I love you so I don't want you to do these things. Save the world instead.

A) IGNORING THE "SIX MONTH RULE"

I was on the board of a business where we all got the financials for that month and realized that the company had six months of cash in the bank.

I called the CEO. He said, "no problem. We have six months. I'll raise money a long time before then and we have some big potential customer deals."

No you don't.

You are already out of business if you just have six months cash left.

Raising money takes AT LEAST six months from beginning to end. And that's if you have a great company.

There's meeting VCs, pitching, due diligence, legal, and then the final funding, which by itself is around a month.

And new customers take 2 months to find, 2 months to do the work, and 3 months to pay. Best case.

We ended up going into emergency mode. Stopping all development. Hired a bank to sell the company. And the company sold when it had about 3 hours worth of cash left. The CEO left with millions but was three hours from going broke and almost didn't know it.

QUESTION: Does the 6 months rule apply to artists?

YES!

Yesterday someone said to me: I'm going to quit my job and write. I know I will get published if I can just focus on the writing.

This person will lose.

Nobody is waiting for your magnum opus. And you need money in the bank. And work is often fuel for stories.

Or it gets you motivated. As in: "Ugh, I hate this job so much I better write as good as possible."

Don't be a baby. Get six months cash in the bank. That's the first taste of freedom. Don't go below that.



B) ENTREPRENEURS SMOKE TOO MUCH CRACK

We have a cognitive bias to think that our sh-- doesn't stink.

One time I was starting a business and I realized about halfway through development of the product that I had 5 competitors.

I started to cry. My business partner couldn't cheer me up. My ex-wife couldn't cheer me up. My early-morning Scrabble friends couldn't cheer me up.

My developers in Bangalore cheered me up. "Don't worry. We'll just make yours better."

But every day I had to ask, "Am I really making it better? Is this really a feature I would use? Is this feature better than the features on all the other sites?"

We went into feature overload but it was worth it. We sold the business a few months before the market peaked. All of our competitors went out of business.

You have to ask every day, "Am I smoking crack?" Because otherwise your bias is to say, "I have the best business in the world. We can never go out of business."

QUESTION: Do artists smoke crack?

Of course. We're all crack smokers all the time.

Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, told me when he was a loan officer that his boss told him,"Never lend money to anyone who says they love what they do."

The reason: because passion is crack. It blinds you to the faults of your art, your product, your business, your friends, etc.

It's really hard. Even now I smoke crack. I look at opportunities every day and they all sound so exciting. Crack crack crack. Mmmm!

Run it by someone who doesn't care about what you do. They can say, "you're smoking crack" or at least ask the right questions.



C) PARTNERS VEST

Your business partner is your worst enemy.

He's worse than your competitors because you are more likely to fail because of a partner than a competitor.

Just like marriage.

In my first business, I gave a partner 10% of the business. Then a day later he quit to write a TV show for MTV. I don't blame him. Heck, I wanted to work for him.

But it was not fun. We had to borrow money to buy him out. It put stress on everyone and I was blamed for inviting him into the company in the first place.

I just had an investment get sold at a low price. The main problem: the partners disagreed.

This happens in every business. It's hard enough for two people who love each other to stay married. It's even harder for two people who don't love each other to work all day together and try to make millions.

Two solutions:

Everyone should have clear roles. No "co-CEOs." You do this and I do that. Period.
Partners who don't put money in should vest their shares — meaning they get a little bit of their shares over time. Usually four years. If they quit, they only have a small piece of their shares. Or maybe none of their shares.




D) BAD ENTREPRENEURS HIRE PEOPLE


Sometimes you need to hire people.

But triple-question this.

Once you hire them, you can't fire them.

Are you sure you aren't hiring them for a task you can do yourself? For instance, you don't need a secretary to book your plane flights and make restaurant reservations. Do it yourself.

Or sales. The founder should be the sales guy for the first $10 million in revenues.

Don't hire 5 programmers. Studies show the difference between a good programmer and a bad one is about 10:1.

So hire one great one and pay double what you would pay individually to 5 mediocre programmers.

The success of a business, the success of a relationship, the success of an artistic scene, is going to be determined by the people you surround yourself with.

If someone is not A+, then they are an F. They might later be an A+. But don't hire at all if your only choices are Fs.

And don't hire if you don't have six months cash in the bank to support the hire.




E) BAD ENTREPRENEURS WORRY ABOUT USELESS STUFF


Should you be a C-Corp or an S-Corp?

Who cares.

Should you have a logo and a mission statement?

Who cares.

I don't think I incorporated my second successful business until the day before we were sold. And I don't know if we ever had a logo or business cards. I forget.

The only things to worry about: Is the product helping people? And do I have more than six months cash in the bank?

And constantly asking yourself if you are smoking crack on the two questions above.

What can go wrong, for instance, that can bring you under six months cash in the bank? Who would you fire then?

These are things worth worrying about.

Because it will force you to keep good relationships with customers to keep the money flowing. And it will force you to constantly know your numbers and test every feature before you spend money on it.




F) BAD ENTREPRENEURS TAKE RISKS

There's a myth that entrepreneurs are risk takers. This is MBA Crack.

That's why 85% of entrepreneurs fail. They believed that myth. They were told all of their lives they were "bulldogs" and can survive anything.

Well, making people happy is really hard. Cooking a meal better than the restaurant down the street is really hard. Building a website that people go to more than they go to Twitter is really hard.

A friend of mine had a great idea for a business. Protein water. Clear water that had 10 grams of protein in it. High quality protein. Good to drink after workouts. Etc.

Whole Foods started selling it. Things were looking good.

But he never tested if people would actually buy it.

Put an ad up on Facebook. "Clear protein water. 10 grams 0 calories." If they click, send them to a page describing the benefits and putting them on an email list.

If a lot of people click — you might have a good business. Develop the product.

If nobody clicks. Move on.

My friend went out of business.

Going out of business is not a "learning experience." It's really painful. You feel like dying.

It's the ugliest thing in the world next to the item I'm about to describe.




G) BAD ENTREPRENEURS HAVE SEX WITH EMPLOYEES

Believe it or not, I see this all the time.

A CEO gets, literally, cocky, and starts fooling around with employees. This is death to the business.

I wish I could've gotten back my money the second I found out each time a CEO was cheating on his wife (or her husband).

Not that they are so untrustworthy. That's not the reason. I don't judge and I don't know what goes on in people's lives.

But it just means that they are going to go through a world of personal shit that I don't want to have to deal with as an investor. It will take their focus off the business.

Save it for after you cash out. You can lose all your money then but I get to keep mine.




H) THEY FORGET THEIR LOYALTIES

Being an entrepreneur largely sucks.

When you're an employee, you do what your boss says and you help your colleagues and you leave your work in the office at the end of the day.

When you're an entrepreneur you have to:

Constantly keep the customers happy. This means responding to emails and comments at 3 in the morning every day.
Keep employees be motivated and creative. This doesn't mean pep talks. This means, find them work they find meaningful and understanding the particular work-life balance for each employee so they can stay both disciplined and happy.
Keep shareholders happy. Since they write the emergency checks when you go below your six months.
All of the above are your bosses 24 hours a day. Meanwhile, you're CEO, Head of Sales, Head of Marketing, and project manager for all projects until you are fully off the ground.

What does "off the ground" mean? It doesn't mean have six months cash in the bank. That's just treading water.

It means you have two years of cash in the bank with stable customers.

By the way, does this question apply to artists and writers?

Of course. I write. "Customers" are readers. And I have to work with marketers, designers, researchers, Amazon, other writers, podcasters, speaking channels, mentors, and alternative marketing channels.

This means constant communication. I write in the morning. And then do "business" in the afternoon.

Make a list of all the groups you need to be loyal to. This loyalty is not "here today, gone tomorrow." These are the groups of people who will catapult you to success. These are the people you will catapult to success.

You need to touch these people in some way each day.

And this is not about 2015. This is how life works for 10,000 years.



I) BAD ENTREPRENEURS PICK FIGHTS

I always ask people about their competitors. You know what the worst answer is? "They suck."

You know what the best answer is? "Oh yeah, I just had breakfast with the CEO of my biggest competitor."

You and I, we are here for a long time. We're all going to grow up in business together.

Sometimes your employees become your competitors. Then they might become your bosses.

They might buy your company after their company is bought. And then they might be your employees again.

We learn and get ideas from each other.

Pixar would learn from Disney how to tell a story. Disney would learn from Pixar how to use technology. Until they merged and Disney's stock doubled.

PayPal (Peter Thiel) and (Elon Musk) would constantly try to one-up each other. Until they merged. Then their biggest competitor (Ebay) bought them.

Now the "paypal mafia" dominates Silicon Valley.

Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese pushed each other all through the '70s and '80s. When one did "The Godfather," the other would do "Taxi Driver." When one did "The Cotton Club," the other did "The Color of Money."

Did they hate each other? Of course not. Scorsese even wrote the music for Coppola's film "The Outsiders" and they teamed up on "New York Stories" (with Woody Allen).

Your competitors are your scene. You will know each other for 50 years. Respect!

