Fears that DRCongo law favoring nationals in farm ownership may scare off foreign investorsn

A new law requiring nationals of the Democratic Republic of Congo to be majority shareholders in farms has caused concern about its effects on the country's image as an emerging agricultural investment destination.

The new law, passed in December 2011, provides tax breaks and other incentives designed to kick start investment in agriculture in the DRC, which imports much of its food requirements despite being a vast, fertile land mass. War and the country's many political problems over several decades have decimated much of what local agriculture used to take place.

But it the clause of the law requiring Congolese to be majority owners of farmland that has raised concerns that potential foreign investors will be scare off from the country, while few nationals will have the means for significant new farming investment.

African Agriculture 

Forest Peoples Programme is recruiting for 2 DRCongo-related job vacancies

Forest Peoples Programme is recruiting for 2 job vacancies:

1. Project Manager for the project entitled: REDD financing, Human Rights and Economic Development for Sustainable Poverty Reduction of forest communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo.


Click here for full job description and application form

2. Monitoring and Finance Officer based in our offices in Moreton-in-Marsh, UK with some travel to Democratic Republic of Congo.

Click here for full job description and application form

http://www.forestpeoples.org

DRCongo: fresh start for coffee producers

by Badylon Kawanda Bakiman

Long years of civil war and instability set off a crippling decline in coffee production in the Democratic Republic of Congo: the country's output in 2010 was less than a tenth the harvest twenty years earlier. Now the DRC government has a strategy to bolster recovery of the sector.

In the eastern province of South Kivu, coffee cultivation is being encouraged in all eight districts. Dozens of nurseries have been set up, carefully tended by local farmers.

"In June and July 2011, we handed over 414 kilogrammes of arabica coffee seeds to these eight territories to cultivate," says Nkamizama Bola, the sector chief for the National Coffee Bureau (known by its French acronym, ONC) in Bukavu, the provincial capital of South Kivu.

From January to June 2011, Bola says, the ONC produced over 250,000 seedlings, distributing more than 170,000 to a hundred planters working on 580 hectares across the province.

In Orientale province, also in the east of the DRC, the actors involved are growing the robusta variety of coffee. All is being done with the collaboration of the Provincial Steering Committee, a technical body created by the Ministry of Agriculture to follow up on the revival of coffee growing in the selected provinces.

"Nearly 700 hectares must be used for growing arabica coffee in Bandundu province (in the south-west of DRC). We have been training growers since June. We have already done a lot to popularise new growing techniques," explains Marc Tunieka, engineer and president of the committee in Bandundu.

"The cost of the recovery plan for Congo's coffee sector is on the order of 100 million dollars. About 50 percent is coming from the government, allocated in the 2012 budget," says Thomas Kembola, president of the National Committee for Monitoring of the Coffee Sector at the agriculture ministry.

The Strategy Document for the Recovery of the Coffee Sector 2011-2015 stresses that by 2015 the country wants to achieve a production level of 120,000 tonnes of coffee. The document outlines the government's plans to reinforce activities all along the value chain, including research, production, processing and marketing, as well as local processing and consumption.

According to experts, Congo's export volume fell from around 119,320 tonnes of coffee in 1989 to just 897 tonnes in 2009, and less than 6,000 tonnes in 2010, due to numerous factors such as the civil wars of 1997 and 1998.

But armed conflict is only part of the picture: the upkeep of coffee plantations and processing facilities has been neglected or abandoned; the big buyers have disappeared...

"Our greatest fear is linked to climate change," worries Joseph Katenga, an expert in coffee cultivation. "Drought could have a negative impact on production despite new methods that have been introduced." He recommends that the government makes improved, high-yielding varieties available in all six coffee-producing provinces.

Bonzeme said roasted coffee will be sold to the international market at a price of up to 4,400 dollars per tonne. Each producing region will have an agency charged with buying raw coffee from producers at around 380 dollars per tonne. The coffee will be harvested in April and May.

The plan has its doubters. "If the government has not restored the coffee sector over the past five years, will it really accomplish anything now, in the few months before the elections? I don't think so. We won't be distracted [from government's actual track record]," says opposition MP Leonard Lumeya Dhu Malegi.

"The country was in a big hole when we came into power," retorts Prime Minister Adolphe Muzito. "The government is striving to re-establish, bit by bit, many economic activities simultaneously to stimulate the national economy. There is no attempt at distraction here, we're putting everyone to work."

"The idea of relaunching the coffee sector is good. But the government must invest heavily and ensure follow up if it wants to have good results," said Arsène Ngondo, vice president of civil society in Bandundu.

IPS

Urban farming takes root in DRCongo

Urban farming in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is providing a livelihood for thousands of city dwellers, with vegetables bringing in good money for small growers and helping to alleviate high levels of malnutrition nationally, agricultural officials say. The demand for vegetables and the high prices they command in DRC cities – up to US$4 per kilo – has pushed many jobless residents into becoming small-scale growers.

