BY DANIEL ALEMAYEHU
Agriculture is the first introduced labor in the early civilizations around the world, New World Encyclopedia states. It is estimated that it has been more than ten thousand years since agriculture introduced into the world. Southwest Asia and North Africa regions are believed to be the ones that made agriculture known to the world.
In Ethiopian context, it is similar with the rest of the world as the country has long- dated history. Agriculture and domesticating animals are the most common activities and the centre piece of the economic system in most parts of Ethiopia.
According to the documents from the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry had been established during the reign of Emperor Menelik II in 1907. For the past century, the Ministry has gone through different stages as per the diversified policies of the governments with plenty of reforms and measures. However, the sector has not shown improvements that matches its age.
Though satisfying result is not achieved during the past years, it is believed that the major objective of the Ministry which is poverty eradication and securing food self sufficiency can be attained with the combined effort of all concerned bodies.
During the early regimes, Ethiopian farmers were extremely marginalized, oppressed and deprived the necessary attentions from the stakeholders.
Starting from 1991, however, the country has designed and began to implement new policies and strategies towards agriculture which is ‘Agricultural Development led Industrialization’ that aimed to accelerate agricultural production and productivity.
According to the Ministry, the past two decades have been the time that the agriculture sector registered prominent successes. For instance, for the last seven years, the agriculture sector has shown 8 percent growth consecutively.
By the same token, in this fiscal year, the Ministry has set plan to keep on doing the good deeds in sustaining production and productivity more than ever. To this end, the Ministry and stakeholders are exerting their maximum effort to make their dreams come true.
While explaining about the plans to be done in the future and activities that have been done so far regarding agriculture, Germame Geruma, Agriculture Development Sector representative said that in this rainy season, everyone expects that the farmers are on their duties. As a result, they plough their lands and sow seeds to become more become productive. This indicates that the Ministry has been carrying out its duties aggressively to meet the goals.
According to Germame, the Ministry has targeted to harvest over 375 million quintals of crops this year. To this end, Around 13 million hectares of land is expected to be ploughed by the farmers. Out of this, 12 million hectares of land has already been ploughed, and out of these ploughed land, more than 3.8 million hectares of land is covered with seeds.
The Ministry has got prepared on many issues, remarked the representative that the first one is importing fertilizers. As a result, 18 million quintals of fertilizer was ordered and 15 million of it is already imported. 13.5 million quintals of fertilizers were distributed to the farmers up to now.
As to Germame, over 1.7 million quintals of seed was planned to be disseminated to farmer, and more than 977,000 quintals of seed have already been disseminated so far. The seeds have been distributed by the government, private companies, and even by the farmers after the seed passed through the quality check. In addition, the Ministry has been providing training to the farmers in different woredas with technical support from experts. Again, about six thousand tractors are on duty at the moment.
For the inquiry what new things have been done during the nearly passed fiscal year, the Representative had a response. He said that in the mentioned fiscal year, the new thing that the ministry has done so far is modernizing the agriculture by mechanization. The government has created opportunities for importers to bring in tractors. Even farmers had an opportunity to get loan from banks so as to buy tractors. Furthermore, Germame added that this year there has been excessive demand for fertilizers which is raise to 4 million quintals from 3.9 million quintals of last year.
However, Farmers say that the price of fertilizers is getting inflated from time to time. To ease this problem, according to the representative, government supplies fertilizer with fair and subsidized price. Compared to other countries, he pinpointed that Ethiopia is one of the countries that purchase fertilizers with fair price. Most African countries on the contrary, purchase their agricultural demand with expensive prices. Therefore, it is not beyond the purchasing capacity of the farmers. Besides, they can pay in an extended time. Truly speaking, the high price of fertilizer cannot be surprising as the price of every commodity is increasing rapidly in unprecedented manner nowadays. “Commendably, the government announced the auction for fertilizer suppliers in the late September and October so that the Ethiopian government got what it ordered in reasonable price. It is known that everything becomes expensive, but our way of purchasing helped us a lot,” he remarked.
The government expects that all of the regions are doing aggressively to achieve their goals. Based on the regions’ agro ecology, they will do the production. For instance, Oromia and Amhara regions have the lion’s share by covering 6 million and 4.5 million hectares of land respectively. This is because of the regions’ land width and coverage. But this does not mean that less wide regions produce less, Geremame explained.
The Ministry of Agriculture has done marvelous jobs during the past winter season. From the briefing of the Prime Minister, during the hot season, the country has yielded 15 million quintals of wheat by applying lowland irrigation scheme. This will be continued in the coming hot seasons too, he remarked.
All in all, regarding what is expected, the Representative has stated that the Ministry expects 375 million quintals of crop production this year as per the effort exerted and inputs supplied for the main harvest season. The government has imported enough fertilizers even though the demand raised. Again, the farmers are encouraged to buy and use tractors for better production. As it is being witnessed, the weather is conducive so that for these and many other reasons this year, the Ministry expects better achievement than the past years, he asserted.
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD JULY 14/2021
