Africa > Agribusiness / Food

Agribusiness / Food in Africa

  • Hong Kong bans all poultry imports from bird flu hit Togo

    HONG KONG, 2016/08/27 Hong Kong’s Centre for Food Safety (CFS) has announced a total ban on the importation of poultry meat and products, inclunding poultry eggs from Togo effective Friday August 26. According to the CFS, the action was to protect public health in Hong Kong in view of a notification from the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) about outbreaks of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza in the west African country.

  • Africa: Agriculture Sector Players Commit to Increase Agriculture Finance

    AFRICA, 2016/08/06 practitioners in rural and agriculture finance have committed to increase finance in the sector as the international conference on best practices in rural and agriculture concludes in Kigali. Participants agreed approaching up with best ways for access to finance, increase production and cutting down the cost of production in agriculture. Closing the conference, Dr. Monique Nsanzabaganwa, Vice Governor of the Central Bank of Rwanda thanked participants for working hard to learn as much as possible. "Everyone should be eager to learn because everyone has something to do better than what they have been doing". She called on financial institutions to overcome fear of risk while financing the agriculture sector.

  • Cameroon: Cocoa Marketing - Producers Urged to Join Cooperatives

    CAMEROON, 2016/08/06 Cocoa prices rose to FCFA 1,650 per kilogramme this year for a total production of 269,497,766 tons. Trade Minister, Luc Magloire Mbarga Atangana, has called on farmers and their cooperative unions to constantly improve on the quality of their cocoa produce and keep watch over fraudulent buyers of particularly illegal cross-border buyers from neighbouring nations that underpay their produce and make fortune out of their sweat.

  • Tanzania: Pass Guarantees 314 Billion/ - Loans to 380,000 Borrowers

    TANZANIA, 2016/08/06 In a bid to promote agricultural production in the country, the Private Agricultural Sector Support (PASS) Trust has between 2007 and 2015 offered 314bn/- loan guarantee to farmers who sought credits from commercial banks. PASS, a facility established in 2000 to stimulate increase and investments in commercial agriculture and related sectors, was registered in 2007 as a non-profit and non-governmental organisation under the trustee incorporation Act, 2002.

  • Ethiopia: Agency Gets Tough On Dormant Commercial Farms

    ETHIOPIA, 2016/08/06 The total area of farmland implicated in the new warnings equates to approximately three-quarters of the size of Addis Abeba Seven commercial farm developers, who occupy a total of 37,500ha of land in three regions, have received warning letters for leaving the land unutilised for so long. The area of farmland is almost equivalent to three quarters of Addis Abeba city or three times the size of Bole district. During the early weeks of July 2016, the Agricultural Land Investment Government Agency wrote a final warning letter to one of the developers and initial warnings to the remaining five. This comes next a four and six-year wait, respectively, for the developers to show significant produce from their estates. The investors who leased the land, which ranges from 500ha up to 10,000ha in the SNNP, Gambella and Benishangul-Gumuz regions, have failed to bear fruit. In this respect, the total land leased in SNNPR takes the lion's share.

  • Zimbabwe Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa

    ZIMBABWE, 2016/07/27 Zimbabwe has started rolling out a $500 million program to boost corn production to meet domestic food request. The three-year plan is aimed at raising plantings and expanding irrigation to increase production of the dietary staple to 2 million metric tons a year, Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa told reporters on Monday. The country harvested 742,000 tons of corn in the 2014-15 season, less than the 1.8 million tons needed by the Zimbabwean people.

  • Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO), Uganda

    UGANDA, 2016/07/25 The President of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni recentlu launched a quality seeds drive at the recently concluded agricultural show in Jinja, Uganda. I hope this is real quality seed, as in organic seed. We have had our own misgivings with seed that is not organic but goes by the names Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO).

  • Crackdown On Illegal Fishing to Protect Millions of Jobs

    BENIN, 2016/07/18 West Africa nations must crack down on foreign fleets fishing illegally off its Atlantic coastline and build up their fisheries to protect the livelihoods of millions of people, a leading thinktank said on Wednesday. Overfishing by foreign vessels is driving a lot of species towards extinction and destroying the livelihoods of fishing communities in nations such as Ghana, Liberia and Mauritania, said the London-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI).

  • Ivory Coast abundant rains favorable for cocoa crop

    ABIDJAN, 2016/05/27 Abundant rain that continued last week in most of Ivory Coast's primary cocoa growing regions will boost the increase of flowers and pods on the trees, although harvesting remained weak and the quality of beans had not from presently on improved, farmers said on Monday. The world's top cocoa producer is in its rainy season, with heavy downpours in the coastal regions and forest areas expected to continue until the end of June.

  • Zimbabwean farmer digs out weeds from a maize crop.

    ZAMBIA, 2016/05/22 As recently as March, Zambian Agriculture Minister Given Lubinda predicted a shrinking harvest this year due to erratic rains. The government was considering importing maize to cover a potential deficit, he said and, faced with food shortages, Zambian officials had even banned the export of corn and corn products on 5 April. The new announcement came as a amaze to a lot of people in Zambia and the rest of the region. The current El Nino weather phenomenon has been affecting the region for a while, with over 60 million people suffering its consequences, according to the United Nations.
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