Some three months before video of a multilingual Oodi farmer washing bundles of market-bound spinach in a pool of stagnant water, the African Development Bank (AfDB) put out a draft compact titled “Botswana Food and Agriculture Delivery Compact.” The Bank’s says that that “implementation of the draft compact will directly contribute to achieving the goals and priorities set out in the national development plans II and III, the national policy on agricultural development, and in the 2020 economic recovery and transformation plan. It is aligned with Botswana’s 2021 food systems transformation draft pathway.”
On this basis of this publication, Sunday Standard published an article with the heading “Questions about safety of Botswana’s horticultural produce raised in Ivory Coast” in in its February 26, 2023 edition.
The introduction of the article read:Horticultural farmers are understandably happy about the killing they have made on the back of a 13-month old import ban that the Ministry of Agriculture has imposed on 16 types of vegetables. Thousands of kilometres away in Abidjan however, some unsettling questions are being asked about the safety of produce from these farmers. Abidjan, the capital city of Ivory Coast, is where the African Development Bank is headquartered and over the past several months, the Bank has been studying Botswana’s food and agriculture delivery systems. It has now summarised its findings in a report that it published last week.
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