29 Nov 2020

The Agricultural development Policy of 1991 is currently under review and will soon be presented to the Economic Committee of Cabinet for appreciation, the Assistant Minister of Agricultural Developmemnt and Food Security, Ms Beauty Manake has said.

Giving an update on the ministry direction post COVID-19, Ms Manake said the policy review would address the meaning of food security, food self-sufficiency and transform the economy into an export led one.

 The current agricultural development policy, she said was 19 years and a lot had since changed since its formulation. She explained that the purpose of the policy was determined by the intended objectives and outputs that had an impact to Batswana.

 She said the review further aimed to create new legislature to enable ease of agricultural production and ease of doing business as well as identifying the basic needs such as attaining agricultural land, water for agricultural purposes, financing and capacity building.

Ms Manake said the ministry had developed a detailed three-year plan under the Economic Response and Transformation Plan (ERTP) that looked at all the sectors to inform the future strategies post COVID-19.

She said the process also involved undertaking an initiative to review the subsidy programmes to re-check their relevance and level of impact they contributed to growing the sector.

 Ms Manake highlighted that starting point in achieving food security and self-reliance on food production was to reduce food import bill.

She said the food import bill stood at P7.6 billion annually with agriculture production only contributing P1 billion.  This, she said meant that the bulk of the import bill was the agric value chain and thus pleaded for investment in the industrialisation of food production.

“The bulk of our import bill comes from buying processed food in meats, mealies, canned food stuff, hence there is need  to facilitate the agri-processing industry,” she said.

The assistant minister, said the ministry had also developed the national Agricultural Investment Plan which identified the priority investment areas around agriculture to enable its sustainable development in Botswana.

The plan, she said focused on infrastructural development in production areas and to identify disease and pest outbreaks that might affect the agricultural sector.

To further transform the economy through agriculture, Ms Manake said the ministry has created a National Institute for Research and Development (NARDI), which would focus on research in the diverse agricultural disciplines to inform the sector of streams to follow in developing agriculture in the country.

She said the ministry would digitise farming and progress it into active Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) status to improve data collection and management.

Nata/Gweta MP, Mr Polson Majaga had requested the minister to update Parliament on the ministry’s future plans for food security development post COVID-19. ends