Most of the green spaces along the roadsides of the capital, Kinshasa, have been transformed into small farms. City farmers now grow 122 percent more produce than they did five years ago, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The FAO is supporting gardeners in five main DRC cities with a $10.4 million urban horticulture project to increase their productivity and improve their farming skills.

“The programme...now assists local urban growers to produce 330,000 tons of vegetables annually,” FAO said in a statement. “In addition to food, the programme has also helped provide employment and income for 16,000 small-scale market gardeners.”

The urban farmers sell 90 percent of what they produce in urban markets and supermarkets, according to FAO, helping to feed a swelling city population as Congolese leave the countryside in search of security.

Although the project has contributed to improving nutrition in urban areas, there was still a lot of work to be done. According to a Multiple Indicator Survey published by agencies in September 2010, 24 percent of children in the DRC under five are underweight; 43 percent are stunted; and 9 percent are wasted.

Farmers have seen their incomes increase dramatically. In Kinshasa and in the town of Lubumbashi, the average annual income of each farmer increased from around $500 in 2004 to $2,000 in 2010. In Likasi town, it rose from $700 to $3,500. There have been similar increases in other cities, according to the FAO statement.

...knew of vegetable growers who put themselves through college with the income they got farming. But after their studies, it was back to the land. “After ending university studies they tell you they cannot look for an office job just for the prestige of wearing a clean shirt and tie, when they could be making $600-800,” he said.

IRIN

DR Congo passes first agriculture framework act

The Congolese parliament approved the very first framework act for the agricultural sector. New in the D.R. Congo are the introduction of an agricultural register and the establishment of a national foundation for agriculture development.

Seventy percent of the Congolese population depends on agriculture. No other sector contributes more to the gross national product.

However, in Congo farming is not yet perceived as a fully-fledged job. The lack of a cohesive agriculture policy is costing the country tons of money. Yearly, 640,000 tons of food have to be imported from abroad to feed the Congolese population.

Years of discussion preceded the framework act. Initially, the Congolese policy makers were convinced that all prosperity would come from large-scale plantations and not from the many micro-farmers. “Luckily the law acknowledges the importance of family farming for the Congolese economy.”

Trias

Georgia -- and Congo -- on South African farmers' minds

by Eve Fairbanks

The 20th-century Moses sits in a khaki safari shirt before a laptop on the ninth floor of an old Soviet government complex in Tbilisi, the capital of the formerly communist Republic of Georgia, and manages his flock by email and on Facebook. Like the biblical Moses, though, Bennie van Zyl also struggles with impatience in the ranks.

"The questions they ask!" he said when I went to see him in Tbilisi this January. At one stage a few days earlier, he had been getting 60 online queries an hour. "If they go to the website, the information is all there."

The website he meant is boers.ge. It's the online portal for the project Van Zyl, the director of the Transvaal Agricultural Union (TAU), has been masterminding for nearly a year now: to send South African farmers to Georgia to rehabilitate the Georgian agricultural sector, which has languished since the end of communism.

Many of the TAU's (predominantly white) members are fed up with farming in South Africa, hence the flood of queries. But mountainous Georgia is also so far away, it's almost unimaginable.

Farmland looks like farmland anywhere, to some degree. But here's the distinction Van Zyl draws between Georgia and South Africa that makes Georgia appear to be a promised land: he perceives a sense of possibility suffusing the landscape, of flush times to come, as opposed to already receding into the past.


Since early 2008, more than two dozen countries have approached South African farmers to ask them to come till their land. Most of these are in Africa and they mainly work with the TAU's counterpart, Agri South Africa (ASA), which, contrary to the TAU, has set a policy to help farmers go only to other African countries.

"I would go all over Africa, but I will never leave this continent," said Wynand du Toit, the deputy head of the ASA-affiliated mission to settle 49 farmers in the steamy south of the Republic of Congo. "This is my home."


In a world where war is provoked by food scarcity, farmers are the peacekeepers. No surprise, then, so many regimes want more of them. Nations from Gambia to Zambia have been appealing to investors from countries with better-developed agricultural sectors to till their land. Between 2008 -- when a grain-price spike set off riots in 30 countries -- and 2009, nearly 60-million hectares of land deals were announced, an order of magnitude more than the pre-2008 annual average.

In this race to woo farmers, South Africans are emerging as highly eligible catches. In places like Georgia and Congo, they have a reputation as formidable ploughmen, although how they got to be so effective must by necessity remain a little vague in their suitors' imaginations. By extending South African farmers' 30-year leases on 80 000 hectares, with more land likely to come, Congo "is expecting abundant food," said Pierre Mabiala, the Congolese Land Affairs Minister.

Of course, the best for Mabiala would be to boost his own people's ability to grow food. But in many developing countries, the gap between what exists and what is needed is so big, it can seem impossible to bridge. In the Republic of Congo, the oil-rich principality west of the Democratic Republic of Congo, 95% or more of the food is imported, mostly from its former colonial master France and at heartbreakingly inflated prices. Congo has 12-million hectares of fertile land, enough to feed all its people and many others besides. But only 2% is farmed, mainly without modern tools. Building the internal know-how to get all the rest under cultivation would be a staggering undertaking.

