Farmers must be supported to tap into new opportunity

Great success for Rwanda and Africa at large. However, there is a sad part to this wonderful success story that has to do with the fact that 90% of raw materials used by AIF still needs to be imported from the region, because our farmers are unable to meet the qualitative as well as quantitative requirements of the factory.

Monday, February 06, 2017

Editor, RE: "Rwanda to export fortified foods” (The New Times, February 3).

Great success for Rwanda and Africa at large. However, there is a sad part to this wonderful success story that has to do with the fact that 90% of raw materials used by AIF still needs to be imported from the region, because our farmers are unable to meet the qualitative as well as quantitative requirements of the factory.

That being said, Government needs to step up and organise farmers into larger coops in order to enable land consolidation programmes to quickly take effect, which will ultimately allow for modern and extensive crop production that makes use of irrigation and mechanization technologies to take place and hence ensuring that the much needed raw materials is sourced directly from Rwandan farmers.

Needless to say that Government will need to work closely with the private sector in order to achieve this, most especially the financial institutions and the various service providers.

Nomiga