2024-03-30 09:48:12
Development of agricultural land policy: national actors at the school of the National Directorate of Rural Land and Heritage to discuss the issue of irrigated land.
The Land and State Code (CFD) of March 30, 1992, still in force, liberalized access to land, through the right to private property, obtained in the form of a land title through the land registration procedure. building in the land book. Unfortunately, however, this code does not specifically address rural and agricultural land issues. Thirty years after its promulgation, the observation of its inadequacy to contemporary land realities is widely shared by all public actors, the private sector and civil society.
The Ministry in charge of Agriculture, in its logic of developing the rural land policy, organized through the National Directorate of Rural Land and Heritage from Thursday March 28 to Friday March 29, 2024 in Conakry, a consultation workshop on the irrigated land.
This workshop, which brought together actors from entities working on development projects, local elected officials, farmers’ organizations, and civil society organizations, aims to bring these national-level actors to formulate possible solutions. solutions that seem most appropriate to them to resolve the main issues related to irrigated land with a view to developing the Agricultural Land Policy (PFA).
Presiding over the opening ceremony of this training which was enhanced by the participation of actors chosen because of their experiences and their ability to raise the concerns of their peers within the framework of the exchanges with a view to achieving a much more consensual and adapted to the national context, the Deputy National Director of Rural Land and Heritage, Ms. Condé Fanta Keïta, set out the objectives of the workshop in her speech. Which objectives, according to her, are among others: “to build a consensus on the state of play of the agricultural land situation in Guinea and particularly irrigated land, to support national level actors in the identification of their proposals to address related issues to irrigated land, in particular, the clarification of the land status of land before development; the land status to be assigned to developed land; land tenure security of developed land; the terms of allocation of plots; the security of users of developed land; the regulation of land transactions on developments; finally, encouraging participants to continue their internal reflections in a structured manner with a view to future consultations,” she said.
And the director adds. “It is important to remember that at the end of the 2016 consultations for the development of this roadmap on rural and agricultural land and the general land statements in 2022, there is an almost unanimous opinion of all the stakeholders that the country’s current land legal framework is not adapted to the conditions for adequate management of agricultural land.
For her part, the representative of the French Development Agency (AFD), Fanny Boudet, found the progress of the workshops and the themes quite remarkable before returning to expectations.
“The team from the National Directorate of Rural Land and Heritage carried out significant awareness-raising work on land reform during the first workshops with reform stakeholders. Today the first thematic consultation workshop is being held. These workshops aim to formulate possible solutions to respond to the main issues with a view to developing agricultural land policy. The expected results are none other than obtaining a consensual inventory of the agricultural land situation in Guinea and particularly irrigated land. That the participants formulate the proposals that seem most appropriate to them to address the issues related to irrigated land; and finally that participants are made aware of the need to pursue their internal reflections in a structured manner,” she said.
Aye Mady Fofana, expert in rural and agricultural land at the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock on the agricultural land project, for her part took the opportunity to return to the themes which are the subject of discussions. “We are in a workshop which concerns irrigated land, that is to say hydro-agricultural developments. But before that, we had other workshops as part of the development of the agricultural land policy, which will be transformed into an agricultural land law, which must manage agricultural land problems throughout the Republic of Guinea. », explains this expert before specifying that this process must bring together all the actors, must be a participatory process which will give a voice to each actor so that they can give their opinion on the development of the agricultural land policy.
“During this workshop, they will make proposals for solutions within the framework of resolving all the problems linked to the axis of agricultural land in Guinea. For this present workshop, we know that the State develops land to make it available to the population but we must put in place processes which manage these developments, that is to say the definition of the status of the land to be developed, is -is it land that belongs to the communities, is it a state domain, we must define that beforehand.”
Finally, Saïkou Yaya Baldé, Coordinator of the project to support the rice farming activity system in mangrove territory financed by the French Development Agency, finds the theme to be debated very important.
“I am working on a project which supports developments in mangrove areas but today I admit to you that we have enormous difficulties, difficulties linked to the sustainability of the project’s achievements. So we cannot talk about securing these developments without really talking about the land question, without resolving the problem of the land question. This is why this workshop is for me a meeting to give and receive the experiences that we have, in relation to this problem of land question to try to exchange and come out with a common objective”
Mamadou Yaya Barry