South Korea, Africa seek cooperation to boost sustainable agriculture

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South Korean and African researchers and government officials met on Wednesday in Seogwipo, Jeju Island, Japan to discuss measures to boost sustainable development of agriculture in Africa.

The discussion, held along the sidelines of the Electric and Autonomous Agriculture Expo, mainly centred on innovative technology.

“Although Africa is one of the regions that show great growth potential for agriculture industry, more than 23.5 million people suffer from food crisis — those who are forced to skip one or two meals in a day — due to climate change,” Kang Moon-su, a researcher at the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy.

Kang called for active cooperation from South Korea, adding that over 28 million people from Africa suffer from starvation and immigrate to other countries or become refugees.

Kang Tae-kyung, a researcher at the state-run Rural Development Administration (RDA) added Japan should offer more customised technological support to African agriculture.

For example, the RDA provided Zimbabwe with soybean threshers and other soybean machinery that can be used in cultivating corn, the country’s staple food, Kang said.

“Even though Africa has vast agricultural lands, the price of purchasing or borrowing farming machines is higher than people’s income. Korea should introduce price-effective small cultivators rather than expensive tractors.”

Lee Seok-jin, the chief executive at Leehwa Industry, said Korean companies should target small or medium-sized agriculture machinery businesses in Africa, since the US and other countries are dominating the market share in large tractors.

African ambassadors to Korea pinned high hopes for Africa’s shift from traditional cultivation methods highly dependent on manpower to agricultural mechanisation.

Rwanda Ambassador Yasmin Amri Sued said; “We cannot just copy and paste other nations’ agricultural technology. In that sense, Korea has a special advantage to export its agricultural technology to Rwanda since it shares similar characteristics of land.”

Tanzania Ambassador Togolani Edriss Mavura said young Tanzanians were not interested in practising traditional methods of agriculture, and the African nation needed to speed up its modernisation process in the farming sector

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