Policy makers have been asked to assist smallholder farmers to apply their energy, creativity, knowledge, technological innovations and other resources to increase farm productivity.
Dr. Obeng Sakyi-Dawson, Senior Lecturer, College of Agriculture and Consumer Sciences, University of Ghana, made the call at the opening of the First National Workshop on Convergence of Sciences-Strengthening Innovative Systems (COS-IS).
It was organized by the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research for participants from the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, academia and policy makers to deliberate on issues relating to the creation of access to
opportunities, including technological solutions for smallholder farmers.
The purpose of COS-IS was to ensure institutional change at higher level by mobilizing and facilitating the stakeholders to act in concert and realize the opportunities.
Dr. Sakyi-Dawson noted that the best way to ensure global food security was to increase the current low productivity of the vast human and natural resources in smallholder farming.
He said smallholder farmers had very small windows of opportunity since as farmers, they faced many parameters that they were unable to change.
"Major constraints still limit the impact of smallholder farmers since improving productivity at farm level have less to do with the performance of crop varieties. There are also alleviation constraints such as limited
access to inputs, markets, and other services such as poor infrastructure and impact of cheap imports" He said.
Dr Sakyi-Dawson who is also the COS-IS Coordinator noted that those parameters could be made variable at a system level higher than the farm.
He said although farmers had begun to organize themselves, they lacked the political clout to influence the decisions of policy makers.
The COS-IS programme in Benin, Ghana and Mali is a sequel to the first phase of Convergence of Sciences(COS) and a five-year inter-university collaborative research programme beginning in 2008 and ending in 2013.
It is being funded by the Directorate General of the International Cooperation (DGIC) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands with a ?4.5 million grant.
The programme will work within three domains in each country: Benin - cotton, oil palm production, water management; Ghana - cocoa, food security, oil palm production; Mali - agricultural surface, water management, shea
butter, integrated livestock and fodder management.
Each of the domains will have a research associate and a PhD holder assigned to it, who would undertake a diagnostic study on the nexus between technology and institutional change, nature of institutional change and innovation systems for smallholder farmers.
This approach implies concerted action among relevant actors such as farmers, researchers, communities, companies, policy makers to realize an opportunities including better access to remunerative markets, inputs, knowledge and credit, more value-added activities, security of tenure, better organization for exerting political influence, post-harvest activities to allow small farmers to jointly supply supermarkets, and effective political support to combat cheap imports.