Greetings from Africa. I have been assigned to South Sudan for six months. I will be working in the three Equatoria states in South Sudan November 2011 through mid-May 2012. I am assigned to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), currently one of the largest U.S. government development efforts in Africa. I am here as part of the Civilian Response Corps as an active member.

Mike Gangwer

South Sudan is a landlocked country just north of the equator at the mid-section of the continent. It is surrounded by Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the south, Ethiopia to the east, Sudan on its north and, on the western side, the Central African Republic.

South Sudan is the world’s newest country, having declared its independence by referendum vote. July 9, 2011, is the date of birth of this country. Later in the month of July, South Sudan became a member of the United Nations and the African Union.

South Sudan is an oil-rich country with many natural resources. In the Equatorias, located in the southernmost region of South Sudan, the rain-fed agricultural potential is enormous. Rainfall is generally May through October, so my arrival here in November is at the beginning of the dry period.

South Sudan is home to extensive forest lands, also located in the southern region of the country.

By nearly every indicator, South Sudan is underdeveloped. Sudan has been at war with internal tribal warfare and external state conflict for decades. Now, with the division of the two Sudans, political and economic realignment is underway.

So, too, are the societal and religious cultures. To say that change is rapid and dynamic is an understatement.

The U.S. government, largely the State Department, has made an effort to help this new country develop a democratic form of government. Elections are the backbone of this help and so is the formation of functional ministries at the central and state level. The capital, Juba, is home to the central government.

In fact, we visited the Ministry of Agriculture already, presenting our credentials to the minister, the Honorable Dr. Betty Achan Ogwaro. By the way, she has a Ph.D. earned at Kansas State University. During our visit, she mentioned two priority areas for her ministry.

One is a common one everywhere in the world … that of credit access for farmers. The second one is the challenge of economic development as a balance of commercial, mechanized agriculture and small landowner farming.

In the short time my colleague, Jim Conley, and I have been in Juba, we have already discovered the importance of this balance. The utilization of underdeveloped land by clearing large tracts of forest land and installing modern mechanized farm is alluring to the South Sudanese and a myriad of other countries.

It is not surprising that exterior states such as China and India are noticing the rain-fed regions of South Sudan. Dr. Ogwaro is aware of these dynamics.

She understands that a landowner with an acre or two of tillable soil can improve crop yield with new ideas and small mechanized equipment and may want to expand this land base if access to markets at some distance is made available.

The huge challenge here is lack of infrastructure: namely, roads. We are hearing the term feeder roads a lot … the secondary roads that connect more farmers with the network of main roads connecting the larger towns and cities.

We are also hearing a lot about food security or the lack thereof. We are on the front end of learning the dynamics of food production and its distribution here in South Sudan.

We do know two attributes that nearly everyone agrees with: One, nearly all the food brought into the urban regions of South Sudan is imported from Kenya and Uganda; and two, most of the rural population is already provided for with subsistence farming.

At a recent agricultural fair here in Juba, we heard the vice president of South Sudan challenge the agriculturalists to expand the rural agricultural production and then move it to the larger towns and cities. This common-sense model is challenging because the production of food must include its storage and movement.

So there is a lot of interest in building feeder roads and the establishment of agribusiness services, which will support the farmer with inputs like seed and fertilizer and then provide storage and transport services so the farm produce reaches markets.

Much of Africa and much of the world face these same kinds of challenges. Here, though, the challenges are larger given the fact that almost nothing exists now except subsistence farming. Even if the rural landowners expanded production with modern farming inputs and methods, the marketplace is out of reach given the lack of a good road network.

Why am I here?

As readers of this column know, for nearly 20 years I have written articles about travels to other parts of the world. I wrote of an assignment in Ethiopia about 14 years ago, the last time I worked in Africa.

As Civilian Response Corps members, we work in areas where agriculture development is at the rudimentary stage.

We spent decades building our agricultural industry in the U.S., and realistically we know that our work here is just a very small part. We are realists in knowing that, in fact, we really have little impact. We are here for such a short time.

Yet one of my first tasks is meeting each of the state ministers of agriculture in the eastern, central and western Equatorias. I will work closely with them, for the mandate I have been given is helping align USAID’s mission between the national ministry with the states.

I will work in the state capital cities of Torit, Yei and Yambio and report my engagements to the national ministry. The USAID mission here has already contracted with several firms, tasking them with agricultural development in the Equatorias. My job is helping the state ministers of agriculture and these contractors work together.

This entire effort is built upon the end goal or outcome of enhancing, improving and modernizing farming practices for farmers regardless of the their land base size. We will be thinking about the entire farm-to-market path, and figuring out how to remove the constraints.

For the next six months I will report what I see and what I learn.

As of this writing, I have not yet been to the field (outside Juba), so my learning curve is enormously steep. But I am paid to help the U.S. government deliver agricultural development so that at some point in the future, markets for U.S. companies are developed and trade between our two countries can be established.

From what I have seen already, these aspirations are some distance in the future, indeed. But we are here trying to take the first steps forward. PD

Mike Gangwer
USDA FAS Senior Agricultural Adviser
michael.gangwer@fas.usda.gov