Thursday, March 14, 2024

The Eastern Africa region is plagued by numerous productivity, aggregation, post-harvest handling, processing, trade as well as marketing challenges that lead to periodic food deficits and shortages. Specific to the grain industry, each stage of the value chain seems to present different bottlenecks that impede the efficient and competitive growth of the industry:

Production

Production is low, with low productivity per acre and a higher cost of production than the world’s average diminishing quality and therefore competitiveness both regionally and internationally.
Production is predominantly subsistence,characterized by crude farm implements such as the hoe, in relatively small parcels of land (smallholder), rain fed production, low use of fertilizers and other farm inputs.

Storage

Storage and warehousing systems at farm and even commercial levels are limited and significant amount of food is lost in form of post-harvest loses. Food safety then becomes an an issue with the occurrences of food contamination in form of aflatoxins which are potentially fatal are increasingly becoming more common.

Access to markets and market information

Access to markets is a challenge and the farmers end up parting with their produce at farm gates soon after harvest and at the lowest prices – hence low incomes to the farmers, who at times may not even break even. Besides, farmers have little or no access to market information and therefore end up being price takers and at the mercy of the middle me.

Access to finance

Agriculture finance empowers farmers to increase the quality and quantity of food production. With low access to finance, farm investments are therefore low.

High transaction costs

Grain Traders and Millers/Processors incur high transaction costs in sourcing for the grain commodities from the numerous small holder producers, further decreasing incomes and raising consumer prices.

Bariers to trade

Grain markets at national and regional level are fragmented, inefficient and subject to frequent ad-hoc government interventions in form of export/import tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade. Consequently, one part of the region may be suffering drought and hunger while another part of the same region has food rotting in the fields with producers fetching very low prices simply because regional trade in food is prohibited by national governments ostensibly for “national food security” reasons.

EAGC was therefore designed to address the above issues, and since its inception, it has developed and has been implementing various programs in partnership and with support from various partners cutting across national, regional and international organizations; governments and development partners. These include;