The entrepreneurs that I see burn out and disappear are the ones who never built community and friendship around them with their peers.

—

I'm not the best entrepreneur. And I'm not the worst. But I've seen a lot. I've started 20 businesses and failed at 17 of them. I'm invested in 30 more. I ran a venture capital firm. I've seen a lot of businesses fail. A lot of people cry.

I want people to succeed. Because then there's that magic moment when you know, "this is it. This is really going to work."

And that moment feels really good. I see it on people. Their lives change.

I recently watched a business I'm involved in go from $0 in revenues to over $10,000,000 and profitable within 8 months. Now they can plan for the future.

Plan for new products that can help people. And they get thank you letters every day from the people they are already helping.

In many cases, those letters are from competitors because they work together on projects.

And in some cases, the letters are from shareholders asking for help.

Once they are over that first hump, a new set of problems arise. But that's for another article.

Today I'm going to visit with Susan Cain, author of "Quiet", to interview her for my podcast.

I'm feeling a bit shy about it. Like, should I be more quiet than she is? Should I look at my feet? Podcasting is part of my business. I want each interview to save lives. That's how much crack I smoke.

Artist or employee or entrepreneur, ask every night, "Who did I help today?" This will help you avoid the problems above.

And if you fail, please don't kill yourself. You can try again.

Read the original article on http://www.businessinsider.com/stupid-mistakes-entrepreneurs-make-2015-9 The business insider

free2ryhme:
“You also know that we have only one canonised person in this country who believes that every other person is corrupt. When you are even talking to him and explain your position, he will not talk but only to be watching you because he has already made up his conclusion.”

This had me in stitches. Hahahaha very funny

By Phil McCausland, The Atlantic

http://www.businessinsider.com/a-handful-of-us-companies-are-trying-to-grow-insects-people-will-want-to-eat-2015-9ic



It’s hard to hear anything over the chirping. Cardboard boxes filled with egg cartons and sheets of plastic buzz with thousands of young-adult crickets calling out to one another to mate.

The brush of the insects’ legs against the various surfaces sounds like hail on a tin roof. Their feed, which sits on top of the cartons on paper plates, looks like a cross between sawdust and sand.

Gabriel Mott, the chief operating officer of Aspire Food Group, yells above the noise and points inside one of the boxes. “You see the one with the wings?” he asks. “That’s a female. They get their wings at their final stage.”

We’re standing inside an old lumberyard in Austin, Texas, that Mott’s company has repurposed into an industrial cricket farm. The 13,000-square-foot space contains multiple rooms stacked with hundreds of boxes, each one home to crickets living through their six-week life cycle. Cricket farmers and geopolitical futurists speculate that entomophagy, the practice of eating insects, considered ordinary in other countries, could eventually be considered normal in the West.

Many entomophagy proponents claim that 80 percent of the world’s nations eat insects, a figure that’s often cited but difficult to substantiate. Mott believes that the number is misleading. He points to a more conservative estimate from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, which says 20 percent of the world’s consumers eat insects.


Regardless of the precise number, though, relatively few members of the world’s insect-eating population reside in Western countries, the market that Aspire is trying to win over. Mott and others at the forefront of the country’s burgeoning cricket-farming industry are banking on the risky proposition that a taste for insects in the West will jump from obscurity to trend to normalcy.

The practice of farming crickets for human consumption is still in its infancy in the U.S., and the crickets here are participating in an experiment to discover how to create a better edible insect. Like with most livestock, there are a number of variables — temperature, humidity, feed, water sources, housing — that are constantly adjusted to create a bigger, tastier, and more nutritious product.

The crickets live to breed and then meet their deaths at the hands of an industrial freezer. Eventually, they are churned into cricket powder or sold wholesale to restaurants or companies making cricket products, like Exo’s cricket-flour protein bar or Bitty Foods’s cricket baking flour.


Aspire Food Group is one of four major farms in the nation that breeds insects specifically for food. Mott founded the company as an MBA student in 2013 with a group of his McGill University classmates, using $1 million in seed money from the Hult Prize, a student start-up competition for social enterprise. As part of their Hult proposal, the team visited farms in Thailand, a country already home to several edible-cricket farms, and conducted additional research in Kenya, Ghana, and Mexico, where the insects are often caught in the wild and used as food.

Aspire now has three farms in the United States, Ghana, and Mexico. Currently, they have only 10 employees in the U.S., each working long hours. It’s almost impossible to find experienced cricket rearers, Mott says, as the field is relatively new. But because crickets are quite hardy, the workers, who are trained on the job, don’t need to be particularly skilled. While Aspire builds a new farm adjacent to its current Austin space, one of the staff’s main tasks is maintaining their temporary space as best they can.

After each six-week lifecycle, they empty the room and scrub everything down before bringing in a new batch of crickets. This is done in part to keep out spiders — the foxes or wolves of the cricket-farming world. When I visited, Mott kept an eye out for intruding spider webs — at one point during our conversation, he reached into a box to crush a spider with his fingers. “I used to be bothered by having spider bits all over my hand, but I very quickly got used to that,” Mott said.

Ideal conditions for raising crickets, Mott told me, are between 30 and 35 degrees Celsius and 40 to 70 percent humidity.

Very little intervention is required: When it comes time for breeding, all the cricket rearers have to do is place some soil into the boxes for the insects. Once the eggs are produced, the farmers take them out of the soil for incubation (each female lays between 100 and 200 eggs, but the farmers will only incubate some of them, limited by the number of crickets they can raise at a time).

Unlike bees or ants, crickets don’t have a larval stage, instead hatching fully formed from eggs after about a week and growing straight to adulthood. When it comes time to harvest the adult crickets, the farmers simply place them in Ziploc bags for freezing.


After our walk through the farm, we stop by the freezers, where Mott pulls out a two-pound Ziploc bag full of dead crickets. He estimates there are about 1,000 crickets to a pound.

This is the insects’ final resting place: Insects get their heat from outside their bodies and have very little ability to regulate their temperature internally. When crickets get too cold, they go into a torpor state — their biological response — and essentially go to sleep until they die. Eventually, the bugs freeze solid.

Big Cricket Farms, the first urban cricket farm, has been around for a year longer than Aspire, and has seen the market grow steadily since it started. “At any one time there are about 6 million crickets in the facility,” says Kevin Bachhuber, the CEO and founder of the company, based in Youngstown, Ohio. Bachhuber’s farm harvests about 140 pounds of crickets every couple of days.

“My demand has been so robust that over the summer I finished getting a secondary facility up and running. That one probably carries between 4 to 8 million crickets at any given time.” Bachhuber says. “The crickets are sold four weeks before they’re finished being raised ... so we’ve had to be selective at times about who ends up with our crickets. I’ve raised my prices maybe six times so far.”

There remains debate within the vegetarian community as to whether insect consumption can be incorporated into vegetarianism.

Proponents say one of the strongest arguments for crickets is their ability to provide a lean animal protein — about 21 grams of protein per 100 grams of cooked weight, according to the United Nations — that requires less space, less water, and produces fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than beef, which has slightly more protein at 28 grams per 100. (However, one recent study suggests that crickets’ potential protein might be slightly overstated.)

“The problem is there isn’t a lot of peer-reviewed hard data that has been through one hundred different iterations,” says Bachhuber. There’s been plenty of research on cows, chickens, and pigs, he says, but “We can talk very definitively about the protein content of a cow because the G.I. Bill created those land grant universities that really enabled a lot of basic research to happen around the rearing of cows, chickens and pigs. Crickets were not on that list.”

Mott hopes that Aspire’s next space will have zero landfill output — currently, their insects drink water through a biodegradable plant matter, which the company composts later. A local mill mixes the crickets’ organic grain-based feed. Farms sometimes add other ingredients to bolster their feed, like flax seeds and essential fats to increase the level of omega 3s.


Megan Miller, the founder and CEO of Bitty Foods, has made a point to try each multiple farms’ cricket powders and provide specific feedback to the farmers.

“There are times we’ve worked with a farmer and their powder hasn’t worked for us, but it’s not because it’s low quality,” Miller says. “Instead it’s because, for instance, our cookies need the fat content of the powder to be relatively low because it doesn’t mix very well with other ingredients. If the farmer decides to mix up his feed and start feeding his crickets a higher-fat grain ... the powder we get sticks together in a way that doesn’t work for us.”

Though U.S. farmers have been breeding crickets as feed for fish, chickens, and reptiles for the past 70 years or so, cricket farming for humans is relatively new, and regulations haven’t quite caught up. While the insects are alive, companies aren’t legally required to distinguish between crickets raised as animal feed and those raised for human consumption.

But once they die and become a food product, they need to be treated the same way as any other food — cricket farmers have to comply with the same regulations of labeling, packaging, and delivering a consistently frozen product as someone who produces bags of frozen mixed vegetables.

To figure out a way into the American diet, Aspire has been researching other foods that have become mainstream only relatively recently, like kale, quinoa, and sushi. Mott believes the key could be acquisition by a large food company, like Cargill, Tyson, or Monsanto. Already, Big Cricket Farms confirmed it has undergone a technical review by one of the large food companies.

