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Economy | Agriculture

Forget It; Nigeria Is Not Ready For Agriculture

Dec 04, 2018   •   by   •   Source: Proshare   •   eye-icon 4886 views

 

Cliches.Too many of them exist in Nigeria. If I had one Naira for each time I’ve heardsomeone say, with all the intelligence they can muster, and lay their degreeson the line, that Nigeria should diversify into agriculture, or when governmentboasts that Nigeria will export agricultural products around the world to thefurthest ends of the earth, I will be a billionaire by now. The problem is thatin spite of the sound and fury around agriculture, not much has changed.

 

Let’slook at what is on ground.

 

Thegovernment of the day has ‘repositioned’ rice production.  They say thatrice importation has gone down 90%. Only that importation of parboiled riceinto Benin Republic our neighbor to the west and a sovereign collaborator ofsorts with smugglers, has gone up by almost the same proportion. So the gainsare marginal actually.  The question is whether it is adequate,sustainable or sensible to ‘diversify’  by spending on a single crop whileclaiming to have repositioned agriculture. Before we can claim any salutaryvictory in agriculture, I suggest that we will have to see sustainable, markedimprovements across the board. We will have to first feed ourselves.  Wewill have to see science in our agriculture. Our academia must meet our farmersin the villages. Too much is left to artisanal farmers who are literallyworking their butts off.

 

Weshould have been wary. Now we hear that the floods from this year’s apparentlyheavy rainy season, may lead to lower yields in many rice farms for next year.Many crop failures have occurred. I recall the year Nigeria focused ontomatoes. That is the year we saw ‘Tomato Ebola’.  Akinwumi Adesina washere and bedazzled us with agricultural repositioning under the Jonathangovernment. We heard that they once bought 10million phones for 10 millionfarmers to be able to monitor global prices and fertilizer delivery. Idisagreed then that Nigeria couldn’t possibly have 10million farmers. Thatwould be 10million households producing food, except we counted the farmers andall their children.

 

Let uslook at what is happening elsewhere.

 

Weknow that the rest of the world has always improved on whatever they do. I oncepassed a maize farm in Essex, UK and was shocked by the regularity of the cropfor miles and miles. Their maize crop has been engineered not to grow too tallbut come out with standard cobs. That is science at work. That is the onlything that works. In most of Europe and the USA, they have managed to keep theprice of their staples - potatoes and bread - stable, sometimes for 50 yearssubject to yearly inflation.

 

Theother day I was shocked to come across a conversation in a movie - Miss Sloan -on the Malaysian palm oil futures market. I then did a research and found thatthe Malaysians and Indonesians are not only producing almost 20 times what weare producing (individually), but they have also developed the market for theproduct and all the derivatives thereof. There are primary, secondary andtertiary products and markets from this same palm oil that they got from here.People can even buy financial instruments whose underlying assets are palmoil!  The examples that we need as a people are out there in the world. Weonly have to look.

 

Themore embarrassing one for me, is Cocoa. I found out that Cote D’Ivoire isproducing 10 times Nigeria’s cocoa. But that country is only a third ofNigeria, and they don’t plant cocoa all over the country.  I admit thatthe French own the largest cocoa farms and processing plans in Cote D’Ivoirethough. But the disparity in terms of agricultural performance should give ussleepless nights. My embarrassment is enhanced by the fact that cocoa is seenas the item in South West Nigeria, where I am from, and where we have the mostprofessors.  What have all our professors of agriculture, agronomy,extension, Agric economics and so on, done for cocoa in the south westNigeria?  I believe that we can start to show activity in this area, andnot until we achieve geographical restructuring on Nigeria. What we will do inOodua Republic, we can start to show now.

 

Mypersonal experience with cocoa is that we leave a lot of them in the wild,overgrown by thicket and only show up for harvest. The cocoa that ourgrandfathers planted is what almost the entire region still depends on. But fora recent initiative by the Osun State government to plant 50 million new treesnothing is happening in that sector. Nigeria used to be the world’s largestexporter, but while we reveled in self-importance and intra-country conflicts,not only Cote D’Ivoire, but Indonesia, Brazil and now Cameroon, has overtakenus.  To make matters worse, a report by the Punch newspaper early 2018showed that vast swathes of the cocoa plantations especially in Ondo State isbeing replaced by Indian Hemp crops, which are harvested in 4 months as againstthe 4-5years required for cocoa. Our youths are chasing money, and have nopatience at all.

