The president of Nippon Foundation says bilateral and multilateral donors are willing to assist its Sasakawa-Global 2000 agricultural intensification scheme in introducing modern farming techniques to small-scale farmers in sub-Sahara Africa.
Yohei Sasakawa disclosed this here Thursday, during a press conference following a two-day workshop for ministers of agriculture and finance from the 12 countries where SG-2000 operates in Africa, as well as agronomists in and outside Africa, donors, international organizations and NGOs.
The workshop was preceded by field trips to east, central and southern Ethiopia for visits to SG-2000 assisted projects run by farmers holding small plots.
Sasakawa said that the Nippon foundation has been supporting the SG-2000 programme since the first one was established in Ghana 11 years ago and has since expanded to cover 11 other countries -- Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, Nigeria and Togo (West Africa), Mozambique (Southern Africa) and (Eritrea, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda (East Africa).
Since our resources are limited, we have interested donors in these programmes, and some bilateral and multilateral donors, including the World Bank, are now willing to assist, he said.
The Nippon Foundation has been spending an average of seven million U.S. dollars yearly, in the last three years on SG-2000 programmes in the 12 African countries helping small-scale farmers to produce more.
The scheme introduces the small farmer, with as little as half of an hectare of land, to modern farming techniques and encourages him to use fertilisers, provide him with choice seeds that are resistant to disease, and show him how to apply existing local technology to increase crop yield.
He is provided credit for the purchase of seeds and fertilizers, to be repaid from the sale of surplus produce.
Sasakawa said he was gratified with what he saw during field trips to southern Ethiopia where SG-2000 agricultural intensification technique had shown the way to increased productivity.
What I saw has convinced me that Ethiopia has ample potentials to produce enough food to supply the nation, he said.
But sustaining what has been achieved in Ethiopia since the project started four years ago requires resources, he added. We want to sustain what has been achieved so far in Ethiopia and also want to replicate this success else where in Africa.
SG-2000 has its roots in Ethiopia. Sasakawa and his late father were touched by the debilitating 1984-85 famine in Ethiopia, to consider ways of helping Ethiopia and other African countries produce enough staple food.
The Sasakawas approached former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Dr. Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate (1970) and the father of the green revolution in India and Pakistan in the 1960s, to launch SG-2000 in 1986.
Carter, Borlaug and Sasakawa are co-chairmen of SG-2000.
Carter, who attended the workshop and the field visits from Aug. 23 to 27, had to cut his stay in Ethiopia by a day and leave for home in Atlanta, on Thursday, due to knee infection.
His associates said in a statement issued the same day: We decided that he should return to Georgia to rest his leg and receive medical attention from his physician.
Carter was earlier scheduled to visit Mozambique over the weekend and later go to Mali.