World Food Programme and South Sudan sign an agreement to implement agriculture master plan

To help speed up agricultural output and improve food security, South Sudan signed an agreement with the World Food Programme (WFP) under its Comprehensive Agricultural Masterplan.

Josephine Lagu Yanga, Minister of agriculture and food security, said the agreement with WFP would enable the youngest nation to transform its farming sector by empowering smallholder farmers to produce enough.

“We are a rural country because the majority of our people live in rural areas and it’s our responsibility to ensure that we lift them from rural areas. Other countries have done it and a lot of them did through transforming their agricultural sector,” the minister told journalists in Juba.

She urged South Sudan to follow China’s roadmap on the agricultural transformation that helped lift millions out of poverty.

Matthew Hollingworth, WFP country director, said empowering smallholder farmers is part of WFP’s long-term vision in South Sudan.

“We believe that if we are going to serve the people that WFP wants to support which are the smallholder farmers in the country, we must have a strong robust agreement with the government to support an entity that can support those smallholder farmers and one of the best entities to deal with is the agricultural bank of any country we are working in,” said Hollingworth.

He disclosed that the World Food Programme aims to empower smallholder farmers, scale-up commercial agriculture and also support the quality of agricultural produce.