National Traders and Producers meetings

 Hon. Christiaan de Graaff

Ministry of Agriculture, Botswana hosted a meeting at Sebele in the Botswana Agricultural College with the Traders and Producers.

The meeting was addressed by Minister of Agriculture Hon. Christiaan de Graaff with his Assistant Minister Mr Oreeditse Molebatsi, Permanent Secretary Dr M. Chimbombi and other senior officials from the ministry of agriculture.

The main purpose of the meeting was to solve issues that always arise between the Traders and the Producers, therefore the ministry found it important to discuss the issues with both parties so as to see how best they can work together to improve the agricultural sector.

From the start the minister outlined some of the issues that always come to his office either form the producers or the traders. There after he opened the stage to everyone to discuss these issues and see how best they can be solved. He pointed out that the meeting is meant to collectively solve the issues that are at hand.

I attended the meeting to see how things are done at this high profile meetings; it was a life time experience to see traders accusing the producers of overpricing their produce while it is not of high quality, on the other hand the producers accuse the traders of buying with low price while the traders say they have invested a lot on the produce. At some point they even blamed ministry of agriculture of taking sides either to the traders of producers.

The Permanent Secretary advised both parties to work for a win-win situation, where by the traders will benefit at the same time the producers benefit from the agreement.

One thing that caught my attention was the language that was used in the meeting; English was used during the meeting. Yes English is the official language in Botswana but not all Batswana know English more especially the people who are in the Agricultural sector.

There were some people in the meeting who were not happy with arrangements of conducting the meeting in English rather than with the local language (Setswana).

Again there were some people in the meeting who could not understand the local language, so the best way to solve this kind of issues is to have a translator so that everyone can understand what the discussion is about.

When I get back to office my boss, Principal Agricultural Information and Public Relations Officer asked me “how was the meeting?” That is when I inform him about the language barrier and he assured me that they will look into it.  

Lesson leant: to always use a language which everyone will be comfortable with, or have a translator for everyone to be comfortable. Communication is the backbone of PR so people should not have so any difficulties to absorb whatever we are communicating.