In Georgia, meanwhile, reconstruction policies after communism mandated the division of formerly communal land into small private plots, on which farmers also using traditional methods now struggle to achieve any economies of scale.

So it can seem easier to import already successful farmers than to mint your own. The South Africans driving to Congo in a convoy next month to start clearing the tropical grass that grows taller than their Land Rovers have agreed to supply local markets before exporting and to set up an agricultural college to mentor Congolese growers. The Georgians, however, haven't made such demands. They just want what South Africa has got: properly modern-looking rural panoramas.

In Georgia, the farmers on my tour were startled to find that certain problems they had come to think of as peculiar to Africa also existed in Eastern Europe. Surveying the Georgian countryside, Frans Venter realised that, to quilt together a plot big enough to farm, "you'd have to work something out with the villagers" who own bits and pieces of land. He shook his head. "It's the same as South Africa."

But, of course, the benefits farmers are looking for when they seek new pastures outside South Africa are not only economic. They are also emotional -- which doesn't necessarily make them unreasonable.

As a result of South Africa's history, there is a general social understanding here that commercial farmers, although perhaps by now an economically necessary evil, are leading a lifestyle that is at least latently exploitative.
The farmers who go to Congo or Georgia hear the exact opposite message: they will be received as handymen, as appreciated experts, even as redeemers. Observing South African farmers in Georgia, it seemed to me that the chance to put on the robes of the healer could be, for the white South African accustomed to thinking of his broader social role as a destructive one, an incredibly powerful and healing experience.

full article and pics...Mail and Guardian

African smallscale farmers trained in business skills

Over 400 farmers in DR Congo, Burundi, and Rwanda are poised to benefit from enhanced business and marketing skills thanks to a capacity-building project that aims at increasing their income in a bid to fight rural poverty.

Business plan training is being co-organized by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), the Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility Institute of the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (TSBF-CIAT) and the Institut des Sciences Agronomiques du Burundi (ISABU) in Burundi.

Most small scale farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, who make up a majority of the population and of the poor, lack proper business and marketing skills. Therefore, they are not able to maximize the benefits of their investments and remain poor despite all their hard work.

To address this, the Consortium for Improved Agriculture-based Livelihoods in Central Africa (CIALCA) has been training smallholder farmers to enhance their business and marketing skills to enable them to better manage their farm enterprises and engage with markets to improve their livelihoods.

The training covers a broad spectrum of activities, from basic farm management principles such as farm record keeping and analyzing the profitability of the farm enterprise to identifying good markets and laying out a business plan.

According to one of the lead trainers, Emily Ouma, an agricultural economist with IITA, “With the training, these farmers will be able to determine for themselves if they are making profit or not. If they are not, then they will be able to shift strategies. If they are, then they would be able to plan better to increase their profits even more, for example, through value addition such as sorting, grading, processing, and storing their produce, and selling when supply is low and demand is high.” 

Another facilitator, Eliud Birachi, an agribusiness specialist with of TSBF-CIAT, adds that most smallholder farmers neither keep records nor plan their production, harvesting and sales according to market demand. “Usually they first grow the crops then look for markets,” he says, “It should be the other way around. This often leads to a glut in the market and the farmers are forced to sell their produce at markedly lower prices than their production costs. Obviously this results in huge losses for them,” he said.

The CIALCA project brings together various partners and donors to improve farm level productivity through Integrated Soil Fertility Management and Integrated Pest and Disease Management. Sustainable farm level productivity requires improved commercialization which can be achieved by enhancing farmers’ access to input and profitable output markets. One way to realize this is by building farmers’ entrepreneurial skills.

www.iita.org

Congo governor offers farmland

by Jonny Hogg

A provincial governor in the Democratic Republic of Congo has offered about 14 million hectares of farmland to large-scale farmers to boost agriculture in the mineral-rich Katanga province.


Moise Katumbi, governor of mineral-rich Katanga, said the province must diversify into agriculture to become self sufficient and export some of its produce. Katumbi said the land was available following an agreement with local tribal chiefs, who are custodians of the land.


The province in the south-east of Congo is better known for its huge mineral reserves, which have attracted major mining companies including Freeport McMoran and Anvil Mining.


"Our future is in agriculture, not mining," Katumbi said in an interview, adding that farmers who take up the offer would also be offered tax breaks.


"Katanga is the size of France, and with only 10 million people there is free land," he said, adding that he was determined to end the province's dependence on imported food.


Farmland in many developing countries has attracted foreign investors, but a U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation official last year urged African governments to avoid rushing into big land lease deals with investors or risk deepening poverty and ramping up social tensions.


Katumbi said Katanga had cut its dependence on food imports to 30 percent from 98 percent since 2006 and that farmers from South Africa had already arrived. The offer for land is not new but has largely been ignored up to now, he added.


Decades of dictatorship and conflict in the DRC have left Katanga's infrastructure in a dilapidated state and its population trapped in poverty, with 13 percent suffering from malnutrition, according to the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP).


