Food security remains big issue for many developing countries. According to a report released by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the hungry and undernourished population had exceeded 1 billion worldwide as of January 2010. More than 300 million of these people are in Africa, which means one out of three people on the continent are going hungry.

"China can contribute some of its experience in agriculture development to African countries," Dong Renjie, Director of the Office of International Relations of China Agricultural University (CAU) in Beijing, told ChinAfrica. China and Africa have similar agricultural development processes, he said.

The Chinese experience

Since 1993, Dong's university has been conducting agricultural exchanges and cooperation with 35 African countries, mainly introducing China's agricultural technologies. In 2001, with the financial support from Ministry of Education, the university launched a program to train African government officials and experts in the agriculture sector and to date has trained 421 people in total.

China's hybrid rice technology is a world leader. Since 1997, hybrid rice has been grown in Guinea when the Chinese Government and CAU jointly established Koba Farm, a 1,000-hectare project aimed at demonstrating and introducing China's hybrid rice technology. Local farmers experience and learn the whole process of growing and harvesting hybrid rice on the farm. "This can help them better understand how hybrid rice is grown."

"Training programs play a very important role in Sino-African agricultural cooperation," said Dong. But most of the training programs only last three weeks and trainees don't have time to get an in-depth study into various factors influencing China's agricultural development, such as incentive policies, irrigation systems and other technologies. The short-term training program now needs to be upgraded to one year or even longer, he said.

"Three-week training is too short for African people to understand why China can develop such stable agriculture. They know what the Chinese experience looks like but don't know how it works," said Dong. In the next training programs, African officials and agrotechnicians should be trained for longer periods and be involved in various agricultural projects in China with their Chinese counterparts, he said.

"This way, they can truly understand how different factors work together."

Motivate farmers

Dong believes that while Africa has good farming conditions, farmers need to be motivated to farm. He said the problems do not only lie in growing technologies, farming machineries, seeds or fertilizer usage, but the fact that many African countries do not have incentive policies to encourage farmers to grow grains. "In this regard, China has set a good example."

China's policy is successful in encouraging farmers. After China's reform and opening up to the outside world in the late 1970s, the country adopted the system of "the more you produce, the more you can earn." More importantly, the Chinese Government also subsidizes some state-owned companies to purchase the domestic-grown grains at protective prices, which are higher and more stable than market prices.

Thanks to these incentive measures, Chinese farmers want to farm. Despite these incentives being canceled in some regions, the will to farm remains. "Once they are motivated, farmers remain enthusiastic whether incentives are provided or not," said Dong.

Now, more than 95 percent of the grains consumed in China are produced domestically. Statistics from the Ministry of Agriculture show that the total grain production in 2010 reached 546.4 billion kg, a year-on-year increase of 2.9 percent.

"I think African governments can also issue similar policies to stimulate farmers' enthusiasm," said Dong.

Dong noted that this model could also be used for foreign assistance in agricultural development in Africa. Farm aid organizations can buy the grains grown by local people at higher prices and then sell them at lower prices. The aid funding can be used to make up for the losses, he said.

"When we talk about Sino-African agricultural cooperation, we often say 'teaching people how to fish instead of giving them fish.' This model of farm training is an accurate manifestation of this saying," said Dong.