We continue receiving documents for the Rural Women's Internatinal Day.

From Africa we have the participation of Kunda Mwila, Head of Communication of the Zambia National Farmers Union (ZNFU).

Agricultural Situation in Zambia.

Zambia is an inland country with no sea access, which has approximately 1.2 million small farmers.

The corn that is mainly produced during the rainy season is considered a "political crop" as corn flour is the basic food of the population. Other important productions in Zambia for export are soya, tobacco and cotton.

In Zambia the practice of Conservation Farming is becoming more and more common. The Zambian farmers who practice this type of farming are obtaining very good results, as the average yield they obtain with this productive model is 5 ton/ha as opposed to 1.2 ton on average obtained from traditional production.

Market Access
Kunda wanted to emphasise one of the recurring problems among small farmers, access to the market.

For this reason, he emphasise the importance of working with short marketing circuits, thus reducing to a minimum the long chain of middlemen that is normally created from the farmer to the consumer.

In particular, he shared with those present a successful practice that this organisation set up in 2006 to enable farmers to find out the market prices of the goods they produce. This idea materialised by sending text messages to mobile phones. They are also working on other possibilities to improve access to the market via the Internet.

He ended his speech by advocating the need to organise the farmers, and highlighted that it is essential to the extent that gaining more dimension enables better attention to the purchasers' demands and improves their capacity for negotiation.

Here is a link from which you can access the presentation developed by the Zambia National Farmers Union.