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Ph/DR: Gaston Cossi Dossouhoui, Minister of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries
The Minister of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries officially launched the 2023-2024 agricultural campaign on Thursday April 27, 2023 in Kétou, in the presence of actors from the agricultural world. A campaign placed under the theme: “Agricultural cluster for the promotion of value chains: Achievements and prospects”. For the 2023-2024 agricultural campaign, Minister Gaston Cossi DOSSOUHOUI announced two challenges.
For the 2023-2024 agricultural campaign, Minister Gaston Cossi DOSSOUHOUI announced two challenges. “From now on, it is traditional to make a participative assessment with the actors, not to hold the language of wood, to highlight our insufficiencies and to indicate the ways of progress, in order to have an agriculture which allows solve two major challenges of our time. The first challenge is to improve productivity, build the capacity of actors to develop value chains, ensure agricultural diversification, to have increasingly increased production, from which each actor derives his profit. The second challenge is to make the raw material available for the industrialization of our country, Benin. And this industrialization goes through agro-industry. It is first of all what we have at hand. The day we have mines, gold, oil, there will be another industrialization. But, for the moment, what we are certain of is that we can produce with our ten fingers, our two hands; it is all that the earth can provide, that is to say the water and nature that we must master under conditions of resilience, to be able to produce and supply this industrial chain which is born in front of us and which will grow rapidly”.
Mr. Firmin KOUTON, Prefect of the Zou department, acting as interim for his colleague from the Plateau department, praised the efforts made by the Minister of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries and his teams to support the Chief of the State in the implementation of the Government Action Program (PAG 2), Agriculture section. “I would like to invite all agricultural producers to support the Government’s efforts and to maintain the momentum of the remarkable progress made by Beninese agriculture in recent years. These advances have made it possible to further boost agricultural production, improve producers’ incomes and create a lot of jobs in the sector”, underlined the Prefect.
“In 2022, the Government took the courageous decision to subsidize agricultural inputs. These measures have galvanized us”, recognized and greeted, for his part, Dominique ALADJODJO, Vice-President of the National Chamber of Agriculture of Benin.
The Resident Representative of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) was also present.