Aspire, in the meantime, is focusing on learning as much as it can about its unusual crop: The company is currently looking for an expert entomologist to work as their director of research, lending some authority to the production of a product that most Americans still view as a novelty, like a scorpion lollipop bought at a science center or a worm at the bottom of a tequila bottle.

Mott says Aspire’s new space will have lab-quality conditions, equivalent to the animal-research labs — a standard much higher than any livestock facility.

“The more serious we look and more accountable we hold ourselves,” he said, the more confidence people will have in the product.”

http://www.vanguardngr.com/2015/09/fears-as-lagos-records-new-bird-flu-cases/

New incidences of bird flu have been recorded in Lagos state, with an estimated 60,000 birds already affected, the News Agency of Nigeria reports amid mounting fears and panic.

bird-flueExecutive Secretary of the Poultry Association of Nigeria, Lagos State chapter, Mr. Olugbenga Ogunsetan, confirmed this yesterday in Lagos.

He said several poultry farms were affected by the avian influenza in Ikorodu area of the state.

“Over 60,000 birds were lost in August after the avian influenza ravaged the farms.

“This has largely affected production of poultry products and leading to price hike in the area,” Ogunsetan said.

Meanwhile, the state government said it was making arrangement with the Federal Government for compensation to the affected poultry farmers.

The Permanent Secretary of the state Ministry of Agriculture, Dr. Olajide Basorun, who spoke on the compensation move, corroborated the severity claim by the PAN scribe.

He said that compensating affected farmers would encourage others, who were afraid to report the case, to come forward.

“The Lagos state government, in collaboration with the Federal government, is already thinking of ways to support these farmers, whose poultry were affected by the scourge.

“Many economies have shut down because of this avian influenza and these economies have dependants, which mean a lot of people have lost their livelihoods.

“Government is mindful of that and is working out modalities to compensate the farmers so that others, who have the flu and have not reported or are under reporting, will be encouraged to come forward,” he said.

The permanent secretary said government does not want a scenario were the farmers, who do not report, will sell their birds to unsuspecting public.

He said where there was a reported case, the ministry had moved swiftly to conduct tests and depopulate such farm.

ON SEPTEMBER 30, 2012, agents from the FBI contacted U.S. Customs and Border Protection at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago with an urgent request. They wanted bags from two passengers on an outbound flight to Beijing pulled for immediate inspection. The passengers didn’t track as dangerous criminals: Li Shaoming, president of Beijing Kings Nower Seed Science & Technology, a large Chinese agricultural company that develops corn, rice, cotton, and canola seeds, and Ye Jian, the company’s crop research manager.


This may seem like a lot of post-September 11 cloak-and-dagger for a few corn seeds, but the U.S. government believes that something much larger is going on. This theft, they argue, stems from an undeniable and dangerous fact: Despite its remarkable landmass, China simply can’t grow enough food to feed itself, particularly now that the country’s burgeoning middle class has acquired an appetite for meat. (Most corn in China is used as feed for livestock.) Water shortages and lack of arable terrain have forced their government to buy between two and five million metric tons of American corn annually, approximately 94 percent of all corn imported into China each year.

[...]

If China hopes to feed (and pacify) its growing population while also loosening the very real stranglehold that America has on its national food supply, its farmers have to start producing a lot more corn—not just enough to meet their domestic demand in good years but enough to maintain a stockpile to offset their global market impact during bad ones. For decades, China has increased corn yields by putting more acres into production, but they’re running out of arable land, and the USDA now estimates that Chinese corn consumption will rise by 41 percent by 2023, far outpacing production increases. The only tenable way for China to meet its own demand, then, is by planting high-performance hybrids, which can single-handedly double or potentially even triple per-acre corn production. Chinese scientists haven’t developed a significant corn hybrid in years. But Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer, the two American seed giants, have produced so many successful hybrids that they now control 45 percent of all the seed sold in the world.

The Department of Justice maintains that China is quietly permitting and even encouraging companies to steal American agricultural secrets right out of the ground. Acquiring the technology behind these next-generation hybrids could save companies like DBN Group—and the country—as much as a decade, and many millions of dollars, in research. And, plant geneticists familiar with the case told me, the very fact that Kings Nower Seed has brought to market—and intended to bring more—products with stolen genetics hints that the Chinese government is complicit. The theft is not hard to detect or prove; the only way that DBN Group could hope to get away with this scheme is if China were pushing such spying as a matter of policy.


Read the rest of the article in the New Republic: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122441/corn-wars?utm_content=bufferdc413&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

MARKETING / ADVERTISEMENT DISGUISED AS NEWS!!

Crimefacts:
The Consortium for Food Safety in Africa, a network of organizations involved in food safety issues in the continent ended its biannual conference which held on September 11-12, 2015 at a Nairobi Hotel, in Kenya’s capital. The conference which was mainly held by webcast and podcast attracted many activists and environmentalists and country delegates...CONTINUE: http://crimefacts.org/bioterrorism-consortium-warns-of-deliberate-cassava-virus-attack-on-africa/

Hello @Crimefacts.

I did a follow-up to the info on the url you provided, but I met a brick wall.

I was not able to find Adrian Milliken
nor ADP press
nor The Consortium for Food Safety in Africa.

Can you give me a verifiable resource on the internet to cite. I need to draw publicity to this Distressing piece of information on food security for Nigeria.

Curiouscity:


Can you please copy the news and paste it here? Many persons may read it when it is here than clicking the link.

This is really sad, and we must be properly informed.

These big agro business companies would not stop until all the peoples of the world are in shackles and chains to them. Greed is a monster.

culled from: http://qz.com/491283/innovators-and-entrepreneurs-will-unlock-africas-agribusiness-promise/

The World Bank projects that agriculture and agribusiness in Africa will grow to be a US$1 trillion industry in Africa by 2030. To promote this outcome, the continent must review its incentive structures.

Agriculture averages 24% of GDP across the continent. With post-harvest activities taken into account, agriculture-related industry accounts for nearly half of all economic activity in sub-Saharan Africa.

The region holds about half of the world’s fertile and as-yet-unused land – and yet it spends US$25 billion annually importing food. It also uses only a tiny percentage of its renewable water resources.

The role of the small players

The potential growth of Africa’s food and beverage markets will only be possible with adequate investment in small and medium-sized agribusiness enterprises.

Small African firms engaged in agribusiness greatly outnumber the large players. Former Malawian president Bingu Wa Mutharika observed:
In West Africa, 75% of agriculture-related firms are micro or small enterprises, 20% are semi-industrial, and 5% are industrial.
Value chains in many African countries feature an informal chain that serves lower-income consumers and a formal chain that caters for high-income domestic consumers or exports. In many sectors the vast majority of the volume moves through the smaller, less formal businesses. More than 95% of the fruit and vegetables produced in Kenya move through smallholders and small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

Policymakers need to support agribusiness and technology incubators, export-processing zones and production networks. They must also sharpen the skills associated with these sectors. Banks and financial institutions also play key roles in fostering technological innovation and supporting investment in homegrown businesses. Unfortunately, their record in promoting technological innovation in Africa has been poor.
Capital markets have played a critical role in creating SMEs in developed countries. They bring money to the table and also help groom small and medium-sized start-ups into successful enterprises. Venture capital in Africa, however, barely exists outside South Africa.

African countries also need to make a concerted effort to leverage expertise in the diaspora. This cohort provides links to existing know-how, establish links to global markets and train local workers to perform new tasks. Much is already known about how to support business development. The available policy tools include:

direct financing via matching grants;
taxation policies;
government or public procurement policies;
advance purchase arrangements; and
prizes to recognise creativity and innovation.

These can be complemented by simple ways to promote rural innovation that involve low levels of funding, higher local commitments and consistent government policy. For example, China’s mission-oriented “Spark Program”, created to popularise modern technology in rural areas, had spread to more than 90% of the country’s counties by 2005.
What China did for small businesses

There is growing evidence that the Chinese economic miracle is a consequence of the rural entrepreneurship which started in the 1980s. This contradicts classical interpretations that focus on state-led enterprises and receptiveness to foreign direct investment.
Millions of township and village enterprises were created in provinces like Zhejiang, Anhui and Hunan. This played a key role in stimulating rural industrialisation. Over the past 60 years, China has experimented extensively with policies and programmes to encourage the growth of rural enterprises. These include providing isolated agricultural areas with key producer inputs and access to post-harvest, value-added food processing.

By 1995, China’s village enterprises had helped bring about a revolution in the country’s agriculture. They had evolved to account for approximately 25% of GDP, 66% of all rural economic output and more than 33% of total export earnings. Most of them have become private enterprises that focus on areas outside agricultural inputs or food processing.
China’s initial rural enterprise strategy focused on the so-called five small industries it deemed crucial to agricultural growth:

chemical fertiliser;
cement;
energy;
iron and steel; and
farm machinery.

With strong backward linkages between these rural enterprises and Chinese farmers, agricultural development in China grew substantially in the late 1970s and 1980s. This happened through farmland capital construction, chemical fertilisation and mechanisation. This expansion, coupled with high population growth, led to a surplus of labour and a scarcity of farmland.

