Nairobi, 18 July. - (ANA)- Increased use of new technologies and innovative approaches in financing smallholder farmers could soon boost growth in agriculture and lead to poverty reduction in many countries around the world, according to experts attending the Fin4Ag international conference, which was held this week in Nairobi, Kenya.

 Looking at the positive outcomes of the conference, which has brought together agriculturalists, financiers, policy makers and other development actors from all over the world, Michael Hailu, Director of the Technical Centre for Agriculture and Rural Cooperation (CTA), stated, ”The conference has succeeded beyond our expectations in creating an ideal forum for financiers, central bank governors, farmers, ICT entrepreneurs and others to come together and address the challenges of financing agriculture and find solutions that could work. There is a great degree of optimism that all the actors working together can turn around Africa’s agricultural sector into a modern and profitable business that will create decent jobs for millions of young people and feed the continent’s growing population.”

Mamadou Biteye, Managing Director of the Rockefeller Foundation Africa Regional Office believes that, “The conference timely mobilised key stakeholders in African agriculture and in the financial sector to create new linkages and better align their visions and to bring together those who implement innovative approaches to boost agricultural production, with those who can finance them. Risk is a word related to agriculture that is often mentioned. As we depart, it is with the unanimous agreement that finance for agriculture is a risk well worth taking for the well-being of African farmers, for the strength of their nations, and for the prosperity of the entire continent”.

Millison Nahr, Chair of the African Rural and Agricultural Credit Association (AFRACA) and Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Ghana, argued that governments need to create an enabling environment to encourage financial institutions to work more closely with the agricultural sector. "We need to learn from countries which have been successful in resolving the bottlenecks to releasing funds to agricultural value chains," he said, citing Tanzania's success with Warehouse Receipt Systems and the Nigerian Incentive-based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending, described in detail by the Nigerian Minister of Agriculture during the opening ceremony.

Lamon Rutten, Policies, Markets & ICT Programme Manager at CTA stated, “CTA wants to play a catalytic role in bridging the gap between agricultural and financial markets. We got the right people together in Nairobi. We saw them discussing what needs to be done to link farmers to financial markets, what the Governments and Central Banks have to do and what farmers have to do. At the end of the conference, we can say that we all accept everyone has to work together, that we all know what to do and that we all share the responsibility for moving ahead.”

The conference was formally closed by Felix Koskei, Kenya's Minister of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries. "Countries don't reduce their dependence on agriculture by getting out of it, but by getting better at it," he said. And that would only happen if farmers had better access to affordable credit. This conference, he believed, has helped to identify the bottlenecks to creating closer relationship between farmers and financiers that can bring about a paradigm shift in the way that finance can unleash the potential of agriculture around the world. - (ANA)

AB/ANA/ July 2014 - - -