Africa s Urban Farmers

Sugar beet and cane growers worldwide are struggling to cope with inflation of production costs and drastic decreases in real revenues.

To give you an example, between 2001 and 2002, Ethiopian maize farmers produced two years of bumper harvest.

Kyangwali Progressive Farmers is registered as a limited company, and has started getting contracts to supply produce directly to manufacturers.

Co operative Bulk Handling (CBH) a cooperative company, established by grain growers in Western Australia, in 1933.

We're not trying to cut and paste the Chicago model or the India model, but creating a system uniquely tailored to Ethiopia's needs and realities, Ethiopia's small farmers.

Coca farmers and producers slash and burn forests, polluting streams with toxic chemicals and damaging fragile ecosystems.

Flower growers in Kenya, who depend on air transport to take their short lived product to Europe, suddenly had no income.

However, the increase in demand for ethanol offers an alternative output and better prices on world markets, and should help the sugar economy and encourage young people to continue family farming of beet and cane.

Washington believes anti drug policies will fail, to the benefit of drug dealers, if coca growers continue to identify themselves with nationalists who vindicate the leaf s production.

If all of Colombia s farmers stopped growing coca tomorrow, unrestrained demand by the world s 13 million cocaine users would quickly generate as much cultivation somewhere else.

However, failures and disappointments linger, for example with regard to the World Trade Organization and trade, where the farmers of the South still lack a level playing field with those of the North.

If smallholder farmers have the basic infrastructure they need to get their goods to market, they will not only be able to feed themselves and their communities, but will contribute to wider food security.

Africa s farmers produce roughly one third or less food per hectare of farmland than their counterparts around the world, resulting in massive hunger, which is exacerbated by a heavy disease burden.

But controlling supply is not enough. If all of Colombia s farmers stopped growing coca tomorrow, unrestrained demand by the world s 13 million cocaine users would quickly generate as much cultivation somewhere else.