01 Feb 2017

Botswana can learn best agricultural practices from Israel, the Minister of Agricultural Development and Food Security, Mr Patrick Ralotsia has said.

He said this during a meeting with Israel ambassador, Mr Gershon Kedar, to appreciate progress made on establishing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on how best Botswana could benefit from Israel on agricultural technologies.

Mr Ralotsia said he had an opportunity to visit Israel to benchmark on agricultural related issues and there was a lot to learn from the country especially that it was a desert.

“They produce and feed themselves and even feed other countries. Every drop of water counts in Israel,” he said.

Despite the fact that Israel’s geography was not naturally conducive to agriculture, Mr Ralotsia said it was a highly developed industry in Israel and the country exported fresh produce.

He said he had an opportunity to benchmark against Israel’s best agricultural technologies, which would help his ministry to focus on technologies that could help enhance agricultural productivity and production.

The minister said there were also plans for Israel and Botswana to collaborate in some areas on a government to government cooperation and also between Botswana University of Agriculture and Natural Resources and Israel University of Agriculture.

“We have developed a draft MoU and I am going to be taking it to government. We are going to be having lot of interaction with Israel.To be specific, one of the things that we are going to benefit from them is making use of highly saline water for crop production purposes,” said Mr Ralotsia.

For his part, Ambassador Kedar said Israel had managed to promote its agricultural performance to meet food demand through hard work, computerisation and by creating agricultural technologies suitable for the desert.

“We are happy to share and export whatever expertise with other countries. We want to share our knowledge and experiences,” he added.BOPA