As a result, China’s rural enterprises increasingly shifted from supplying agricultural producer inputs to labour-intensive consumer goods for domestic and international markets. From the mid-1980s to the 1990s, China’s township and village enterprises saw explosive growth in these areas. At the same time they continued to supply agricultural producers with access to key inputs, new technologies and food-processing services. The most successful were those with strong links to: urban and peri-urban industries with which they could form joint ventures and share technical information; those in private ownership; and those who were willing to shift from supplying producer inputs for farmers to manufacturing consumer goods.

China’s experience provides a mechanism for enhancing rural access to agricultural inputs such as fertilisers and mechanisation, as well as post-harvest food processing. Rural enterprises may make the most sense in areas where farm-to-market roads cannot be easily established.
Along with sparking agricultural productivity, rural enterprises may also help provide employment for farm labourers who have been displaced by agricultural mechanisation.

By keeping workers and economic activity in rural areas, China has helped expand rural markets and limit rural-urban migration. This has also helped create conditions under which it is easier for the government to provide key social services such as health care and education.
Township and village enterprises enjoyed government support, but retained a degree of autonomy in their operations.

The way forward

Some non-profit organisations and foundations are experimenting with promoting rural entrepreneurship by donating cows or other livestock to rural communities. Organisations like Heifer International provide cows, along with training about how to raise them and profit from animal husbandry.

But the impact of these programmes is relatively limited. In Malawi, for instance, Heifer International is implementing a programme alongside USAID that is designed to stimulate a dairy industry. But it serves only 180 smallholder farmers.
The lesson from China’s experience is that development must be viewed as an expression of human potentialities, not as a product of external interventions.

Reprinted from The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa, Second Edition, by Calestous Juma, with permission from Oxford University Press, USA. Copyright © 2015 by Oxford University Press.

Calestous Juma is Professor of the Practice of International Development at Harvard University

Okworigeorge:
Source?

I doubt you read the article. Take time to really read it.

Just months ago, his courtyard home at the edge of the orchard was a makeshift trading floor where local farmers gathered to share tips and track the Shanghai Composite. Now, the gates are closed, a security camera stands watch, and nobody wants to talk about the stock-trading local party secretary.

“Out for the whole day,” ventured a neighbor.

“Who?” said another.

“Maybe he flew away in a plane,” joked a third.

The chaotic week of trading started with many large U.S. companies losing billions in market value amid a global sell-off.
It is a scene playing out across China. This spring, the country was gripped by stock fever, a frenzy of borrowing and buying that saw Chinese markets soar to historic heights, drawing in tens of millions of first-time investors, including dozens of people in this northern Chinese village.

The rally was bolstered by rah-rah editorials in the state-controlled press. Invoking President Xi Jinping’s vision for a powerful and prosperous China, the People’s Daily called rising stock prices “carriers of the China dream.” When the benchmark index hit 4000 points, an editorial in the same party flagship promised it was “just the beginning” of the bull run.

But the bulls would soon retreat, taking with them that official confidence. After trying — and failing — to prop up the market through July, the state has faded from view. The morning after “Black Monday,” the 8.5 percent slide that sent global markets sinking this past week, the People’s Daily led with a rosy report on Tibet.

Now investors across the country are left wondering how what seemed like a sure thing so quickly turned into a suck on their life savings — and what the party leaders many trust might do about it.

And so it is in Nanliu. Nicknamed “China’s stock trading village” at the height of the boom, the small farming community about a two-hour drive from Xi’an attracted attention from the local and international media, relishing its moment in the spotlight and a rare bit of good luck.

Old-timers in Nanliu have known war, famine and revolution, and note, gratefully, that things are getting better by the year. Young people leave to find work in the city, sending home enough money for new clothing, smartphones and two-story homes.

But farming is tough, unstable work, and many here still struggle. By the time this year’s rush began, Nanliu was home to a handful of small-time investors trying to supplement what they earn on the land. The number swelled dramatically after the rise of the benchmark index sent stories of fast fortunes spreading through the fields and the local leader got involved.

Nan Xinglao, 64, a retired village schoolteacher who with his wife, Wang Caiwa, 62, tends a crop of apple trees, corn and wheat, followed the market for months before opening a trading account, wary about losing what he had saved from his modest salary, and their 10 mu (1.6 acre) plot.

Nan was nervous, but tempted: Farming was hard on the body, and he longed for a chance to use his mind. A word from the village chief, a distant relation, convinced him that the time was right. The chief, he heard, knew about stocks — he would learn the rest.

Ignoring the protests of his wife, Nan invested 80,000 RMB ($12,500), about half of what they had saved over the years. Like millions of other first-time investors, he saw quick results and doubled down, borrowing money from his sister, his two children and a couple of friends, so he would not miss out, he said.

The rhythm of the market fit well with village life. Farmers tended their fields in the early morning, then gathered inside to follow the market action while the sun was high, popping back out after the close. At sundown, they would assemble again to dissect the latest rumors: Was the government really pushing ahead with state-owned-enterprise reform? What might that mean for blue-chip stocks?

At Liu Lianguo’s fertilizer shop, where the robust WiFi signal attracts neighborhood kids, the midday mahjong game gave way to a group of men gathered around a purple laptop. The small grocery store owned by veteran investor Wang Lili, 42, became a meeting place for evening market talk.

Nan, the former schoolteacher, would return each night to share the news — always good — with his wife.

Then came the crash.

Wanting to believe

The farmer-investors of Nanliu know about volatility — their livelihoods have depended on the whims of weather and the price-setting powers of people far, far away. That did little to ease the pain as people watched helplessly as the equivalent of a year’s work on the land vanished in the span of a day.

When the first drop came, many locals, including shopkeeper Wang Lili, pulled their money, but Nan held firm. He wanted to believe. And, heeding what he read online, he thought it was the right thing to do. Officials were blaming “hostile foreign forces” for the rout and people were calling on investors to be ­patriotic.

“It is not just a stock market issue any more. I will fight with forces who short China’s economy,” Cao Zenghui, deputy manager of Sina Weibo, wrote online. Fan Shaoxuan, an executive at Weibo TV, issued a similar call: “Hold stocks with confidence. Win glory for the country even if you lose the last penny.”

Nan’s wife, Wang, could not decide whether to laugh or cry. “The weather is so hot and I have to go to the fields, and I make so little, and he can go and lose so much in one day?” she said with a wry smile. “Am I angry? Of course I’m angry!”

After July, when steep drops wiped out trillions of dollars and brought reporters back to town, people stopped gathering at the village chief’s house, several locals said. It is still unclear whether he simply stepped out for the day or is not taking calls, though the fact that dozens of villagers refused to comment on his whereabouts suggests that the matter may be politically sensitive.

On Friday, after another wild week in the market, the men at Liu’s fertilizer shop were back to playing mahjong. Liu lost money but said he wouldn’t walk away from investing: “You can’t make a living working the land,” he said.

Wang Lili still hosts a small group of farmer-investors at her grocery shop. She believes the market has bottomed out and wants to get back in. “The economy will more forward, not back,” she said. “It must.”

For Nan, the taste of fast money has been hard to forget. His wife, Wang, wants him back in the fields, but he believes he can recover what he lost, maybe more. If he is angry, he won’t say so, fulsomely praising the local chief and the Communist Party as he compulsively checks for market news on his phone.

On his desk sit two new books: “The Simplest Things in Investment” and the awkwardly titled “A Farmer’s Hundreds of Millions of Wealth Legend” — the unlikely story of a peasant who beat the odds and struck it rich.

culled from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/how-farmers-from-rural-china-bet-on-the-stock-market-and-lost/2015/08/29/a16f8492-4cb8-11e5-80c2-106ea7fb80d4_story.html

The rural-urban migration in the developing world has created a large strain not only on governments, but also on public infrastructure. Many urban areas are ill-equipped to handle the influx of people searching for work, stressing resource allocation, housing markets, and social welfare programs. Yet, agriculture can provide young people an opportunity to move out of poverty, if they are properly supported by decision makers and by policy.

The world is realizing that we need farmers and that we need young people to be farmers. At the ICTforAg conference, Nira Desai of the World Cocoa Foundation pointed out there are less cocoa farmers right now than a decade ago because cocoa farmers are not being replaced by a younger generation.

Youth are not drawn to backbreaking work because they don’t feel they have secure access to land, support of elders, or a career path that will lead them to a better quality of life. With high youth unemployment rates found in urban areas, rural agriculture is a possible solution. ICTs present the unique solution of connecting these young farmers to opportunities in agriculture in order to create a more knowledgeable and better-supported community.

Creating Connections and Efficiencies

ICTs cannot change the nature of farming – the physically tough work can’t be sugar-coated – but they can help young people to work more efficiently. Building platforms to share advice and technique across regions is a method that has found success.

Across South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, organizations are seeing positive effects of their video projects, which demonstrate and explain the best practices. Additionally, the videos can feature local farmers, helping to highlight and to support the featured farmer and to encourage engagement with the project. To build status in the community, many organizations also are introducing e-Mentorship programs that encourage exchanges of knowledge and support for farmers new to the field, which can help mitigate feelings of isolation.