"I think the conditions for producing food are better here than in neighbouring countries; (here) they have land, water, people," said the WFP's country head, Abdu Dieng. Governance issues that blight Congo's development are less of an issue in Katanga, Dieng said, but he added that the central government's investment in the agricultural sector -- less that 2 percent of the national budget -- was inadequate.


"There is more involvement and better fund management by the provincial government than anywhere else in the country," he said.


The environmental conditions may be perfect for farming in Katanga, but the business climate remains a problem, said Luc Asosa, an official with U.S.-based development agency PACT, adding that corruption remains a big issue for investors.


"Mining is quick money, but it's not long-lasting. The reality is people are eating bananas imported from Zambia, and we have the same climate as them. That's not right," he said.


Governor Katumbi, who has run the province since 2006, said mining employs too few people to fight poverty. He also breeds antelopes to restock one of the province's national parks in an attempt to lure tourists.


"Really for us, (the aim of the offer) is to give each person in Katanga enough food, and then one day export to Europe and Africa," he said.

Reuters

Guinea pig touted as solution to Congo food crisis

by Todd Pitman

An army of humanitarian organizations has been unable to end years of recurring hunger in conflict-torn Congo. Now a South American research group says it may have found another way to fill hungry bellies: with guinea pigs.

The small rodents could provide war-battered villages with "a much-needed source of protein and micro-nutrients in a country with some of the highest incidences of malnutrition the world," according to the Colombia-based agricultural research institute, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, or CIAT.

Congo's hilly east has been plagued by violent turmoil since Rwanda's 1994 genocide spilled war across the border, displacing millions of people and sparking years of skirmishes between soldiers, rebels and militia from both nations.

It's not known how or when guinea pigs — native to South America — arrived in Congo, but CIAT researchers discovered them last year being kept as "micro-livestock" in the nation's hard-hit North and South Kivu provinces, which border Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi.

"Small and easy to conceal, guinea pigs are well-suited to (Congo's) conflict zones, where extreme poverty and widespread lawlessness means that the looting of larger domestic livestock is commonplace," the group said in a statement.

The furry animals have other advantages: they can be fed kitchen waste and are a relatively low-cost investment compared to other livestock. Crucially, they reproduce quickly, with females giving birth to multiple litters that total 10 to 15 offspring per year.

"They also suffer from fewer diseases than pigs, chickens and rabbits, and in the event of disease outbreaks, their high reproduction rate means populations have a much shorter recovery time," the group said.

Guinea pigs are widely eaten in parts of South America, notably Peru. The taste of the rodent has been compared to pork, dark chicken meat and rabbit. The rodents are not a common sight in rural Congolese households, unlike chickens, goats and other domesticated animals.

CIAT scientists have been investigating ways to boost livestock production through a project funded by the German government which had originally targeted pork and poultry. It has now been expanded to include guinea pigs, with trials underway in four South Kivu villages to try to find ways to improve the quantity and quality of the meat.

"None of the scientists had contemplated guinea pigs as an option in (Congo) when the project started," said CIAT's Michael Peters. "Now they really could turn out to be indispensable."

AFP

Mining investors in DRCongo obliged to also engage in farming

Miners and authorities in the Congolese province of Katanga have settled a row over support for local farming, leading to the lifting of an export ban for 16 companies, a provincial minister said.

Mineral-rich Katanga province announced two weeks ago that it was blocking exports by mining companies which it judged had not supported local agriculture projects as requested.

"We have asked mining companies that had not planted crops to pay for fertilisers for farmers for 2009, and to plant in 2010," Katanga's agriculture minister said, adding that all 16 companies had said they would comply. "They are now paying for the fertilisers", he said. "That arrangement has made it possible to lift the measure."

However, he warned that any company that did not meet the requirement of planting 500 hectares of maize this year would again be prevented from exporting.

Kamoto Copper Company (KCC), a joint venture between Toronto-listed Katanga Mining and the Congolese state, CMSK (Compagnie Miniere du Sud Katanga) and Kota Mining were among the companies affected by the ban.

Reuters

South African farmers offered land in Angola, Uganda

by Ron Derby

South African farmers have been offered land for agriculture in Angola and Uganda and the government is also in talks with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia and Southern Sudan.

South Africa “encourages this type of expansion,” Agriculture Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson said at a conference in Muldersdrift, outside Johannesburg. The country needs “to ensure that we broaden the base for commercial agriculture.” Before any agriculture “there must be bilateral agreements between governments,” Johannes Moller, president of Agri SA, the country’s largest farmers association, said at the conference. Farmers want to move into Africa “as a result of scarcity of natural resources and land redistribution,” he said.

AgriSA on Sept. 30 said it had been offered as much as 10 million hectares (24.7 million acres) of land to farm in the Republic of Congo and 35,000 hectares in Libya.

