Concept
The challenge consists of cultivating large areas for the agro-industry, using annual plants, suited to the country, which are capable of producing raw materials for animal feed, to provide ethanol, for the manufacture of paper, cardboard or bio-fuel and energy. And all of this with the ultimate objective of quickly securing for the project region the production of energy for local consumption or export and the creation of a large number of jobs to maintain or attract back hundreds of young farmers to the countryside.
In such programs, we strive to reconcile the needs of the project sponsor (the owner, investment fund) which prioritizes profitability and short-term return on investment with those of the leaders of the country who are concerned with environmentally-sensitive agricultural or industrial production as well as reducing unemployment and idleness. This results in a different management approach which is characterized by:
Special management of sites:
- Divide up the space into small, optimally-sized holdings (often 20 to 50 ha)
- Hand over the land, preferably, to young farmers after training,
- Ensure the long-term sustainability of the holdings using agro-ecological farming techniques which are based on the efficiency of each site’s natural cycles in order to develop an appropriate agricultural system,
- Secure agricultural production through crop rotation which provides security for the system of production and allows the soil to recover.
- Drastically reduce inputs (fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides) and irrigation by using hardy sorghum varieties
- Multiply agricultural activities to protect project profitability from market fluctuations.
etc;
Systematically incorporate production plants into each project
Set up a local ADIA (association pour l’aide au développement agro industriel) on each site:
- Local association for agro-industrial development aid which pursues different on-site goals to FADIA