The Beyond Cotton initiative has partnered with the Federal University of Lavras, in Minas Gerais. The university will act as a Brazilian cooperating institution to support capacity building actions in the four African countries that participate in the Beyond Cotton: Benin, Kenya, Mozambique, and Tanzania. The partnership was formalized on 4 June.
The University of Lavras will complement the technical assistance actions of the WFP Centre of Excellence against Hunger and the Brazilian Cooperation Agency in three areas: nutrition, food processing, and improvement of cotton and food production. The university has experience in technical cooperation initiatives with African countries, including in the cotton area.
Technical assistance
To support the work in the four countries that are part of the Beyond the Cotton initiative, the Federal University of Lavras will work on the definition of the food and nutritional security and school nutrition axes. Together with project partners and stakeholders in each country, university technicians will guide the development of actions to incorporate nutrition and food security into the cotton production chain and to integrate farmers into the school feeding market.
A second demand from countries participating in the Beyond Cotton is to enable the minimum processing of food in small agro-industries. Brazil has a lot of experience with the subject and the University of Lavras will help structure cooperation with Benin, Kenya, Mozambique, and Tanzania so that farmers have access to food processing techniques and equipment to reduce waste, increase the durability of products and ensure the food safety.
The university will also provide technical assistance for the design and implementation of production models for cotton intercropped with food. In this same line of action, it will also support the structuring of cotton processing so that, from the seeds, farmers can produce cotton oil and cottonseed cake, used mainly to feed animal stocks.
Experience
The Federal University of Lavras was founded in 1908 as an agricultural school. Since 1963, it has become a federal teaching, research and extension institution dedicated to the production and dissemination of knowledge. Although working in several areas of knowledge, it is mainly in the agrarian sciences that the university stands out.
Currently, the university works directly on another technical cooperation project between Brazil and African countries, known as Cotton Victoria, which operates in three countries (Tanzania, Kenya and Burundi). In addition, it participates in activities in the Cotton4 and Shire-Zambeze projects. The university was responsible for several training courses and postgraduate courses focused on cotton production and conducted field tests to validate technologies for smallholder farmers and new models of cotton production.
Beyond Cotton is a joint initiative of the WFP Centre of Excellence against Hunger and the Brazilian Cooperation Agency, with support from the Brazilian Cotton Institute. It aims to support smallholder cotton producers and public institutions in African countries to connect cotton by-products, such as seed oil and cake, and associated crops, such as maize, sorghum and beans, to reliable markets, including school feeding programmes.
