CLF, CNFA and major chemical companies plant demo plots in Africa

Date:10-23-2008

Financial and technical support provided by Syngenta Crop Protection, Dow AgroSciences, Bayer CropScience, DuPont Crop Protection, and Monsanto are helping African farmers to prevent weeds from reducing their crop yields. The companies also give product samples for use in 50 demonstration plots in Kenya and Malawi, located just outside dealerships where farmers will see them when they buy seeds or other crop inputs.

Washington, US-based CropLife Foundation (CLF), which was created in 2001 to promote and advance sustainable agriculture and the environmentally sound use of crop protection products and bioengineered agriculture, working in partnership with CNFA, a Washington-based enterprise development organization non-profit, is launching the demonstration project aimed at helping African farmers learn how to replace manual labor with chemical weed control and showing the potential of herbicides to produce higher crop yields, and generate higher income. CNFA is utilizing its network of 1,500 agrodealers in Africa for the demonstration.?

Chairman Jay Vroom and other CLF representatives announced the project at the World Food Prize Symposium in Des Moines, Iowa, US in mid-October. The World Food Prize was begun by Nobel Prize Laureate Norman Borlaug, an Iowa native who is credited with saving hundreds of millions of people from starvation by improving plant genetics. Borlaug said he has found weed control to be one of the most limiting factors affecting crop production in Africa and in most developing countries. “Many times you will hear a farmer say he cannot grow any more corn, wheat, or sorghum because he has to spend so much time controlling weeds on his acreage,” says Borlaug. “This severely limits how those farmers view increased crop and food production.”

According to studies conducted by university agronomists in Africa, farmers can spend more than 100 hours per hectare preparing weed-infested land for planting, with as many as 200 hours required for hand-hoeing weeds from growing crops. Even then, farmers still lose 25% to 100% of their crop yields to competition from weeds. Some farmers also limit the amount of crop nutrients they apply because they’re also fertilizing the weeds, making them even more difficult to chop out.?

“If the Kenya-Malawi demonstrations are as successful as we believe they will be, we will be seeking support from major funding organizations to expand the crop technology concept to all the 1,500-plus agrodealers in our African network,” said CNFA President John Costello. “These dealers provide planting advice and crop inputs to millions of African farmers.”