 

Thecore lesson is that no country is out there waiting for the day some countrycalled Nigeria will produce enough food to export to her. The idea ofagricultural production should therefore be calibrated toward first eradicationof food poverty/hunger in line with the Sustainable Development Goals, and thenfood security. We need to produce food first for ourselves, before thinkingabout exports.  But well, if we can do the two at the same time, why not?The only issue is that most of us are fixated with making dollars at theexpense of greater exploits.  This is why we went through the fiasco ofyam exports in 2017. Recently we learnt that processed (dried) fish coming fromNigeria were again emptied into the Atlantic Ocean in the USA because theyfailed some Phytosanitary certification (usually used to attest thatconsignments meet phytosanitary (regarding plants) import requirements and isundertaken by an National Plant Protection Organization) test or somedocumentation was omitted. We think too much about dollar, dollar, dollar. Thisis not the way to go. We sometimes deprive our neighbor basic cheap foodbecause we are in a mad stampede to export for dollars.

 

Thereality on ground is that our agricultural productivity is extremely low.

 

It istoo low for any competitive advantage; and part of the reason for this is thatwe basically neglected folks who live in our villages and small towns to theirown devises since 1960 and even before. The much celebrated growth and order ofthe early years of independence is not real growth, but mindless neglect.Everybody who went to school was struggling to become urbanised. These were thesame ones who ran governments.  Tai Solarin’s admonition about our schoolsin those days comes to mind. He wanted Nigerian education to be calibratedtowards tooling our students to create their own reality rather than importother people’s realities. He lost the argument. Today, there are more Kings’College graduates abroad than there are in Nigeria, and that is exactly whatTai Solarin warned about KC being too elitists with insular, disconnectedgraduates.  And so we were saddled with a disconnect which has over thedecades translated into the current disaster we are facing.  We cannot expectto be fed by the emaciated, dying farmers we have left in the villages.

 

 

SERIOUS AGRICULTURAL COUNTRIES

 

I dida bit some more research in this area. I found the countries that exported themost in terms of agricultural products. USA tops the list with close to$150billion in yearly Agric exports. Following closely is the Netherlands acountry which is about two thirds the size of Niger State in Nigeria at just41,000 square kilometers as compared to Nigeria’s 923,000 sq kilometres. TheNetherlands exports $100billion worth of agricultural products yearly, even ifhelps to process some of products from other countries for export. This tellsus clearly that agriculture is no longer dependent on land mass but onknowledge; on science. I researched into what they do in The Netherlands andfound that they practice a lot of vertical farming. They also use a lot ofgreenhouses which enable the country plant all year round. The Chinese are alsodoing this and boosting farmers’ productivity by a factor of ten.

 

Othermajor Agric export countries are Germany ($90Billion), Brazil ($80Billion),France ($75Billion), China ($65Billion) and so on. The 25th country on the listof food exporters, is Chile, with $17Billion worth.  All OECD countries -The G8 Countries, and upper income countries are also major food exporters. Wecan see clearly that at less than $2billion in year Agric exports, Nigeria hasjust not yet started. Who exactly do we want to be exporting food to, if wewanted to really be serious? Have we added value to our species? Is it justabout exporting to Nigerians in diaspora? Or are we exporting items as foodfrom here that are then used as industrial products - like starch - out there?And what do we do about this mounting waste as our food exports are destroyed,burnt or dumped in the sea?

 

Furtherresearch as captured in the pictures below, shows the countries that sit atopthe pack in terms of different crops. Sub-saharan countries in general featuresparsely, whether in the production of cereals, vegetables, fruits, meat,dairy, nuts, spices or fibre. Nigeria does well with cassava, yam, potatoes,papaya, sorghum, okra and goat.  In these we come between first and thirdin the world. Paradoxically we have not seen any deliberate policies that will ensureour sustained relevance in these crops. We have focused on rice instead andleft these on autopilot, relying on the efforts of local farmers.

 

Theother issue to resolve with agriculture is to determine what model we wish torun. If we want to give more encouragement to mechanized farming then we mustdetermine what to do with our tens of millions of peasants, who must not becondemned to being mere farm hands in large capital-driven farms as has becomethe case in Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa. This later leads to insurrectionand mass-dissatisfaction.  If we don’t want to go down the route then wemust begin to integrate our rural areas by considering them properly as part ofNigeria because for now they are forgotten in a warp of time.

 

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Proshare Nigeria Pvt. Ltd.

 

 

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About theAuthor

Tope Kolade Fasua is aNigerian businessman, economist and writer. He is the founder and CEO of GlobalAnalytics Consulting Limited, an international consulting firm with itsheadquarters in Abuja, Nigeria. He is the presidential candidate of theAbundant Nigeria Renewal Party (ANRP), which he founded. He can be contactedvia e-mail at [email protected]

 

 

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Proshare Nigeria Pvt. Ltd.


Proshare Nigeria Pvt. Ltd.


Proshare Nigeria Pvt. Ltd.

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