South Africa’s government will complete a review of its “willing-seller, willing-buyer” model of land redistribution by early next year, Thozi Gwanya, director-general of the land ministry, said yesterday. South Africa wants to transfer 30 percent of farming land to black farmers to help compensate for discrimination under apartheid.

Bloomberg

Belgium and FAO link to help African farmers

Belgium has agreed to a $6.6 million programme for FAO to provide emergency assistance to poor farmers in Africa as part of an ongoing partnership that has totalled more than $80 million over the past twelve years.

Around $ 2.6 million of the latest contribution from the Belgian Development Cooperation will go to directly support farming households whose livelihoods have suffered from the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Cassava and sweet potatoes cuttings as well as hand tools, vegetable and other crop seeds will be distributed to 25,000 farmers. In addition, another 4,000 small farmers will receive backing to increase maize production in order to meet market demand. Producer associations will be given basic training in the use of machinery and how to repair warehouses and roads to enable harvested produce to be stored and transported away.

This part of the project will be implemented jointly with a World Food Programme “Purchase for Progress (P4P)”, also funded by Belgium. WFP supports local farmers by buying their products which is then distributed as food assistance to hungry people.

The Belgian donation to FAO will also assist returning ex-soldiers and farming households hit by floods and high food prices in neighbouring Burundi. They are to benefit from a $2 million programme that will help them return to farming. The rest of Belgium’s donation will go to support farmers in drought-stricken Niger and Ethiopia.

“Belgium is one of the most consistently supportive donors to FAO’s emergency work, something which is very much appreciated and its latest show of generous support will help improve the livelihood and food security of thousands of vulnerable people” said Laurent Thomas, Director of FAO’s Emergency Operations and Rehabilition Division.

Belgium has also recently contributed $900 000 to the FAO’s Special Fund for Emergency and Rehabilitation Activities which allows the agency to act swiftly in emergency situations. Since 1997, Belgium has financed more than 105 emergency and rehabilitation projects in over 20 disaster affected countries.

FAO

ADB grants DR Congo $8 mln in aid to agricultural production

The African Development Bank (ADB) has granted 8 million U.S. dollars to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) in support of the central African country's agricultural production. ADB official Korsaga A. Frederic unveiled the funding in Kinshasa, after an inspection tour of N'sele, 40 km away from the capital city.

Frederic, who was heading a 12-member team on a three-day visit to DR Congo, said part of the money will be used to import fertilizers for agricultural production.

N'sele is an agro-industrial community known for poultry and pig farms and the production of ananas and tomato.

Xinhua

South African farmers interested in Congo

Hundreds of South African farmers have shown interest in farming in the Congo, Agri SA deputy president Theo de Jager said on January 29. "I am replying to e-mails on a full-time basis now. Requests for more information are just pouring in," said De Jager. He said he had received more than 500 emails since last weekend. De Jager expressed surprise at the number of farmers from the Free State and Northern Cape area who had made enquiries.

"It's maize and sheep country (Free State and Northern Cape) and that does not correlate with the agricultural conditions in the Congo, which surprises me."

Many of those enquiring are South Africans farming in America, New Zealand and other African countries.

De Jager said foreigners who had farmed in South Africa previously, were also interested while a number were South Africans and Zimbabweans who farmed in the Congo previously but left during the riots of 1997.

"They all would like to investigate the possibility of farming in the Congo."

De Jager said Agri SA received a formal invitation from the Congo to send a fact-finding mission, through South Africa's representative in Brazzaville, on Thursday.

"They want a group of us to visit as soon as February already."

De Jager said the Congo wanted farmers to produce sugar, maize, soy beans, coffee and tea, and farm cattle and goats. Many farmers wanted to know about security, the South African government's relationship with the Congo government, education and labour laws, before making the move. They also wanted information on agricultural trade contracts already in place and anti-dumping issues. De Jager said many also wanted to know how the Congolese in rural areas would react to white farmers in their areas.

"The problem is there are no people in the rural areas, the rural areas are depopulated."

Farmers who have contacted Agri SA thus far have between 15 and 35-years of experience. De Jager said this means that they were roughly between 35- and 55-years-old.

He said the interest shown does not necessarily mean South African farmers want to leave permanently.

"It's not an uprooting of farmers in South Africa, it's rather looking for options for the future," said De Jager.

Nevertheless, most farmers indicated that land claims and land redistribution, the labour laws and the general political situation around agriculture in South Africa were making them uncomfortable.

News 24

High fish demand in DRCongo creates aquaculture opportunities

Give a woman a fish, she will eat for a day. Teach a woman to grow her own fish, and she may soon have so many that theft becomes a problem.

The issue of thieves stalking the handful of fish farms coming back to life in the Congo speaks volumes about the sheer demand for fish as an essential source of protein in the former Belgian colony.

Yet the problem is relative – and containable. Here in Kipushi, near the headwaters of the mighty Congo River, the tidy series of rearing ponds dug and now run by 150 women – mostly widows, resettled refugees and former combatants of the Congolese civil war – lie an inconvenient 30 kilometres from the hungry city of Lubumbashi. Hence, no thieves here, and the women are making a tidy, sustainable profit on the delicious and nourishing 600-gram tilapia they raise from fry, selling their stock to local villagers.