Providing farmers with necessary information is another method for supporting young farmers, and ICTs also have built successful programs that can provide SMS subscribers helpful information ranging from market prices to best practices advice. In order to better serve rural Nigerian farmers, Bassy Archibong of Chemonics helped create a system of free phone calls to farmers that gives them detailed the weather forecasts around which they can plan their farming activities.

Moreover, ICTs can have unintended benefits, as well: Internet access centers built near farms have become hubs for young people to go online, connect, and socialize with other young, local farmers. These projects are working. Today’s rural farmers have vastly different farming realities than those of previous generations, and supplying them with current information enable them to be better decision-makers.

More Than Technology

While these projects are exciting, it’s important to recognize that ICTs can do more to support and, perhaps, entice the next generation of farmers. Organizations are working towards professionalizing the field in order to provide a career path for young people and, thereby, support the local communities. ICTs are reinforcing these efforts by seeking to engage and connect local farming populations with these organizers.

Leadership positions present a viable career move for young people wanting to work in agriculture, but in different capacities. It’s necessary to recognize the multiple ways that youth can engage with agriculture beyond land cultivation. Providing farmers with daily or technical knowledge is beneficial, but it’s essential that the younger generation understand the benefit of being more politically aware. Educating farmers about policy and governmental procedures through online courses, workshops in data centers, or distance learning are more ways that ICTs can support and expand the agricultural field.

ICTs cannot override the preexisting system that has forgotten and ignored rural farmers for too long, but they can educate, connect and create a community of young farmers who work smarter and who work together.

Cassiane Cladis is a Masters student at University of Colorado Boulder and an intern at FHI 360

culled from:http://www.ictworks.org/2015/08/31/can-technology-entice-youth-to-be-farmers/

The Democratic Republic of Congo is trying out a large-scale agricultural plan that is, to say the least, ambitious. The government plans to develop one mega-farm of 50,000 to 150,000 hectares per province — producing food for local consumption and also export crops. The government says the aim is to promote food security.

The park at Boukanga Lonzo currently has 5,000 hectares under cultivation. The site is on a plateau, and crops already stretch as far as the eye can see.

Isaac Saleh, who works as an economist at the prime minister’s office, says they are harvesting about 3,300 hectares of that land.

New machinery is in use at the pioneering mega-farm at Boukanga Lonzo park in Democratic Republic of Congo, July 19, 2015. (N. Long / VOA)
New machinery is in use at the pioneering mega-farm at Boukanga Lonzo park in Democratic Republic of Congo, July 19, 2015. (N. Long / VOA)
Most of the production at these mega-farms will be mechanized, but there will be some 7,000 jobs created on the farm in the near future, according to the government.

On 1,000 hectares, the employees will be working full-time to cultivate and harvest vegetables irrigated by sprinklers rotating on 20 huge pivots.

"Each pivot is the length of a football pitch [field]," said Saleh, "and it’s big enough that vegetables under the pivot can be planted and harvested every day."

The DRC government says the food is intended for Kinshasa, and should help to cut down on the $1.5 billion the DRC pays each year for food imports.

Under these plans, Boukanga Lonzo also will be a new town, with processing industries and many other jobs. The government says it already has spent $100 million on infrastructure for the park and the town, mainly on a power grid, a water-pumping station and productive machinery.

John Ulimwengu, the prime minister's chief agricultural adviser, told VOA the agro-industrial park model will be replicated in other provinces.

Currently the government is the majority shareholder at Boukanga Lonzo, and it is leasing land to investors for 25 years.

Ulimwengu explained why the government is concentrating so many resources on specific farms.

"You cannot do agriculture everywhere in a country. So we felt it was much easier to develop a site [that’s] investment ready, instead of a country [that’s] investment ready, because on a specific site the government can create the environment that is required to attract investors," said Ulimwengu.

An agronomist at a development center near Boukanga Lonzo, Clement Mbekia, is critical of that approach.

"The $100 million is a colossal amount that could have been spent on local communities," said Mbekia, "and that would have served the population. If the investment they have made in agro-industrial parks had been spent on small-scale family farmers you would be seeing more high-quality staple foods in the market.".

But Ulimwengu argues that’s not realistic. "Let’s be honest, if 80 percent or so of your population is involved in agriculture, and they cannot feed 30 percent of your population, it means it’s not done in an efficient way, so there are a lot of them that should be doing something else," he said.

Beyond having up to 11 mega-farms, the government also plans to have smaller agricultural development centers of 200 to 300 hectares across the country.

culled from: http://www.voanews.com/content/democratic-republic-of-congo-tries-mega-farms-to-fee-population/2939735.html

Culled from: http://allafrica.com/stories/201508281151.html

By Ernest Chinwo
Port Harcourt — Officials of the Rivers State Ministry of Transport on Thursday told the Judicial Commission of Inquiry investigating the sale of valued assets of the state and other matters by former Governor Chibuike Amaechi's administration that the former governor had to dissolve his cabinet for him to have his way in awarding the contract for the monorail project to TSI.

The officials also said the 2.6 kilometre down-graded Phase 1A of the project has so far gulped N33.9 billion as against the original design of the Phase 1 which spans over 12kilometres and expected to cost N50 billion.

The Director of Safety and Aviation at the state Ministry of Transport, Mr. Saya Antioch, told the Justice George Omereji-led Judicial Commission of Inquiry on Thursday that the former governor sacked all his commissioners because majority of them insisted on an American company, Urbanord, for the construction of the monorail, while Amaechi insisted on TSI, a company managed by a former military administrator of the state, Colonel Anthony Ukpo (rtd).

He said the session of the State Executive Council meeting lasted three days. According to the director, who was being cross-examined by counsel to the commission, Zaccheus Adangor, "Two companies were initially involved in the race to partner with the state government on the monorail project. TSI represented by Brig-Gen. Ukpo and Urbanord, an American firm.

"The American company made a very impressive presentation. They told the state government that they will build the monorail project at the cost of N25bn and hand it over to the Rivers State government to operate it as its property." He said he was at the executive council meetings in a technical capacity and that Urbanord's presentation was backed by a guarantee that if it failed to deliver the project in two years, it would effect a refund to the state government.

He also said the American company placed a bid of N25 billion, 50 per cent less than the N50 billion bid that the former governor foisted on the reconstituted State Executive Council with the acceptance of TSI, under a public private partnership.

Speaking further, the director informed that the former governor acted against the advice of the manufacturers of the monorail who noted that elevated platforms were out-dated. He said that the governor said he preferred elevated platforms with pillars rather than the suggested underground monorail because he wanted people to physically see the project.

Permanent Secretary of the Rivers State Ministry of Transport, Stella Ebere-Wigwe, also said the public private partnership arrangement reached between the Amaechi administration and TSI indicated that the state government was to contribute 20 per cent while TSI was to pay 80 percent of the project cost.

Ebere-Wigwe said Amaechi ensured that the state government paid N11 billion slightly above the 20 percent agreed in the memorandum of understanding to TSI, while the benefitting company made no payments whatsoever.

She said despite the payment of the N11 billion without the participation of the state Ministry of Transport, the arrangement with TSI failed woefully and the state lost her investment.

She added that the state government went ahead to appoint Archus Gibb, a South African company without experience in monorail construction, the project consultant for the Rivers State Monorail project.

According o her, the Ministry of Transport was used as a mere conduit in the payment of N22.9 billion to the South African firm, while the company was to receive N660 million for its services and N36.3 million monthly as engineering services.

She submitted that considering that N50 billion was budgeted for the entire Phase 1, expending N33.9 billion for Phase 1A, which is less than 30 percent of the original budgeted design is unjustifiable.

She further informed that six trains and two switches were allocated for the Phase 1A, but on ground in the state is just one train with no switch as the Amaechi administration constructed only one track. She said the other five trains are in Europe.

Chairman of the commission, Justice George Omereji, during yesterday's sitting, encouraged members of the public who came to witness the sitting of the commission to contribute, saying that the commission was on a fact finding mission.

The Judicial Commission of Inquiry adjourned to today as the former Accountant General of the state, Mr. Ngozi Abu, through his counsel informed that he was not around to testify. The former Accountant General will appear today.

I know what you're thinking: I don't look like a farmer—at least, not like your mental image of Jed Clampett from The Beverly Hillbillies. I get that a lot. And to be honest, I'm not your typical farmer.

I didn't inherit the profession from my family, as you might assume. I grew up in suburban Michigan, and when I graduated from The College of Charleston in 2009 with a degree in business, the extent of my "farming" experience was helping my dad and grandfather in the yard, going cherry picking a few times, and growing some herbs.

My plan up until that point had been to get my master's degree in financial analysis and eventually run my own business. In 2008, I was working for a financial advisor and had picked out exactly which graduate program I wanted to pursue. But of course, that's when the recession hit. Already deep in debt, I realized I wanted to do something else, something that wouldn't require another major hit on my bank account.

I'd developed an interest in food while working in restaurants throughout college and had started shopping at the local farmer's markets in Charleston. Then, during my last semester of my senior year, I did a report on Whole Foods that really made me think about where our food comes from and the people who grow it.

