03 Dec 2023

Kusi Ideas Festival is an interconnection platform that will give participants exposure to great investment opportunities in the agriculture sector, says commercial farmer and managing director of JP Roos Vegetables (Pty) Limited, Mr Jan Pierre Roos.

With African countries heavily reliant on imports, he says for as long as there are no manufacturing entities with agricultural inputs, African farmers will continue to depend on imports from other regions, adding that, “there are currently no programmes addressing this issue, while we appreciate government trying to lure investors to set up in Botswana there is little activity.”

Therefore, the coming Kusi Ideas Festival slated for December 7-8, Mr Roos said it would give exposure of great investment opportunities in Botswana from a funding point of view, facilitation of long-term relationship with international supply chain market players and facilitation of markets for Botswana goods internationally and finally risk mitigations measures for farming industry.

Expected to speak at the festival, Mr Roos, encouraged government to on-board farmer programmes aimed at lobbying investors so that people on the ground could provide critical information and data to investors about opportunities in Botswana and the need for capital investment in Africa and facilitation of free and ease trade between African countries.

He said with opportunities abound in the region, there was still lack of activity from companies that already with operating internationally, which could be a result of international players unaware of existing opportunities.

“The ease of doing business is also an issue that African governments need to attend to. Governments need to facilitate for investment by providing some form of comfort to investors that their money will be safe,” says Mr Roos.

Further, he commended Botswana for the vegetable import ban which he said incentivised farmers to increase production to meet the country’s demand, adding that farmers tackled the opportunity head-on, and in some product lines, production exceeded demand during certain months of the year.

He said all-year production of some vegetables was very challenging due to Botswana’s unfavorable climatic conditions. Cool-weather crops such as potatoes and onions were normally only produced in the winter, but farmers were stretching production season to meet the 12-month demand period.

Thus, the need for enormous investments to acquire special seeds and planting material, improved farming technologies, cooling facilities, and advanced storage facilities.

Farmers, therefore, needed investment assistance to achieve the country’s food security vision.

Mr Roos who is also the Chairperson of the Tuli Block Horticultural Farmers Association said farmers in the Tuli area benefit from the closed borders.

“This provides more market security which enables us to continue to make big investments in expanding our production areas and improving our farming technology and post-harvest value addition,” he adds.

As an emerging market, Mr Roos said Botswana continued to avail opportunities in the agricultural sector, to date the country is yet to ascertain its ‘food secure’ status meaning that there was still a gap in production and supply of produce locally.

He said inputs supply chain in Botswana for chemicals, fertilizers, seeds and packaging material was still dependent on South Africa, therefore the need to lobby manufacturing companies set up operations in Botswana; including suppliers of farming equipment, machinery and parts.

Climate change remained a major challenge for the agricultural sector with extreme weather conditions shortening planting and harvesting seasons, increased risk of pests and diseases, affects crop quality and production volumes which in turn affects cashflows, he added.

Though agriculture remained an important player in the country’s GDP, Roos said inflation and increment in cost of agricultural inputs since the Russia-Ukraine conflict had seen an increase of cost of agricultural inputs, and this has been a major challenge with farmers having to adopt to sourcing inputs from other markets leading to delays in supply, reducing the number of hectares they normally plant, ordering in bulk with a view of negotiating lower prices and to some extent a twist in the fertilizer and pesticides programs to reduce requirements per hectare.

Lack of funding, he said was one major challenge because Botswana capital market was dominated by commercial banks, with little participation by equity investors, the local commercial banks appetite for agribusiness remains low meaning that commercial farmers cannot expand their operations, even the structures put together by the banks do not allow some form of flexibility to generate buffer cashflows and stabilise the business.

Ease of doing business in Botswana is still a problem and Mr Roos cites delays in clearance at borders and securing imports permits for inputs, systems not working, approval of export permits taking forever to process, time taken to secure regulatory approval when acquiring farmland to be some of the major hindrances of progress.

Despite challenges, he said farmers continue to look for technologies in the market aimed at improving efficiency, yield and maintain sustainability, reduce and or manage production costs, increase crop quality and yields.

“Currently, prior to planting we carry out soils and water precision analysis which assists us in determining the crop needs and what measurers we need to have in place to execute a precision farming plant, we have seen an increment in usage of drones to spray pesticides which reduces fuel usage but increases efficiency and data production, construction and connection of solar for pumping of water for irrigation purposes, adoption of covered structures for production of high value crops such as tomatoes which protects crops from extreme weather conditions, pests and diseases,” he cites. Ends