A different story is told in the vast, lush market garden of Quartier Congo on Lubumbashi's outskirts, where so many fish were stolen that the seven farm associations representing smallholders simply abandoned their aquaculture ponds, deciding instead to concentrate on the thriving vegetable beds that have doubled farm incomes in the past four years, lifting the neighbourhood just above the poverty line.

Location, location, location, therefore, will be a crucial factor in whether fish farming will make a splash as part of a green revolution Congolese agronomists hope to bring to the war-torn central African country.

It matters because the Congo, like all of sub-Saharan Africa, is crazy for fish. Last February alone, the eastern province of Katanga imported 2,250 tonnes, mostly dried, smoked or salt-cured.

Perversely, some of that imported fish actually originates in Congo: it's netted in Lake Tanganyika and then shipped to Zambia before coming back through the borders at the bustling border city of Lubumbashi. The circuitous route says much about the state of Congolese infrastructure, where a simple 100-kilometre journey can take up to seven hours on roads barely worthy of the name.

The need for the Congo to more than dabble in fish farming is all the more acute, given doubts about the long-term viability of Lake Tanganyika's fishery. It was all but destroyed during the Congolese war, but now nearly 1,200 fishers are back on the lake, thanks to a UN Food and Agriculture Organization program that has replaced stolen nets and tackle. Some are line-fishing with dugout canoes; others are working in two-boat teams by lamplight to net bigger hauls overnight. Anecdotally, some say the stocks are not what they used to be.

The books of one of the seven fishing co-ops show a haul of 257 tonnes in 1993 dropping to 3.24 tonnes in 2003, a figure doubtlessly impacted by war, which saw some fishers drown in a bid to flee to neighbouring Tanzania.

Today, nobody knows the stock levels, says Adelard Mambo, 43, president of Kalemie's MPK fishing association. "There is no state regulation, no enforcement. We fish freely, yet we are seeing fewer fish."

Despite its lofty title, the provincial Centre for Aquaculture Research at Lubumbashi is actually just a small cluster of ponds tucked behind a tiger enclosure at the city zoo. There, head researcher Jules Lwamba leads a team of three working to supply the region's rearing ponds with the best possible local stock, focusing on tilapia and several variations of African catfish.

"We would like to follow the path of Asia, where they successfully combine rice paddies with fishing in dual-use projects," says Lwamba. "But we are so far behind. Before the war we had 8,000 fishponds, but at least half were abandoned. The goal of this centre is to restore them all and then keep going."

The problem is not demand, nor even technology. It is simply a question of building up capacity to help people help themselves – arguably the most common refrain heard today in eastern Congo.

"Everyone here wants fish," notes Lwamba. "We have to guard this place by night, otherwise people would steal them."

The Star

Project targets small scale farmers for multiplication of improved seed maize

Victor Mulongo Mukalay, a former member of parliament, is now emerging as a small-scale maize seed entrepreneur in his home region of Lubumbashi, in Katanga province, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

In a province with nearly 750,000 households of small-scale farmers planting an average of 530,000 hectares of maize, it is unusual that there is no commercial seed company.

Mukalay is working with his neighbors on three hectares of land to produce maize seed to fill this gap, and is planning to acquire a maize seed processing machine to enable him to expand the scale of his operations. "Although this is our first season, I’m very optimistic we’ll meet our target of producing enough good seed for 300 farm households,” he says.“I’d like to contribute in my small way to increasing the availability of quality seed of improved maize varieties for small-scale farmers.”

Mukalay and his neighbors are multiplying breeders’ seed they receive through CIMMYT’s New Seed Initiative for Maize in Southern Africa (NSIMA).

They are using the open-pollinated varities ZM623 and ZM721—developed by CIMMYT in Zimbabwe but showing good adaptability in the DRC.Variety ZM623, developed through CIMMYT research on drought tolerant maize for sub-Saharan Africa, is particularly popular with farmers, who like its intermediate maturity, disease resistance, and grain type.

“We’re encouraged by this interest from community-based seed producers who are investing their own resources in maize seed multiplication,” says John MacRobert, CIMMYT Zimbabwe seed specialist and NSIMA coordinator. “This will surely increase the availability of improved varieties to small-scale growers.”

Two years ago, a cooperative project between World Vision International (WVI), Swaziland’s national research and extension system, and CIMMYT began working with a farmers’ group in rural Swaziland, providing technical and financial support for community-based seed production.

Today, 86 farmers are proud owners of Lesibovu Community Company, involved in the seed production and marketing of the popular, drought tolerant variety ZM521.This season they will start producing and marketing certified seed of the newly released variety ZM611.

“The training we received from CIMMYT in seed production, certification, and marketing aspects was very useful in helping us scale up our production from just 25 kilos to approximately 41,000 kilos of seed annually,” says John Mamba, the group’s chairman. “We now feel empowered to produce good quality seed.” The company has purchased a simple seed packaging machine and developed its own packaging label.

