26 May 2014

Batswana must commercialise the agricultural sector in order to grow the economy, the Minister of Agriculture, Mr Christiaan De Graaff has said.

Giving a keynote address at the National Policy Consultative Conference for the Revised National Policy on Agriculture Development on May 23, Minister De Graaff said it was imperative to have an accelerated growth of the sector, where all key role players were committed and demonstrated their participatory role in driving the strategic developments.

He said in 2008, government took a decision to commission a study to review the agricultural sector, with a view to facilitate further decision making on future directions of the sector.

He said the aim was to ensure that the sector ultimately contributed more to the national priorities of food security and nutrition, productivity, investment, income generation and employment creation.

Minister De Graaff said 2008 was a critical time when the whole world started facing the difficulties of the economic meltdown and as such, government had to proceed through a difficult period to drive the policy review process.

However, he explained that that partners such as the African Development Bank supported the country through financial assistance to enable the government to engage the Botswana Institute for Development Policy Analysis who jointly with Transtec Consortium carried out the review and completed it in 2010.

The minister also emphasised that the main objective of the agriculture sector was to develop a strategic framework that would provide guidance on ways to achieve sustainable agricultural development.

The specific objectives of the review included undertaking holistic in-depth review performance of the sector, and all the existing sectoral policy initiatives in the context of the current globalisation trends and all other emerging challenges that directly affected agriculture production.

The other objective was the identification of existing gaps in the sector with a view to inform the formulation of the new policy, which could turn the status quo around.

In addition, the objective proposed specific areas of interventions and strategic options where financial institutions could be able to provide a helping hand towards poverty eradication, competitiveness, increased productivity, trade and environmental sustainability.

Minister De Graaff further stated that government adopted the recommendations of the study with the overall recommendation that the policy objectives of the 1991 National Policy on Agriculture Development were still relevant.

He said the study therefore recommended that the Ministry of Agriculture needed to work within the limited resources to augment these policy objectives, through ensuring rigorous implementation of the associated strategies as well as tracking performance overtime.

He said this created a platform for the ministry to start developing new strategies on how the policy objectives would be effectively driven from now on forward adding that several consultation workshops were held with various stakeholders in line with the planning principle. These consultations were held with civic society, farmers and various government structures. ENDS