linked to markets has attracted investment of more than R1,5bn, according to a report from Business Trust. The trust, which was established in 1999 and now counts 140 companies among its members, has set out to prove that a market-based approach to rural economic development can improve living standards of the country’s poorest.

With the project in Maruleng and Bushbuckridge – near the Kruger National Park in Limpopo – expected to reach maturity late this year after five years in the making, its planners say that it could be used as model for a future rural development strategy.

Brian Whittaker, CE of Business Trust, writes in the report that the trust’s projects had proven that “a well planned and co-ordinated rural development programme” can turn around the lives of rural communities. At the beginning of the project, 86% of Bushbuckridge residents between the ages of 15 and 65 were unemployed or economically inactive, while 85% of households lived on less than the household subsistence level of R19200 a year.

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