KHARTOUM: Sudan will prioritize agriculture to target self sufficiency within five years after the devastation of decades of civil wars, its agriculture minister said on Monday. Africa's largest country must diversify its economy away from oil - from which it derives more than 90 percent of its foreign exchange revenues - as the oil-producing south is expected to secede following a January 9 independence referendum. “We are targeting to achieve food self sufficiency within five years - agriculture is the way forward for Sudan,” Agriculture Minister Abdel Haleem Al-Mutafi told Reuters in an interview. Sudan has increased wheat production this year to cover 42 percent of its more than 2 million tons of consumption and is trialing soft and hard wheat large farms in its north. A Saudi businessman has invested an initial $50 million in a 50,000 feddans (21,000 acres) pilot farm in the River Nile state, Mutafi said, adding the first wheat yield was 1.6 to 2 tons per feddan, low because the land was still virgin. “They are expecting to reach good productivity within 2-3 years from today around 8-9 tons per feddan,” Mutafi said. Sudan is also offering incentives to small farmers to produce wheat by buying the produce ex-farm for $350 a ton, converting diesel water pumps to electricity, saving them 50 percent in costs, and starting to produce local fertilizers to further reduce costs. Sudan's north directly borders Egypt, one of the world's biggest importers of wheat, and is near Saudi Arabia which is halting wheat production. With millions of feddans of arable land and unused water allocations from the river Nile, it has the potential to provide for the region. But Mutafi said they needed foreign investment for such large-scale projects and their first priority was self-sufficiency. “We need five years to be directly self sufficient (in wheat), but indirect self sufficiency by exporting other cereals to cover the cost of wheat imports, I hope to be doing that in three years time.” Mutafi said Sudan was increasing production of sorghum and rice which prefer hot weather, adding in 2010 they expected to export 1 million tons of sorghum.