There was only one problem: I had no idea how you go about becoming a farmer. So I did some Googling, and that's when I stumbled upon an apprenticeship program in Chatthoochie Hills, Georgia. It seemed perfect. The 25-acre farm is part of a community called Serenbe that really emphasizes preserving green space for its residents. It's always run itself off of young farmers who are learning how to farm and want to continue in the profession when they leave; so I'd basically be paid to be trained for nine months. It would give me time to learn the ins and outs of farming—but also to see if I was crazy to be seriously considering it as a career. (Plenty of people I knew were skeptical—including my mom, who was like, "This is just a phase, right?"

I had to submit an application, go through an interview, and spend a day working in the field—but in the end, I got the apprenticeship. All I really remember now about my first season was that my back hurt for the first month, but I loved every second of what I was doing. I learned something new practically every hour of the day and was growing some vegetables that I'd never even eaten before, like kohlrabi and Swiss chard. I also like being active, so being able to be outside and sweat every day felt so good.

I remember being shocked at how much I loved farming because I wasn't sure that would be the case going into it. But within three months, I knew that I wanted to continue farming—and I started thinking about how I could do that after my apprenticeship was up.

I ended up getting a job starting the vegetable-growing program at a farm in South Georgia, and then, when the farming managers I had worked for at Serenbe left, I came back to take over that job in early 2014.

It's not all blue skies and sunflowers (a little farming humor for you there). My hours are pretty crazy. I probably do 60 to 70 hours a week on the farm and another 25 to 30 hours in the office, whether that's writing a newsletter promoting our community-supported agriculture program, handling the money that goes along with that, or managing our restaurant farmer's market businesses.

As you might expect, my love life hasn't exactly benefitted from the long hours. When I tell most people I'm a farmer, at first they think it's cool—but the further I get into relationships, the more they inevitably struggle with the fact that farming is my lifestyle.

It's not just a job that you do every day. It's a culture, it's a way of life. You have to embody farming—so it's hard to find someone who's not a farmer who understands and can embrace that.



To this day, I can't believe I managed to find the great apprenticeship program at Serenbe and end up where I am today. Most people who grow up in suburbia develop this very narrow-minded view of food. But now that I've opened my eyes and realized how important food is—yes, eating well, but also eating food that was farmed in a sustainable way—I'm so glad to be doing what I can to change our food system for the better.

I also find wearing so many hats really empowering—I'm using all of the skills I've learned to grow produce and running my own business, just like I always wanted to.

I really want to encourage young farmers and women in particular to start farming (I actually think women have an inherent attention to detail that really lends itself to the job). While it may be a stereotypically male world, it doesn't have to be. Like I said before, I'm not your typical farmer—and I couldn't be prouder of that.

culled from: http://www.womenshealthmag.com/nutrition/left-business-school-to-become-a-farmer

What is your take on the recent ban of Nigerian food crops by EU?

A costly error has been committed, in that the agricultural transformation should have been a way of uplifting the poor peasant farmers in Nigeria and also securing our food supply. It would have been an avenue to make our products which are natural products without Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) contamination premium export commodities. They would have easily formed the bulk of organic food products in the West which are very expensive in the global market and a viable foreign exchange earner for our farmers. This would have lifted our rural communities from poverty.

What in your view led to the ban?

It is simply the infiltration of our agricultural sector by persons and companies with ulterior motives packaged as humanitarian support to a developing economy. That is why an unacceptable dose of pesticide was found in food crops from Nigeria, a development that is alien to our agricultural practices. One of the most toxic pesticides found is Dichlorovox. The normal acceptable maximum quantity in crops is 0.01mg/kg. They one found in the Nigerian export crop by EU officials is 0.46mg/kg which is 46 times more than what can be safely consumed by human beings. By implication, what has been going on illegally in secrecy is that the produce from Nigeria is being stuffed with very toxic pesticide and being released into Nigerian market and now into foreign market by some GMO companies driven away from Europe and America but given refuge in Nigeria. In fact, these products do not even have NAFDAC approval. The Director of Food Safety and Applied Nutrition of NAFDAC, Mrs. Ogochukwu Mainasara had already indicated that whatever they were doing was not approved or endorsed by any Nigerian law on food safety. So what the agricultural transformation agenda did through the former Minister for Agriculture, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina was to give a red carpet reception to GMO producing companies in Europe and America, the likes of Monsanto, to come into Nigeria and bring in products which are unsafe for human consumption. Now Europe has rejected our food crops because they must test what their people would consume, but who is testing the food product going into the Nigerian market? So Nigerians are being force-fed with poison. This is outrageous and treasonable. This was a danger we saw coming and under the Global Prolife Alliance, we warned about this and petitioned the National Executive Council and the National Assembly.

A report said the pesticide contamination was during preparation for export. What do you think?

The entire process of producing GMO crops; right from cultivation, growth, preservation and down to export require pesticides to sustain the process. So it is not just a matter of export preservation, it is a far reaching contamination which EU was not prepared to risk. Is Nigeria prepared to risk it? It is indeed a strange and terrible practice going on here but ironically, the United States Department of Agriculture states very clearly and this document is available on the internet, that Genetically Modified Seeds do not increase crop yield or improve crop quality.[/b]It virtually does the reverse. [b]So Nigeria has nothing to gain from genetically modified food (GMO), all we are going to gain is a polluted environment and a compromised food chain forcing Nigeria to depend on some of these Americans biotechnological companies to supply food to us.

You said actions of some key players in our agro industry are treasonable. How?

Let me put this in perspective so you can figure out the conspiracy against Nigeria. Knowingly or unknowingly, former President Goodluck Jonathan in an act which is actually illegal appointed a foreign citizen, Bill Gates as Eminent Special Adviser on Agriculture. Then I asked; on what ground? It is not that Gates has any technocratic knowledge on agriculture. So what happened was that a foreign citizen was appointed Adviser supervising the Ministry of Agriculture, and he found his protégé and made him Minister of Agriculture with an agenda in mind; to use the Federal Ministry of agriculture to promote GMO products from his own company called Monsanto which is globally known for producing genetically modified seeds and agricultural products. It must be noted at this point that before being appointed as Agriculture Minister, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina was working for Bill Gates as a Deputy Director in an enterprise known as Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) which primary objective was to advance the acceptance of GMO products in African countries. This is a massive corruption ring and a treasonable conspiracy involving Adesina, Bill Gates, Monsanto and the Federal Government. This is a crime against the Federal Republic of Nigeria; putting the lives of millions of Nigerians at risk. Honestly, some of these foreign agribusinesses have reduced us to being the guinea pig for their questionable projects. And Adesina and his collaborators have succeeded in nailing the coffin of agricultural transformation in Nigeria.

But Senate President Bukola Saraki condemned the ban by EU?

The Senate President is wrong to say EU should not have banned
our products. EU officials showed that they were responsible officials; with an obligation to protect their people. Let the Nigerian National Assembly show the same by setting up a Senate probe committee to investigate the agricultural transformation program; the role of Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, Bill Gates and everyone involved in the conspiracy against Nigeria. This must include a public hearing by the National Assembly. For safety sake, the entire agricultural transformation program must be put on trial.

What is the bottom line here?

Bringing questionable international agribusinesses into Nigeria is an
extermination plot against Nigerians. We will experience very high toxicity levels in our farms and food crops and this is very dangerous to health. No nation in their right mind should ever embrace GMO food crops in preference to organic food crops. The bottom line is that we do not need Bill Gates and his Monsanto GMO seeds and products to transform our agriculture. When Nigeria was first in cocoa, groundnut and palm oil, we did not have any genetically modified planting materials. Our millet, sorghum, groundnut, cocoa and oil palm were not genetically modified and they flourished and we were first in the world. And our economy was driven by agriculture at the time, so why do we need it now? Somebody or a sinister group somehow succeeded in blind folding our leaders, and working to keep our country dependent on GMO companies, and by so doing compromising our food security. We can still salvage the situation before it gets out of hand.

What response do you expect of Nigerian leaders?

The Senate president by now should be looking at putting Gates and Adesina on trial, he should be announcing a committee to probe into that. We are saying Adesina should be brought back to answer questions on what he knows about the introduction of GMOs into our food market. This is not just corruption in the agricultural sector but a corruption that has put the national security of Nigeria at risk.

What legislative protection do Nigerians have?

None! The last National Assembly was so tied up with frivolities that obnoxious articles were sneaked into bills that should have protected Nigerians. This is largely why the 7th Assembly of the National Assembly was a national disgrace. And it is a shame to have many of them still seating in the senate. In the case of the Bio-Safety Law they passed, the crime committed against Nigeria rose to the level of treason. Many experts in this area of agriculture and food safety pushed a law designed by African Heads of State and their experts called it the African Model Law on Bio-Safety. This law is patented as the Cartegena Protocol. Signed by over 190 countries, this protocol was designed to protect Africans from the adverse consequences of GMOs. The African Heads of State came together and resolved to make it even more stringent and they drafted and signed a law in which Nigeria participated since 2003. When they came to pass the so called Bio-Safety law in the last senate, all the safety measures in the African Model Law on Bio-Safety were missing. The original document was doctored and what was produced and called Bio-Safety Law was designed more to give advantage to GMO companies. Can you imagine a situation where all the safeguards required before putting a GMO product in circulation in Nigeria is to just publish the product in a national daily and after 670 days, it is considered accepted and as such it is approved for circulation and consumption? No institute will examine it, not even NAFDAC will be compelled to look at the food safety before it is brought into the market. What you get under this circumstance, is food toxicity. And this is because we have a corrupt system that is self-preserving. This was the disgrace of the 7th Assembly.

