Whistles and Whips: Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation program results in sounds of success in Ethiopia’s lowlands | African Development Bank

(Korofto, Adama District, Ethiopia) If the shrill sounds of police whistles ringing in Ethiopia’s Awash River Valley don’t seem out of place, some visitors to these irrigated wheat fields will wonder what’s going on in the sky. this piece of remote farm cooperative.

A short walk through the thigh-high wheat stalks reveals farm workers blowing whistles and waving whips to scare away quelea, a destructive bird species that flocks to the fields to peck away ripening wheat grains.

Farmer Yilma Mamo says the cacophony of sound to rid fields of the birds is actually a testament to the success of the Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation initiative, or TAAT.

Launched in 2018, the TAAT program is an integral part of the Bank’s Feed Africa Strategy 2016-2025.

Farmer and TAAT beneficiary Yilma Mama says participation in the TAAT program has made him more financially and food secure.

TAAT’s overall goal is to deploy proven technologies to increase agricultural productivity in Africa, mitigate risk and promote diversification and processing across 18 agricultural value chains within eight priority intervention areas. In total, TAAT will produce an additional 100 million tons of food to feed 200 million people.

In Ethiopia, TAAT provides tens of thousands of smallholder farmers like Mamo with heat-tolerant wheat varieties that produce more profitable crops compared to traditional crops such as vegetables.

“Over the years I have grown tomatoes, onions, peppers and cabbage. Production costs were very high and the market for produce was volatile – sometimes we lost money,” says Mamo, who has been farming here since 1969, adding that birds do not affect his vegetables. He explained that the cost of wheat production is very low and “the profits are good”, providing food and financial security for his family and the community.

“Chasing the birds away takes a lot of effort. [But] I prefer to grow wheat, even though the birds are here,’ Mamo said.

VIDEO – Watch farmers on the TAAT program whip and blow whistles to protect their crops.

Mamo is one of more than 28,000 Ethiopian farmers who have received TAAT-funded wheat seed since 2018 with a TAAT Wheat Compact, led by the International Center for Agriculture Research in the Dry Areas and the Ethiopian National Agricultural Research Institute.

In the lowlands of Ethiopia, such as the Adama district, about 100 kilometers southeast of the capital Addis Ababa, wheat cultivation is relatively new. The Ethiopian government’s program approached farmers and provided training on how to grow the heat-tolerant grains where daytime temperatures can reach 35 degrees Celsius. “Before that, we didn’t know wheat could perform well in these areas,” Mamo said.

Farmers receive government loans to cover 80% of costs for land preparation, seeds, fertilizers and mechanized harvesting equipment. The loans are repaid at the harvest.

Bank vice president Beth Dunford (r) and director Martin Fregene (white shirt) recently visited the farm of TAAT grantee Yilma Mamo.

“Heat tolerant wheat varieties can withstand the high temperatures in the lowlands. Essentially, these plants can thrive where common wheat varieties would struggle to produce that much grain,” said Dr. Beth Dunford, the Bank’s Vice President for Agriculture, Human and Social Development, after a recent visit to Mamo’s farm. The farm is part of a farmers’ cooperative with 280 members.

“It is critical that African farmers have the technology-enabled tools and know-how to unlock Africa’s agricultural potential – the bank’s TAAT initiative works with our regional member states to deliver those agricultural technologies to better enable the continent to feed itself,” added Dunford.

In Ethiopia, irrigated wheat acreage expanded from less than 5,000 hectares in the 2018-2019 agricultural season to 650,000 hectares in the 2021-22 season, following the nationwide deployment of heat-tolerant wheat varieties. Wheat yields have doubled and wheat production in Ethiopia will increase by another 1.6 million tons by 2022. The country says it became self-sufficient in wheat production last year and is about to start exporting wheat for the first time.

“We are proud of what Ethiopia has achieved. We have seen similar TAAT successes in Zambia, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Kenya and other countries,” said Dr. Martin Fregene, the director of the Bank of Agriculture and Agro-Industry. “African farmers can feed their land and build resilience to shocks in the continent’s food systems if they widely adopt improved seeds from the TAAT wheat and other agricultural pacts,” Fregene added.

In July 2022, the Bank Board approved another $27.41 million to implement Phase II of TAAT. TAAT aims to make proven technologies available to more than 40 million agricultural producers across Africa by 2025 – the majority of whom are young people and women in low-income countries. This funding supports the expansion of the TAAT platform that also provides heat-tolerant wheat varieties, drought-tolerant corn varieties and high-yield rice varieties to 11 million farmers, as well as increased crop production with an estimated 25 million tons of additional food.

The TAAT initiative will be one of the Africa-led solutions to increase the continent’s food production capacity, at the Dakar 2 Africa Food Summit to be held January 25-27. President Macky Sall of Senegal and President of the African Union will host the three-day summit. The African Development Bank Group is co-organizing the summit.

Click here for more information about the Dakar 2 Africa Food Summit.