A vegetable farm in Yei before the conflict escalated to Yei in 2014 | Credit | Gurtong

An agriculture expert says the government should spend more money on farming to increase food production in the country.

Various studies show that South Sudan only uses 5% of its 30 million hectares of arable land.

The chairperson of the Eastern Africa Grain Council, Dr. Kenyi Spencer, told Eye Radio that the development partners should give farmers machinery to help them boost production.

“The first thing is to increase the government budget; government has to spend on agriculture. I think this is one of the key issues. Secondly our development partners also should be helping us especially with machinery that will help the human to make a little bit more effort to produce a lot more than they would on their own. The third thing that we want to impact on now is to group the people into cooperatives so that we can have production cooperatives all over the place. These cooperatives are a big help to the farmer instead of the farmer struggling on his own, or her own”, he said.

Kenyi added that establishment of farming cooperative societies could also speed up construction of road networks within the country.

“If we could from now start putting a lot more emphasis on developing the road system, I think the transport system will just come up by itself, but as I said if we start the cooperative system, some cooperatives will be involved in the maintaining of the roads, some cooperative will come up with the transport system, some cooperative will come up with better storage system so as to avoid post- harvest loss. This is some of the things that need to be done before really people can be encouraged to produce more”, he added.

The agriculture sector is facing a lot of challenges in terms of switching from the traditional to modern systems so that the farmers are able to produce enough food.