Ashley Nyambe
THE Minister of Agriculture, Water and Land Reform, Calle Schlettwein, touched on the inoperative conditions of some Green Schemes and explained how the ministry intends to resolve the problem this year.
According to the minister, last year the ministry managed to improve the utilization of Green Schemes through alternative modes of operation, which allowed for the unlocking of potential in accordance with the Second Harambee Plan (HPP II).
Still, Schlettwein acknowledged that “the institutional arrangements under which the Green Schemes operated have not resulted in production and productivity of agricultural inputs at household and regional levels”.
According to him, this was due to a wrong management model that was used.
“By and large, they are not failures of infrastructure, not failures of people that are farming there. It was a wrong management model that we tried to use. It was a model of state farmers managed from headquarters in Windhoek and that turned out to be very unproductive.”
Schlettwein explained that “farming must be done on the farm. You must take your decision on the farm and you must implement your decision there and then. If you do not, you risk delaying the process, which could hinder productivity. Every delay reflects in a smaller yield and that’s what we saw,” the minister emphasized.
According to Schlettwein, Agricultural Business Development (AgriBusDev), who was managing the state farms at the time, was not able to give timely instructions and there were also delays in the provision of funds and resources necessary for maintaining the farms.
“All that, at the end came to the result that Green Schemes actually became loss-making. Now that is so but let’s fix it. Cabinet has approved a new management model. It is our job to fix it, to implement that management model, and our job is to do that this year.”
In addition to fixing the Green Scheme initiative, the ministry also intends to finalize the implementation of an initiative that affords young unemployed graduates who are passionate about agriculture the opportunity to contribute to food production.
Schlettwein also stated that the ministry had many notable achievements last year, such as producing and distributing a total of 79 tonnage of quality seeds for this cropping season and supporting 2 294 community and backyard gardens as well as 4 163 horticulture producers.
File photo for illustrative purposes only.
