Addis Chamber, June 7, 2024:
Themed with building “supportive policy environment for agro transformation”, the series of studies commissioned by Addis Chamber discloses the current opportunities, potentials and challenges of fruits and vegetables in Ethiopia.
Despite massive agricultural potentials and opportunities existed in Ethiopia, yet the sector suffers from multitude of challenges such as limited varieties and most of the vegetables and fruits have no properly managed value chains , unveils such researches.
The latest study on fruits and vegetables also reveals low attention of extension and research works, lack of coordination and linkage among stakeholders and prevalence of diseases and insect pests in affecting fruits and vegetables.
In addition to these, the research output attributes lack of subsector specific policies and limited access to finance in affecting smallholder fruits and vegetable as farmers rarely access loan facilities to run their business.
Poor investment participation in agriculture and inadequate input supply are additional factors for hindering the sector.
The panel discussion also put forward a couple of recommendations to foresee a better agricultural sector and some of these include policies on fruits and vegetables to seek special consideration, the need to produce for purpose and protecting low income consumers to ensure that they are not disproportionately impacted by price rises on fruits and vegetables.
The workshop also heard the concerns of key stakeholders from fruit and vegetable growers and processors as they said the need to put in place sound land use policies for effective agricultural processing schemes and supply of sustainable agricultural products.
In addition such recommendations include sustainable supply of infrastructure such as electricity and water supply.