Maize Alliance Partners Renew Commitment to Support Marketing Outlets for Smallholder Farmers

I’m sure I’m missing something here, guess we’ll see, but….

Looks to me like the ATA is selling out the very farmers they’re tasked to help, but I’m sure I’ve got this all wrong. Right? So IMO, short of more insights….

Chock up another capitulation to corporate agricultural interests in the form of the Maize Alliance here and their quest for GMO corn supremacy in Africa

On behalf of the Maize Alliance

ADDIS ABABA –

A consortium of partners known as the Maize Alliance committed today to continue and scale-up a program of support to drive agricultural marketing in Ethiopia.

The Alliance, which consists of the Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA), the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), federal and regional cooperative promotion agencies, and non-governmental capacity-building partners, came together in 2012 with the mission to support farmers cooperative associations by providing a secure commercial market along with access to finance, post-harvest handling, and efficient aggregation and commercialization services.

This Alliance partners signed a Memorandum of Understanding committing to facilitating capacity-building support and financing to 29 cooperative associations, which will support the contracting of 40,000 tons of maize through WFP’s ‘Purchase for Progress’ (P4P) initiative. The agreement will provide increased income and economic security to the farmers who make up these cooperative associations’ membership.

Today’s agreement builds on the Alliance’s success over the past year, in which 16 cooperative associations with Alliance support delivered over 18,000 metric tons of maize through Purchase for Progress, which aims to source food from Ethiopian smallholders.

The Alliance includes the Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA), the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), the Federal Cooperative Agency, USAID AGP AMDe, Sasakawa Global 2000, TechnoServe, the Regional Cooperative Promotion Agencies of Amhara and Oromia, and the Bureau of Marketing and Cooperatives of SNNPR.

As part of the same event, WFP, ATA, and the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) signed a Tripartite Agreement to support the provision of output loans to farmers’ organisations, under which CBE will avail output financing through loans for the participating cooperative unions at a lower interest rate and without collateral requirements. This sort of provision of financial services for agricultural development has the potential to increase farmers’ yields and income and increase food production in the country.

“The success of P4P this past year has provided a secure market for a large number of smallholder maize farmers,” said Khalid Bomba, CEO of ATA. “We appreciate the role of all partners in the Maize Alliance in helping achieve this and we are looking forward to its continued growth in the coming years.”

Abdou Dieng, Representative and Country Director of WFP, said “This is a renewal of WFP’s commitment to support development of smallholder farming in Ethiopia, in alignment with the GTP’s strategy. WFP is grateful for the generous contributions from donors like Bill & Melinda Gates, DFID and USAID that made this initiative possible. Through its food procurement and partnerships, P4P aims at strengthening the marketing capacities of cooperative unions whereby thousands of smallholder farmers can enjoy sustainable access to markets.”

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For more information please contact:

Ashenafi Sileshi, ATA, +251 91 166 7941 (ashenafi.sileshi@ata.gov.et)

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