“It was necessary to build the group’s capacity in producing open-pollinated varieties and hybrids, seed inspection procedures, and maize seed standards,” says Peter Setimela, CIMMYT maize breeder. “This was the only way of ensuring that they supply high-quality seed and of making them competitive in the market.”

The South African government, through the Limpopo Province Department of Agriculture, is also supporting similar initiatives. Although they began just eight years ago, they have taken root and today are supplying as much as 5,000 kilograms of improved maize seed to hundreds of small-scale farmers who previously had little access to improved maize varieties. The bigger seed companies did not consider it good business sense to supply thousands of widely-dispersed, small-scale farmers.

Through strategies such as marketing the seed in smaller, more affordable packets and working with rural traders, the schemes have increased access to and uptake of varieties such as ZM421 and ZM521. Farmers prefer ZM421, another variety from CIMMYT’s work, because of its comparatively stable yield, drought tolerance, and early maturity. The latter was especially attractive, because it eases the burden of guarding the crop from marauding baboons, a major menace.

Farmers have also found ZM521 to be high-yielding and early-maturing, with good milling properties.

The South African National Seed Organization (SANSOR) has been involved in the certification of seed from the small-scale production schemes since 2002. SANSOR works closely with farmer producers to ensure their seed is of the required quality.

Producers must register seed plots within 28 days after sowing, have plots inspected at different plant growth stages, and present seed samples for certification.

Being in close contact with farmers makes it easier to include their feedback in varietal improvement research or in key aspects of seed production, meaning for example that the varieties developed can be better suited to farmers' cropping settings.

Maize is a major food staple not just in South Africa but in most of sub-Saharan Africa. Through NSIMA, the South African government is investing in training and extending financial and material assistance to community-based seed producers.

This in turn helps ensure small-scale farmers access to affordable, quality seed of improved maize varieties, enhancing their food security and incomes.

Africa Science News Service

DR Congo has huge biofuels potential: UN expert

The Democratic Republic of Congo is one of Africa's most promising biofuels producers due to its vast amount of farmland suited to a range of crops from palm oil to soybeans, a top UN economist has said.

Dr. Josef Schmidhuber, senior economist at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), said the DRC had 80-115 million hectares of unused arable land, 4 million of which could be irrigated."The DRC and many of the African countries have an enormous agri-ecological potential," Schmidhuber said. "They have production potential for more than (sugar) cane: palm oil, maize, jatropha, cassava even soybeans -- whatever is suited to tropical and highland conditions."

Many countries seeking to produce biofuels have run into problems over the use of land, and environmental campaigners have accused palm oil growers in Indonesia, for instance, of cutting down rain forests to make room for feedstock.

Schmidhuber said this need not be an issue in Congo, home to the world's second largest rainforest, given the substantial amount of arable land outside precious rain forest areas. "The normal perception is that biofuels destroy the environment, particularly palm oil on existing rain forest land, but that doesn't have to be the case."

Schmidhuber added that using land for energy crops should not necessarily be at the expense of food production. In fact, producing bioenergy from domestic agriculture could boost productivity, as a lack of energy is a key factor holding back agricultural productivity and food production.

DRC, in central-eastern Africa, is rich in natural resources with a land area the size of western Europe but years of civil war have hindered economic growth and inward investment.

Schmidhuber said it would be difficult to produce biofuels for export and Congo would benefit most by providing fuel for domestic consumption. "You have to bear in mind barely 1 percent of the rural population has access to electricity ... There's a need for empowerment and to be sufficient in energy and not just food."

He said capital investment in the sector from abroad depended on the scale of demand, referring to China's well-established interest and investment activity in Congo. "Domestic support seems to be there, there is a government programme that essentially stresses that one should try to explore energy options with the objective to produce motor-fuel and electricity," Schmidhuber said. Latest World Bank figures show $402 million of foreign direct investment went to Congo in 2005.

Other countries with similar potential to supply themselves with biofuels were Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi, Schmidhuber added.

The Guardian

Chinese firm to invest $1 billion in 3 million hectare DRCongo oil palm plantation

A Chinese company, ZTE International, is to invest US$1 billion in a 3 million hectare oil palm plantation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to produce biofuels.

The vast Central-African country is a potential bioenergy 'superpower' which could supply a large part of the world's fuel needs. But it faces some hard choices. Congo is home to the world's second largest undisturbed tropical rainforest, an invaluable hotspot of biodiversity and carbon sink that is increasingly under pressure from illegal logging operations. A rush into the biofuel sector could threaten these ecosystems further.

The Congolese are beginning to understand the world-changing prospect that in a post-oil era, their country, together with Brazil, will largely determine the energy security of the world. The DRC's new government has just recently established an interministerial commission on biofuels to assess the complex opportunities and the many risks of this future.

