ACTESA BACKGROUND

BACKGROUND

The establishment of the Alliance for Commodity Trade in Eastern and Southern Africa (ACTESA) was in response to the 2003 Maputo Declaration by the African Union (AU) which required the need for coordinated and comprehensive public and private investments in the agricultural sector commonly known as Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Program (CAADP) where agricultural sector support increased to 10% of the total national budget. This was meant to ensure practical implementation of CAADP and also contribute to the attainment of the then Millennium Development Goal 1 (MDG) 1 which seeks to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger by 2030. ACTESA’s commodity focus includes cereals and pulses; oil seeds; horticultural crops; roots and tubers; tree crops; forestry products; livestock and agricultural inputs. ACTESA provides an answer to the region’s agricultural challenges including market access-related constraints, low productivity, and technological and policy-related constraints. It is a key institution of COMESA where 85 percent of all staple crop producers are smallholders and of these, only about 15 percent produce for the market and are characterized by poor organization with no predictable selling mechanisms. ACTESA’s role in this 10-year strategy is to reverse these constraints.

Challenges of staple food production and trade in the 21 COMESA Member States include:

• Low agricultural productivity with uncoordinated and weak markets,
• Weak policy environment,
• Weak farmer-based apex organizations and limited access to post-harvest handling technologies and facilities,
• Information asymmetry/lack of equivalence across the value chains linked to inconsistent quality requirements/harmonisation
• Government-imposed import/export bans and prohibitive transport costs.
  

SPECIFIC INTERVENTIONS

Among the ACTESA Alliance Partners, ACTESA would like to partner with development partners in moving forward ACTESA Staple Food Programmes within the three-focus area, namely approved by the Council of Ministers in 2012:

• Policy Development and Implementation;
• Market Facilities for trade expansion; and
• Capacity Building for commercialization.

in view of the above, the overall goal of ACTESA is to boost intra-regional agricultural trade through support of small-scale farmers’ access to agricultural input, output, and financial markets.

ACTESA STAPLE PROGRAMMES FOCUS

The current flagship ACTESA program is the COMESA EAC Horticulture Accelerator (CEHA) with a vision of having by 2031, climate-smart horticulture value chains will become a significant driver of income growth, inclusive job creation, and improved nutrition throughout Eastern and Southern Africa. CEHA was created in 2022 by public and private sector partners to better coordinate horticulture policy, value chain development programs, financing, and Research and Development (R&D). CEHA would initially focus on three priority anchor value chains (VCs), namely avocado, onion, and Irish potatoes as these specific value chains have agronomic, logistical, and regulatory challenges and opportunities that are common to many other fruit and vegetable crops. Other value chains, such as tomato and cabbage may be added in the near future at the direction of the CEHA Board and based on National Chapters Platform stakeholder priorities.

CEHA has a bottom-up structure, where the strategic priorities identified by national-level stakeholders drive the priorities at a regional level. It consists of a CEHA Board, Technical Committees, Country/National Platforms / Chapters as well as a Secretariat managed by ACTESA. An annual General Assembly, comprised of a much broader set of stakeholders from governments, development agencies, and the private sector would allow COMESA and EAC Member States to endorse the CEHA Board recommendations and any other engagement relevant for increased intra-regional horticultural trade.

In this regard, ACTESA will be key in moving the CEHA forward through the following:

• Coordinating investments that are primarily private sector-led, public sector-enabled, and donor-catalysed into production and processing clusters in support of the EAC and COMESA horticulture strategies.
• Facilitating policy and standards improvement to stimulate trade and market access across the region for multiple regional fruit and vegetable value chains; and
• Facilitating access to both working capital and capex finance as well as technical assistance to processors, farmers, and other agribusinesses across the value chain to accelerate growth.

ACTESA implements other programs within its two strategic areas, namely increasing agricultural productivity of staple crops and supporting small-holder farmers and commercial farmers’ access to national, regional, and international markets as outlined below:

INCREASING AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY OF STAPLE CROPS OF THE COMESA

REGION

• Moving forward COMESA Seed Harmonisation Implementation Plan (COMSHIP);
• Support initial activities of the COMESA Biotechnology and Implementation Plan (COMBIP)
• Harmonisation of fertilizer policies/regulations, standards, quality assurance, and market development in the COMESA Member States and thereafter establish a finance mechanism for bulk manufacturing and procurement of fertilizers and distribution in the COMESA Member States.
• Support to national governments as they design evidence-based policies that encourage staple food trade;
• Develop ACTESA Stakeholder Mappings and regional staple food market intelligence system.
• Harmonisation of livestock feed in the COMESA region in line with the COMESA Council Decision for ACTESA to establish a regional program that will focus on addressing the bottlenecks identified in the regional Livestock policy framework.
• Support existing regional value chains in cassava, banana, maize, cotton, niche crops (small grains and legumes), livestock (beef, poultry, and dairy), and fisheries so that national and regional markets can be accessed.
• Training and support to enhance the adoption of technologies such as drip irrigation, promotion of climate-smart varieties within COMSHIP with the COMESA Climate Change program and agricultural water management technologies for increased productivity especially in resource-endowed but underutilized areas.
• Support for the use of agriculture productivity enhancing options such as conservation farming, carbon trading, and biotechnology through GMO cotton iii) support for extension by enhancing the capacity of farmer organizations and adoption of extension models such as training of lead farmers to serve as focal points for information dissemination.
• Support annual regional competitiveness analyses that include comparative competitiveness benchmarking of national business environments among ESA member states through analysis and empirical client satisfaction surveys;

SUPPORT SMALL-SCALE FARMERS ACCESS TO NATIONAL, REGIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL MARKETS

• Comparative competitiveness benchmarking of national business environments among Eastern and Southern African (ESA) Member States through analysis and empirical client satisfaction surveys;
• Analysis of key sectors across intra-regional markets in ESA and comparative analysis of ESA regional markets against alternative export sources in viable export destinations for selected staple foods.
• Strengthen and facilitate the development of existing farmer associations to enhance their capacity to engage in the staple food value chains and improve their participation in national and regional markets.
• Consolidate and disseminate innovative/best practices and lessons that integrate smallholder producers into commercial markets (initial focus on aggregation, warehousing and contract farming, etc.)
• Harmonisation of Warehouse Receipt System (WRS) for staple commodities and development a COMESA Regional Food Balance Sheet (COMESA RFBS) to enhance establishment of credible and reliable agricultural food security information system and re-launch the ACTESA Knowledge portal.
• Facilitate the establishment of dialogue platforms at national and regional levels in providing oversight on food balance sheet and informal cross border trade monitoring.
• Enhance private sector and smallholder farmers’ capacity to comply with regional and international market standards for staple food trade.
• Creation of service, production, and marketing forums to develop and disseminate best practices and lessons learned for the development of key facilities and public-private partnership services supporting the commercialization of staple food production.
• Support for grain bulking through the formation of farmer groups and grain bulking centers
• Strengthening Farmer Based Organizations (FBOs) by promoting viable models that can sustainably provide needed services such as storage, access to finance, and market linkages to smallholders is critical for the growth of the staple food sub-sector; strengthening formal value chain linkages between farmers, FBO’s and regional marketing infrastructure such as larger warehousing facilities and commodity exchanges and capacity building activities to enhance the effectiveness of FBO’s.

Harmonisation of grades and standards for staple food commodities and in the process establish a COMESA regional agricultural commodity exchange on spot and futures exchanges to link small-scale farmers to national, regional, and international markets within the COMESA Region.