What would you recommend to FG?

The Federal Government must begin to see through the deception and as a matter of urgency, expel all biotechnological companies in Nigeria and their products; because what is happening is total deception. I can give you an example. Bill Gates came to Nigeria with the yellow cassava which he claimed contained Protein and vitamin-A. The claim was published by Bill Gates Foundation in Senator Danforth Institute, in which they claimed to have found a Zaolin gene implying that protein is present or can be present in cassava. That provoked the curiosity of every scientist in the world such that every scientist wanted to replicate the work for themselves and nobody found any protein in cassava. The institute was queried and the reputable journal where it was published, Plox One, now mandated them to find out where the flawed data came from, only to find out that some people sat in the laboratory and forged all the data. The institute immediately proceeded to retract the work and declare it a scientific falsehood. It is still like that in the Plox One website. And Gates still came to tell African Heads of state who embraced him, and that includes Nigeria and Ghana, that the cassava is nutritious. What they now claimed thereafter is that it contains Vitamin-A. Today everybody is shouting Vitamin-A cassava but that too is fraudulent in a way. Let me explain. For you to get the equivalent of the Vitamin-A in two pieces of small carrots from the so-called yellow cassava, you will need to eat one full bag of garri in one sitting, which is impossible. That is how useless the Vitamin-A cassava claim is. What Gates wants is to be the sole supplier of one our major staple food crops in Nigeria, the largest black nation in the world. There is nothing humanitarian to it. It is just a ruthless business venture of no quality value to Nigeria. Unfortunately, Gates is using notable institutions like the National Root Crops Research Institute in Umudike and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Ibadan, both of which are beneficiaries of generous grants from Gates, to distribute this cassava that is not even certified by the relevant agencies in Nigeria as safe. These are constitutional breaches, national security breaches and health breaches that can only be fully revealed when a tribunal is inaugurated to probe this matter.

Finally someone with an understanding of the shadow politics and danger Nigerian consumers have been exposed to.

Please lets join together and push out Monsanto and other Big Agro 'ASSASSIN' companies in Nigeria. Cancer is real.

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Chen Xingyin is from Tongxin village, Fengdu county, Chongqing municipality. He lost his arms in an electrical accident when he was only 7 years old.

Despite this obstacle, Chen has managed to do his best to fend for himself. He can do most work on his own, including farming, cooking and feeding his family's goats.

Chen is the youngest son from a six-member family. Since 2014, he has taken care of his bed-ridden 88-year-old mother, who began suffering from bronchitis five years ago. He cooks her three meals a day and helps feed her.

Chen also raises more than 20 goats. Every afternoon at 3 p.m., he herds the animals to graze.

Chen's inspiring self-reliance and his filial devotion to his mother has made him a local celebrity with numerous parents in the village setting him as a lofty role model for their own children.
"Even though he doesn't have any arms, he still works faster than most people," said one fellow villager.

Over the years, Chen has learned to use his feet to wash, cut and cook food. Now, nearly no task seems too difficult for him to perform.

Chen's incredible story has naturally won many a netizen's heart. Web user commented, "In some ways, his feet look more useful than my hands. What I respect about him the most is how hard he works to make his own life better instead of relying on help from others." "I felt like crying when I saw the picture of him feeding his mom," wrote

"People like him deserve more attention and should serve as our example. I wish him happiness," another netizen echoed.

Culled from:http://shanghaiist.com/2015/08/22/farmer_who_lost_arms_helps_his_mom.php

Cockroaches might be hardy creatures known to be able to survive a nuclear explosion but farming 400,000 of them is a different matter.

The myth that these bugs might inherit the Earth in the event of a full-blown nuclear war first surfaced after they were found to be among the only survivors in the razed Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the United States dropped atomic bombs in 1945, closing the chapter to World War II.

But I learnt on a recent visit to a cockroach farm in a small village about two hours outside Sichuan province's capital Chengdu that while these 300 million-year-old insects might have survived mass extinction, they can be a lot pickier than you think.

Not only must they be fed once daily in a dimly lit room but the temperature must also be kept at a toasty and constant 30 degrees for them to thrive.

In fact, that was how childhood friends and cockroach farmers Mr Qian Cheng, 24, and Mr Zheng Tianhang, 23, first convinced me to step into a 30 sq m room filled with egg cartons to provide the hiding places the roaches prefer.

Related Story
They left city jobs to farm roaches in their home village

Already apprehensive about the visit after a colleague (mercilessly) showed me a YouTube video of another cockroach farm in Shandong province where hundreds of full-sized roaches scuttled across the floor, the knot in the pit of my stomach tightened further after I realised in horror that I had worn sandals in my rush to get ready in the morning.

"Don't worry," Mr Qian said. "Your body temperature is too warm, they won't even come close to you. They are more afraid of you than you are of them," he insisted, after I had pointed out my footwear crisis.

And he was right. As I stepped timidly into the room, careful not to squish any that I imagined would be scurrying across the floor, cockroaches big and small darted back to their hiding places, choosing to hide in the shadowy dark corners of the room and away from any loud noise.

When it was quiet, however, the unmistakable sound of their spiny little legs scratching against cardboard could be heard and a twinge of ammonia hung in the air.

While I spotted dozens of roaches as I gazed between the narrow corridors and hives made from egg cartons and cement roof shingles, it was far from the nightmarish scenario that I had envisioned.

For some reason, it was less frightening to see many of them, all minding their own business, than having a standoff with a single startled cockroach in a kitchen. The latter, in my experience, would more often than not sense my fear with its twitchy feelers and make a beeline straight for me.

As I got used to my surroundings, I started walking more confidently around the room in an attempt to find more of them clustered together for the pictures and videos my story needed, peppering Mr Qian with requests to take photos of them.

So much so that he decided to lure more of the larger cockroaches out for me with one of their favourite treats: potatoes. (Potatoes are only second to their love for food that has gone slightly bad.)

"Their diet consists of mainly corn paste but they love potatoes and will come out almost immediately after we put them out," Mr Qian said as he cut up chunks and put them at the entrance of the hives.

In a matter of minutes, as if on cue, cockroaches of all sizes crawled out and climbed all over the potato, greedily feasting on it.

I had never known how cockroaches ate previously, but observing them now, I could see the tiny bite marks left behind on the pale yellow flesh as the insects devoured the food.

Mr Qian also showed me the "nursery" where little cockroach nymphs about the size of a grain of rice were kept. They had just hatched from the eggs that he had bought from a fellow cockroach breeder.

I learnt that cockroach eggs can also be bought on Taobao, China's version of eBay, although Mr Qian cautioned that their quality cannot be guaranteed.

In about six months, they will grow to about the size of a thumb where the roaches - a breed called Periplaneta americana, or the American cockroach - will then be harvested, boiled and dried for use in traditional Chinese medicine for a wide range of ailments.

While there are hundreds of species of cockroaches, the American one is thought to have the highest medicinal value, Mr Qian said.

As my visit to the farm ended, I ventured to ask both men how they overcame their fear of cockroaches and whether watching thousands of them scurry about still made their skin crawl.

"It can be quite unsettling to handle them in such huge numbers at first but after taking care of them for almost a year, we've gotten used to it and are not afraid anymore," Mr Qian said.

If my experience is anything to go by, I guess anyone can get used to them as well.

Culled from: http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/a-visit-to-a-cockroach-farm-in-chinas-chengdu

Thinking outside the box. Priceless!

Obiagelli:

the question is do native shrimps grow as fast as the "Agric" type? Do they also take artificial feeds.

I rather think that the main focus would be to create an ambient and supportive environment for the shrimp. If you want to do it outdoors, you will need to create earthen ponds like its done for fish farming, but you will need to aerate the water constantly. So constant electricity supply is a must.

If you elect to farm indoors, constant electricity is also needed to aerate the tanks. Beneficial bacteria will have to be cultivated and nurtured for the shrimps.

Both native species and exotic species of shrimps will eat artificial feeds.

Also, all of the crayfish we consume are sea (salt water) creatures, so that makes things more interesting, but it has been done before.
I am afraid that this is a very capital intensive farming operation that requires daily attention, but the potential payoff is remarkable.

Alternatively,

If you have dogonyaro (Neem) growing in your vicinity, collect the leaves and blend it in a blender. Sieve out the leaf particles and put the water in a sprayer and spray your crops.

This will keep the transparent insects away and also the solder ants.

Your produce will also not be a lethal chemical poison for your customers which can cause cancer to them.

Garlic juice (blended like above) will help keep the ants away also.

