To overcome poverty and hunger, many developing countries will need to achieve faster and more sustained pro-poor economic growth. Good governance plays an essential role in reaching these goals. To navigate the difficult choices among policy and investment alternatives and governance reform options, policymakers and stakeholders need a holistic and dynamic approach, in which the interaction of policies is understood and pro-poor strategies that encompass farmers’ response to new knowledge and technologies are developed and implemented.
Research and technology alone will not drive agricultural growth. The full and beneficial effects of agricultural research and technological change will materialize only if government policies are conducive to and supportive of poverty alleviation and sustainable management of natural resources.
Modern agricultural biotechnology – including, but not limited to, genetic engineering and the breeding of transgenic crops – offers great potential as an instrument for achieving food security for all in sub Saharan Africa where about 200 million people are chronically hungry.
Despite the level of agricultural technological advancement in the world’s agricultural biotechnology arena over the past decade, sub Saharan countries farmers’ systems for exchanging planting material have not been better understood and appropriate public policy diffusion strategies have therefore not been formulated. Results from a significant number of research studies indicate that in formulating pro-poor development strategies, many governments in sub Saharan Africa have not given high priority to small farmers, in other words, to broad-based agricultural development. Many developing country policy makers have looked at the large commercial farmers in the west as a “replicable trait”, yet small farmers are the keystone of a pro-poor development strategy for sub Saharan Africa. A significant proportion of the population in sub Saharan Africa still wallows in abject poverty, threatened by hunger and food insecurity as a result of poorly focused, wrongly targeted and acutely inaccurate rural development policies.
Research is therefore needed to build the understanding of the big picture influencing agricultural policy design and implementation including appropriate strategies for delivering agricultural biotechnology to the rural poor. This is one of the best ways forward for alleviating the social problems of food insecurity and poverty ravaging across sub Saharan Africa.
"As a Development Economist concerned with the plight of the African population, i am preparing this grounds breaking research that will revolutionise the agricultural production systems in the continent thus promoting sustainable livelihoods, by increasing rural household food security and incomes."