The country has Africa's largest base of potential arable land, some 167 million hectares of non-forest land (roughly as much as all countries of Western Europe combined), it has the world's largest expanse of highly agro-ecologically suitable land for crops like sugarcane and oil palm, besides having a vast potential for most other tropical energy crops such as soybeans, sorghum, cassava, grasses and energy trees. Currently, the country has around 4.7% of its arable land under cultivation

The Chinese project will be implemented in the Equateur and Bandundu provinces, in the Province Orientale and in part of West-Kasaï.

The Chinese company will first satisfy local demand for oil palm. Despite its vast potential, Congo currently imports 15,000 tonnes per year, mainly due to the breakdown of logistical chains that are supposed to bring the product from the hinterland to the capital. Current oil palm production stands at around 240,000 tonnes, with demand expected to grow to 465,000 tonnes in 2010 and 540,000 tonnes in 2015.

When the palms for the 3 million hectares are planted this and next year, and reach full maturity 5 years later (in 2013) the plantations would yield around 12 million tonnes of oil (at 4 tonnes per hectare), easily meeting local demand. The excess of around 11.5 million tonnes would be used for the production of biofuels,or for human consumption, depending on the market situation and the reality of peak oil, which should become apparent by that time.

full article at Biopact...

Urban gardening improves incomes, diet, health in DRCongo

The fields that ended hunger for Henriette Lipepele's family are squeezed between a trash-strewn dirt road and a cluster of one-room cinder-block houses. They are not exactly pretty, at least not in the wide, pastoral way that one might imagine fields and farms. Ms. Lipepele's beds of sweet potatoes and leafy bitekuteku (Amaranthus viridis) are narrow and not quite straight; the patch where she added bananas and sugar cane seems almost overgrown with competing greenery.

But these plant beds wedged into the Quartier Mombele, one of the unpaved slums of Kinshasa, the sprawling capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, are examples of what many aid experts believe could save hundreds of thousands of people from hunger and malnutrition : urban gardens in the developing world's fast-growing cities.

For the first time, global population estimates this year show that more people live in cities than in rural areas. By 2020, according to the international Resource Centre for Urban Agriculture and Forestry, some 75 percent of the world's city dwellers will live in developing countries – many of them in poverty. Already in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, according to the UN, almost three-quarters of city residents live in rapidly growing slums.

These trends present a huge challenge when it comes to food and nutrition. Bringing rural-grown produce to people living in infrastructure-poor cities is difficult. Besides, many poor city dwellers do not have money for fresh groceries. Many worry about a wave of city-based hunger and see urban gardens as one possible answer to easing these stresses.

"Gardening is one of the things you can do to help families," says Mbuyi Joseph, who runs a Kinshasa-wide urban gardens project. "It's not expensive to start up. You don't need a lot of capital."

It is only recently that aid organizations, many of which for years believed that feeding programs were the best response to hunger, have increased their support for this type of agriculture. Now, many of the large UN agencies such as UNICEF, the World Food Program, and the Food and Agriculture Organization have teamed up with local NGOs to teach urban farming skills, distribute seeds and tools, and help new city farmers grow the right foods to maximize family nutrition. From Accra, Ghana, to Hyderabad, India, groups of NGOs are working together to build urban agriculture networks.

Kinshasa was one of the early test centers for urban gardens. In 1995, the "Programme Presbyterien de Jardinage" (PPJ), a Presbyterian gardening project, received funds from Catholic Relief Services to manage an urban agriculture project here, focusing on the families of malnourished children. It organized a team of local volunteers called "Mama Bongisa" ("mom improver") to teach mothers in some of Kinshasa's most impoverished neighborhoods about nutrition and farming.

The project reported rapid results: After only three months, the percentage of families in the program who kept gardens increased from 54 to 73, and the amount of land each family planted more than doubled. At the beginning of the program, according to PPJ, 64 percent of the children in targeted households were malnourished. After five visits from Mama Bongisa, that number dropped to 20 percent. The gains continue.

"So many times in Congo you start something and then it falls apart. That didn't happen here," says Larry Sthreshley. He and his wife, Inge, helped set up the PPJ garden project in the mid-1990s. "A critical mass of information gathers, and then you see neighbors helping neighbors," he adds. A drive through Kinshasa today shows some of these lasting results. Leafy green beds sit plush between cinder-block homes and shacks, on median strips, and along roads crowded with pollution-spitting taxi vans. According to Inge Sthreshley, many successful home gardeners eventually become market gardeners, offering their produce for sale.

Some people, such as Mulopo Wally, have even turned urban gardening into a full-fledged business. He gardens along one of Kinshasa's main roads, in what used to be a vast, abandoned swath of weeds. Today, he has 300 beds of spinach, manioc, and other greens. A middleman who exports vegetables to Europe regularly buys up a dozen or more beds' worth of produce.

There are unique considerations when it comes to urban farming, Wally says : He can't grow crops that will get too tall, or else they will absorb too much pollution. Also, bandits might hide in the foliage. Better to keep the vegetables low and leafy. When asked about the success of his business, he gives the half-defeated shrug characteristic of farmers across the world, and grumbles about the weather.

"We're OK," he says. "We do not get rich, but we're OK."

Christian Science Monitor