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Join on Telegram Rabat – With the COVID crisis and the Ukraine war having put a whole new spotlight on world governments’ scramble to rise to the major challenge of ensuring food security for their populations, OCP Africa is ramping up its research and development (R&D) initiatives to spearhead the necessary transformation of African farming.
Aniss Bouraqqadi, Head of Research and Development (R&D) at OCP Africa, told Morocco World News in a recent interview that the company’s commitment to sustainable agriculture is an essential component of its vision of empowering African farmers with the resources and technology needed to boost their productivity.
Created in 2016, OCP Africa is a subsidiary of a global Phosphate fertilizer leader, OCP Group. A key focus of the pan-Africanism-driven company is to develop the agricultural sector across Africa to make it more resilient, sustainable, and profitable for farmers.
As African governments brace themselves to rise to the existing and emerging challenges of the climate crisis, Bouraqqadi stressed that R&D is a solution to environmental challenges such as biodiversity, decarbonization, erosion, and increasing pressure on natural resources.
With its insistence on devising a systemic and inclusive approach to tackling some of Africa’s most pressing issues, OCP Africa focuses on developing science-based solutions in line with local, national, continental, and international standards and requirements.
“Our approach is also farmers-oriented as it offers farmers an opportunity to improve their income and contribute to a sustainable and productive agricultural ecosystem to meet increasing demand,” Bouraqqadi said.
R&D’s agricultural-oriented pillars
OCP Africa’s R&D initiatives are structured around six pillars, each featuring several projects and initiatives aimed at improving farmers’ productivity.
A central element of this sustainability-focused and efficiency-driven portfolio is the integrated soil health management and crop nutrition. Bouraqqadi highlighted the importance of having healthy soils and crops to ensure sustainable food systems and improve upon the quality of nutrition across the continent.
He also spoke emphatically of the need to develop new approaches to improve rural livelihoods systems amid emerging threats like climate change and water scarcity. On this front, he especially stressed that developing new approaches for transforming and reorienting agricultural systems to support food security, under the new climatic realities,
can significantly improve food systems efficiency, resilience, and inclusion.
“With a focus on contributing to end hunger and all forms of malnutrition, OCP Africa also has a mission of promoting agronomic solutions to manage micronutrient deficiencies in human nutrition that affect over two billion people, especially in developing countries,” Aniss Bouraqqadi explained.
He further pointed out that women and children in rural Africa are the most vulnerable populations that can be affected by micronutrient-related malnutrition. Agronomic solutions like customized micronutrient-containing fertilizers, and plant breeding offer highly effective and quick solutions for improving micronutrient sufficiency.
Bouraqqadi spoke of the urgency for Africa to invest in innovative solutions and new technologies, arguing that African nations need to embrace impactful research to accelerate the transformation of agriculture while developing a resilient ecosystem that can ensure enough food for the continent’s growing population.
With an objective of creating more jobs for rural young Africans, OCP Africa launched in 2019 the Empowering African Youth (EMAY) program in Nigeria to address the issue of youth unemployment and ensure young people’s participation in the agricultural sector.
« OCP Africa believes in the potential of youth to be agents for positive changes », Bouraqqadi noted, arguing that EMAY is particularly meant to make the younger generation the central pivot in the much-needed digital transformation of African agriculture.
“To increase farmers’ yield and profitability, OCP Africa also relies on leveraging supply chain maturity models and data science analytics to optimize fertilizers flow and improve the production inputs,” Bouraqqadi added.
The OCP Head of R&D also highlighted the importance of two enablers, one being establishing efficient and agile partnerships to address new challenges and strengthening R&D in agriculture, and the second being maintaining dialogue with the various stakeholders and partners to make research results a central element in the development of agricultural policies.
The promise of smart agriculture
“Our vision is to contribute to the sustainable transformation of the food system”, Aniss said.
Africa is still exposed to several threats, he added, drawing attention to the increase in the price of commodities in some African countries and arguing that prices can sometimes be three or four times expensive due to logistical constraints.
But OCP’s work of introducing African farmers to digital tools has helped to improve agricultural productivity in many countries across the continent.
In Nigeria, for instance, farmers were able to increase Maize yield by 24%, while in Ghana rice yield augmented by 35%, when using the OCP customized solutions.
As OCP Africa continues to commit to its vision of smart innovative agriculture, however, the company’s driving philosophy goes beyond the mere urgency of implementing R&D solutions to contribute to revolutionizing the continent’s approach to agriculture and its rising food security challenges.
Just as important for OCP Africa, Bouraqqadi argued, is the need, ultimately, to enable African farmers to benefit from customized digital solutions.
“Digitization is an opportunity for the development of African agriculture. But there are several limitations linked to education, access to technology due to the continent’s infrastructure,” Bouraqqadi said, suggesting that a key part of OCP Africa brand is to subscribe in the structural transformation of Africa’s agriculture.
In 2019, OCP Africa launched in Nigeria the digital platform Udongo in a bid to support the West African country’s value chain with various services that put farmers at the center of the new, emerging agricultural ecosystem.
“The platform aims to improve farmers’ capacity and allow them to have access to input services, education, contents with good agricultural practices, market linkage, and management tools,” Bouraqqadi explained.
Another OCP Africa initiative with similar ambitions is the Digital Soil Mapping Projects. By enabling soil fertility assessment through satellite imagery processing and geostatistical modeling. Currently, 29 million hectares of sub-Saharan African soils were mapped and the project’s overarching goal is to make African agriculture more rationed and efficient.
Despite the challenges hindering Africa’s digital transformation, Bouraqqadi insisted that OCP will continue its commitment to rising to the food security challenge in the continent.
“In partnership with all value chain stakeholders,” he concluded, “OCP Africa is contributing in channeling the continent’s existing resources to make African agriculture smarter — which means more sustainable, more efficient, and more empowering for farmers.”
