Seeds for Growth

Financing smallholder farming in southern Africa

Poverty and hunger continue to be the biggest challenges in Africa, yet eight years into the Maputo Protocol, in which governments pledged to allocate 10 per cent of their national budgets to agriculture, this sector remains seriously underfunded. Seeds for Growth: Financing smallholder farming in southern Africa explores how governance and political decision making about the allocation of resources could transform the smallholder agricultural landscape in southern Africa. It affirms the role smallholder agriculture can play in the pursuit of social and economic justice. The authors take a fresh look at the ways in which governments could allocate resources to the sector in order to reshape it so that it achieves its potential to ensure food security, alleviate poverty and promote the economic growth of the region as a whole. This book demonstrates the need to shift from the current centralised policy-making and resource allocation, which is fundamentally undemocratic, to a more integrated vision of governance, in which politically mature rural communities, together with their civil society partners, can support social and economic justice.

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