Editor,

Reference is made to the editorial, "Agro-processing can change farmers’ fortunes” (The New Times, July 15).

No country ever developed without using its agriculture as its industrialisation stepping-stone. Agro-processing also has the benefit of eliminating wastage in a country’s agricultural output by transforming its surplus for its more effective and longer conservation thus eliminating post-harvest wastage (a major problem in many subsistence agriculture societies) and enhancing national food security.

I have always remembered something I read long ago as a primary school kid about the fishing industry in Canada’s Alberta province. That "they eat what they can, and can what they can’t!”

We too should eat what we can of our local produce and can what we can’t to move it everywhere on our domestic markets, the sub-region and beyond.

The resulting processing plants would be a boon for our rural farmers and their communities in terms of providing expanded markets for their produce, processing jobs for their youth and higher incomes to drive effective consumption and fairer distribution of incomes across the country — a truly win-win-win outcome for all concerned.

Mwene Kalinda