SECRETARY-GENERAL
Africa is raging. Africa and Africans can be proud of past achievements and look forward to a bright future.” Also, reports from Nigeria, for example, show that for quite some time: “The sector has been neglected with the country’s focus on oil and gas, causing a bill of nearly $10 billion on imports of both wheat and rice.” The country, however, can grow these crops itself. The challenge of agriculture in many countries is that the educational curriculum has tended to distance young men and women from agricultural activities. The school experience in the 1950s and 1960s in a number of developing countries appears to have been different, in that the basic educational process was geared towards the necessity to be self-reliant. Youth at elementary and middle school levels studied academic science
Credit schemes for the agricultural sector have been established in Commonwealth countries such as Ghana and Uganda.
and other subjects, but were also trained in agricultural techniques to manage sizeable farms to produce food crops. They also kept cattle for milk or poultry for consumption at school. They would sell off the extra proceeds to raise the school funds. This was indeed practical education for self-reliance. In some Commonwealth countries, the immediate post-independence policy of “Education for Self-reliance” enabled young men and women to go through
basic education to acquire both academic and vocational skills for life. This was an immediate response to the minimal investment and slow modernisation in agriculture, which to-date has led the youth to shun agricultural activities, choosing to migrate to urban places where they encounter high unemployment. In recent years, however, again with reference to Africa, where the World Bank and International Monetary Fund marginalized agriculture in the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s, there are several countries that have now created conditions for a modern and productive agricultural sector. Examples of positive public-private partnerships have been mooted in Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania. It has been cited by several publications that credit schemes for the agricultural sector have
been established in Ghana, Mozambique and Uganda. Similar financial ventures for agricultural growth have been utilized in Asia, particularly in India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, et cetera, in pursuit of food security. Recent reports on the state of global agriculture show that the current decade will require careful but full human and material resource utilization to ensure global food security. My view is that to attract the youth into agriculture,
Commonwealth gallery
) pictured with South African National Council of Provinces Chairperson Hon. P, (left); Gauteng Legislature Speaker Hon. Lindiwe Maseko, MPL, (second left) nne Makinda, MP, (right) at the 44th Africa Regional Conference in Namibia.
The Secretary- General and the Governor-General of Antigua and Barbuda Dame Louise Lake-Tack, GCMG, DStJ .
VIEW FROM THE
The Parliamentarian | 2013: Issue Two | 99
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