Uplands Food Security Project

Upland Food Security Project

The overall goal of this project was to develop and demonstrate balanced, sustainable and replicable cropping systems, coupled with environmental management, to achieve greater and more secure food production and incomes in upland areas.

The project provided support to farming households in the more remote upland areas where the land is arable but where people tend to be poorer because fewer resources are allocated to them on an area basis. In the overall context of agricultural rehabilitation, the 45 cooperative farms and farming communities also benefit directly from infrastructure and enterprises funded through the community development fund. The project provided credit to empower the most disadvantaged members of the community, particularly women. By supporting mechanization of agricultural work it spared women much of the drudgery and fatigue of labour in the fields.

The project's main activities included:

• introducing sustainable crop production systems that conserve soil fertility, and promoting diversification of crops, through a support package that included crop inputs, mechanization, storage capacity and training
• improving the supply of clean, high-productivity potato seeds through assistance to the national Potato Research Institute
• addressing the issues of the supply of fuel wood and the stabilization of slopes threatened by erosion and initiating anti-erosion measures with the collaboration of WFP's Food-for-Work Programme
• supporting credit services for households and cooperatives and strengthening decentralized and grass-roots financial institutions<
• stimulating participatory planning and investment at the farm level
• helping cooperative farms investigate and develop opportunities for processing farm products
• providing support for project implementation

Source: IFAD