01 Sep 2016

The Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) is making strides in its effort to commercialise the agricultural sector,.

While admitting that the country’s agricultural sector is still faced with different challenges, the Minister of Agriculture, Mr Patrick Ralotsia and his deputy Mr Kgotla Autlwetse were adamant that the sector was making progress, contributing to the government’s pledge to create jobs and reduce poverty.

“We admit that our country’s agricultural sector is faced with challenges, which we as a ministry keep identifying with a view of ensuring that we improve. But we have managed to grow the agricultural significantly, and there has been progress in commercialising the sector,” Mr Ralotsia said in an interview.

He said the agricultural sector had grown significantly due to various state interventions over the years, and what had become essential was ensuring that such progress was further entrenched.

“Food production has grown significantly, the amount of land being used for farming, the yield, the livestock and small stock sectors as well as our overall technological approach to the sector have been magnified, and we are working on entrenching such progress through commercialisation,” Mr Ralotsia said.

He added that through the National Master Plan for Arable Agriculture and Dairy Development (NAMPAADD), MoA served to streamline arable agriculture and dairy development in order to provide food security, alleviate poverty and economically empower rural communities.

“NAMPAADD assists commercial farmers to upgrade their technologies and management levels and we encourage the setting up of agro-business. We realise that agriculture has strong potential to create jobs, through downstream business; if you have a factory producing maize meal or biscuits and drivers transporting farm produce to such industries, that is a spin off of agriculture,” he said.

He said the Integrated Support Programme for Arable Agriculture Development (ISPAAD) assisted farmers with seed subsidy, free fertilizer and herbicides to assist in controlling weeds.

Mr Ralotsia said that the government has availed parastatals such as Citizen Entrepreneurial Development Agency (CEDA) and the National Development Bank (NDB) to offer loans to farmers to set up agro-businesses, with the government also availing land to be leased for commercial farming across the country in places such as Pandamatenga and Mosisedi.

“The MoA itself offers free advice to those engaged in commercial farming, but the pace of commercialisation is slower than our input in terms of educating farmers because the mindset of people is still caught up in viewing agriculture as a pastime or a subsistence vocation,” he said.

For his part Assistant Minister Autlwetse added that the MoA, through its agricultural officers countrywide, assisted small-scale subsistence farmers on improving their yield.

“Our hope is that in future, subsistence farmers will graduate to become commercial farmers who are self-sustainable. But in the interim, we give support to the small-scale farmers through the offering of advice and provision of inputs,” Mr Autlwetse said.

These initiatives of the MoA are part of the government’s key priority areas for which include making job creation a number one priority; taking Batswana out of poverty; increasing education funding; eliminating mother to child transmission of HIV; as well as fighting corruption in all its manifestations. ENDS