COTTON – CATALYST FOR AFRICAN SMALL-HOLDER AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT

There are approximately 50 million small-holder farmers in Sub Sahara Africa, the number of those growing cotton varies and is difficult to quantify.  Smallholder farmers grow a wide range of crops, (both inter-cropped and in rotation) to manage food security, cash income, risk diversification and soil health.

For smallholder farmers, cotton is a challenging crop requiring significant ongoing labour (from planting to picking), sensitive to a wide variety of pests & diseases and the final value based on global conditions over which even the most productive farmers have little control.

Despite these challenges, cotton remains an extremely important crop in most parts of Africa for a number of reasons:

• The cotton industry’s supply chain is a vast scale and last mile delivery network of extension services and input providers which are frequently leveraged to support the whole farm;
• Cotton has a developed trading and logistics infrastructure that benefits farmers and complementary crops grown on the farm;
• Cotton provides cash flow that farmers require to support inputs for food crops and a number of other essentials;
• Cotton is an important source of foreign exchange revenues for more than 20 African countries; and
• Cotton production is required to spur a textile industry which can serve as the “first rung” on the industrialization ladder to create employment and build a middle class.

ACF leverages the vast reach and last-mile delivery infrastructure of cotton companies to share best practices and carry out development programs in a coordinated, sustainable, and scalable manner to significantly improve the revenue, food security and resilience of small holder farming households