Pavore9:


Though at N300/Kg which is on the high side, it is a wiser over road as within 2hrs it has arrived Lagos. Going by the article they presently between N700 and N800 per kg. When one buys directly from their farms one can negotiate a bulk purchase for between N500-N600.

First checking out the retail prices across stores will be key in determining if it worth it. I just hope it is the Chandelier variety they are growing.

Jos to Abuja - 3 hours
Abuja to Lagos - 6 hours

Total road transit time - 9 hours

It is stated that Nigeria is the 4th Largest producer of Cocoa in the world. The chocolate business in the world is worth $80 billion (US Dollars) annually.

WHY IS THERE NO CHOCOLATE MANUFACTURER IN NIGERIA?

There are chocolate manufacturers in Ghana and Ghanaian Chocolate is being sold in Nigeria.

Opportunity Knocks!!

The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) yesterday advised Nigerians to prepare for possible drought in the country.

NEMA’s warning followed the prediction of heavy rainfall by the Nigeria Meteorological Agency (NIMET).

The North West coordinator of NEMA, Musa Illalah, gave the advice in Kaduna during a workshop on liquid and solid waste management in the context of flood mitigation.

Represented by the director, Administration of the agency, Amina Ahman, Illalah said the implication of the NIMET alert was that the rain may exceed the normal rate and states in the North ought to anticipate drought.

“The implication is that there might be water surplus and increase in stream flow which will affect dams storage for municipal water supply, may affect hydro power generation and irrigation.

“Therefore, the development and regular maintenance of dams for dry season irrigation and water supply must be accorded high priority during this time.

“In the same vein, there may be shortage of rainfall; we must also be prepared for drought and the mitigation of its impact.’’

He said that the workshop was to articulate the problem of solid waste management which exacerbate negative impact of flooding in the country.

The coordinator urged the participants to develop effective and efficient management model through collaboration with all stakeholders.

in order to address the problem.

Also speaking, Mahmood Shehu, Director, Disaster Management, Kaduna State Emergency Management Agency said that the state government had embarked on the enforcement of public health and environmental laws.

He said that ensuring adequate risk assessment, planning, early warning, information management and communication systems were basis of curbing disasters.

Shehu advised residents to stop developing houses on water ways and to always maintain their drains to avert flooding.


Source: http://leadership.ng/news/452055/prepare-for-drought-nema-warns-nigerians

Bumangi (Uganda) (AFP) - Even before the bulldozers arrived life was tough for John Muyiisa, scratching a living from a rented farm on Lake Victoria's Kalangala island.

Now he has almost nothing and is seeking compensation in Ugandan courts from the palm oil plantations he blames for seizing the land and destroying his livelihood.

As land grabs by local firms linked to multinationals drive small-holder farmers out of business, a rights group behind a February bid for compensation by 100 farmers says rights violations and environmental degradation are also at stake.

Muylisa, a 53-year old father of nine, had leased a 17 hectare (40 acre) plot farming coffee, bananas, cassava and potatoes on Kalangala island. But in 2011 that land was taken and cleared for a palm oil estate.

"It's like I'm starting all over again now," Muyiisa said, adding he once could earn over 1,400 dollars a year (1,300 euros) but is now struggling to survive.

"With that land, some of my children even completed university, but now I've taken some out of school, some of my daughters are doing housework to earn money."

It is a story repeated elsewhere in Africa, where large internationally-backed companies are snapping up agricultural land, and activists claim their actions deprive local farmers of basic needs.

But Muyiisa did not legally own the land he farms -- the title deeds are held by the local Sempa family.

Horatius Sempa said the 14 farmers were "illegal squatters," but acknowledged some had received payments of between $35 and $200 while others had been allowed to continue farming smaller parcels of land. Muyiisa was left with three hectares (7.5 acres).

The palm oil project is being carried out by Oil Palm Uganda, a subsidiary of local food producer Bidco Uganda. Bidco in turn is a joint venture between global palm oil giant Wilmar International -- backed by several European banks and financiers -- and other international partners.

It is also supported by the UN's International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), which offers government loans at subsidised interest rates to set up plantations.



- 'Total robbery' -


Campaigners say the Kalangala case highlights a growing conflict over land rights and ownership in Africa between those who hold the legal deeds and the generations of smallholders who occupy and invest in farmland, potentially earning themselves squatters' rights to remain.

"It is happening in Liberia, Nigeria, Tanzania," said environmental campaigner David Kureeba from Friends of the Earth in Uganda, which is supporting the farmers' legal challenge.

"Expansion of palm oil will lead to food insecurity, human rights violations, environmental degradation and climate change," he argued.

Friends of the Earth this month called for Wilmar to immediately halt its palm oil development plans in Nigeria, which they describe as a "key frontier country" for palm oil expansion leading to "conflict".

Muyiisa, one of over 100 farmers in Uganda who lost their farms, are hoping the court will order the land to be handed back, along with "fair compensation" for damages.

They claim they were kicked off the land without warning and the compensation they got was derisory.

Muyiisa's mother-in-law, Magdalena Nakamya, a 64-year-old widow with eight children, depended on a three-hectare (seven acre) plot growing cassava and potatoes, earning over 250 dollars (180 euros) a month.

"Then they came and measured up, and the next I heard there was digging," said Nakamya, describing the day the bulldozers arrived. "Now I'm making very little money."

Kalangala island in the vast freshwater Lake Victoria appears idyllic, but Bidco -- which launched the ambitious Oil Palm Uganda Limited (OPUL) development in 2004, and by the end of 2012 had been given 7,700 hectares of land (17 acres) by the government -- says it was once at the bottom of the pile for economic development.

The food producer dismisses claims it has caused harm, saying the palm oil farm has instead boosted development on the island.

Bidco boasts Kalangala now is among the top 10 developed districts in the east African country, after "working harmoniously and closely with the community" on the joint public-private partnership.

Wilmar said in a statement that the court had ordered mediation, pointing out the company had played no role in buying the land.

"We are disappointed that our efforts to engage with the stakeholders concerned, that is the alleged affected communities and NGO involved, were not reciprocated," the company said.

But for Muyiisa, the case is clear.

"In the end some were scared and took anything offered," said Muyiisa, claiming some farmers were paid as little as $16, others just $33. "It wasn't much. Some were offered really poor money and refused it because they thought 'this is total robbery'."



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/afp-ugandas-farmers-battle-palm-oil-goliaths-for-land-2015-7#ixzz3hHM67q6N

Monsanto’s GMO crops were supposed to feed the world hunger and starvation but instead the diverse sustainable organic agriculture was replaced with globalization, GMO crops and monopoly.

According to a report by Daily Mail, every 30 minutes an Indian farmer commits suicide as a result of Monsanto’s GMO crops. In the last decade, more than 250,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves because of Monsanto’s costly seeds and pesticides. Globalization and monopoly have forced farmers to buy GMO seeds and since GMO crops have become pest resistant, the farmers have no choice but to purchase Monsanto’s popular herbecide.

Indian-farmers-suicide-GMO-crops

In 2008, the Daily Mail called the continuous suicide of Indian farmers a “genocide” in the human history. What’s really disturbing is that often time farmers commit suicide by drinking the insecticide shipped to them by Monsanto. Here is the full article

After the use of Monsanto’s BT cotton in 2002, the rate of suicide among Indian farmers increased drastically. The stroy started when 90% of Indian cotton farmers were forced to swtich to Monsanto’s Bt crop hoping that Bt crops were pest resistant (so farmers did not have to buy Monsanto's costly herbecide). However after a while, Bt cotton’s pests resistant quality started to fade away so farmers had to again buy and use Monsanto's costly herbecide.

The high cost of GMO seeds, extensive use of herbecides and great reduction in crop value have often times left farmers bankrupt and as a result many farmers are falling into the endless cycle of debt, depression, hopelessness and despair and they have no choice but to ends their lives. The figures provided by NY University School of Law show that just in 2009 alone, 17,638 of farmers committed suicide. Here is the Figures by NY University School of Law

As a result of Monsanto’s costly GMO seeds, many families of farmers have lost their livelihood and lands and are left on their own to struggle with starvation and misery. 1.1 billion (which is 60% of Indian population) are directly or indirectly dependent on the agriculture.

Monsanto is resposible for dominating the market by forcing farmers to buy their seeds and chemicals. Seeds that die every year, so farmers are forced to buy new seeds.

Monsanto-GMO-seeds-Indian-farmers

Monsanto’s domination is threatening sustainable organic agriculture and the livelihood of Indian farmers and health of all of us as consumers. Thanks to biotech companies, what was once a sustainable diverse way of agriculture is now replaced with unsustainable globalized agribusiness in the hands of few people consumed by greed and power. We as consumers cannot even choose to boycott GMOs since biotech companies like DuPont and Monsanto give millions of dollars to lobbyists to bribe politicians in order to aggressively pursue their anti-GMO labeling policies. Click here to Watch Vandana Shiva on Indian Farmer Suicides, Monsanto, Walmart and More.

- See more at: http://www.seattleorganicrestaurants.com/vegan-whole-foods/indian-farmers-committing-suicide-monsanto-gm-crops/#sthash.aXakk6Ck.dpuf

https://youtu.be/Av6dx9yNiCA