As the nation marks democracy day today, the minister of agriculture and rural development, Mr Akinwumi Adesina, recounts how the Agricultural Transformation Agenda is steadily moving Nigeria towards food security
Potentials:
Nigeria’s immense agricultural potential is a great asset for the nation and Africa, with promises for food security when fully harnessed. Only 40 per cent of Nigeria’s 84 million hectares of arable land is presently cultivated. Nigeria’s endowment of 263 billion cubic metres of water, a bulk of which comes from two of the largest rivers in Africa, represents a great agricultural benefit.
A population of 167 million provides Nigeria a large pool of cheap labour to support agricultural intensification while also offering a huge market for agricultural produce. But this must not be a market for others or a dumping ground for indiscriminate importers. We must grow our own food to feed ourselves and to export. The task of creating markets locally for our own farmers is an urgent one.
What we are doing:
To this end, we are unlocking the potential of agriculture to once again drive the economy. We are doing a rapid transformation of key agricultural value chains – from the farm to the table. In 2011, President Jonathan launched the Agricultural Transformation Agenda, with the goal of adding an additional 20 million MT of food to the domestic food supply by 2015 and stimulating the creation of 3.5 million jobs along the agricultural value chains.
To achieve these, we are working to create ecosystems in which small, medium, and large-scale farming systems not only co-exist but also flourish. We are focusing on creating value added products from staple crops – through an aggressive import substitution programme and other policy reforms to accelerate food production and agricultural resilience.
The various commodities and areas under consideration in the Agricultural Transformation Agenda are:
Rice transformation:
We are making remarkable progress towards achieving our target of achieving self-sufficiency in rice production. What started as a determined effort in 2012, has started yielding remarkable impacts on farmers field. Our first task was to ensure that we raise the yields on farmers’s field and replace low yielding traditional varieties with high yielding improved varieties.
The Federal Government began a massive programme to subsidise the cost of the new rice varieties for farmers, providing them free of charge. Today, almost all rice farmers cultivate the new varieties, Faro 44 and Faro 52, which meet the quality requirements of rice millers. Average yields on farmers’ rice fields increased from 1.5 metric tons per hectare to 4 to 5 metric tons (MT) per hectare. Paddy rice production is accelerating than at any time in Nigeria’s history.
In 2012, total wet season rice production yielded 339,078 MT of rice or 220,400 MT of milled rice. In 2013 wet season, a total of 1,739,322 MT paddy was produced, which translated to 1,130,559 MT of milled rice. In 2012 alone, the dry season rice farming introduced by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development added 1,070,364 MT of paddy, enough to generate 695,737 MT of milled rice, which brought a total production to 1,409,442 MT of paddy rice and 916,137 MT of milled rice.
These increased significantly in 2013, as the dry season rice farming intervention produced additional 1,220,634 MT of paddy, which translates into 793,412 MT of milled rice. The total rice production in 2013 rose to 2,959,956 MT of paddy, which translates into 1,923,971 MT of milled rice, which is enough to mill close to the 2.1 million MT of milled rice Nigeria annually imports.
The milling capacity for rice is expanding rapidly. Within two years, the number of integrated rice mills expanded by 300 per cent, with 15 new integrated rice mills established, with total capacity of 520,000 MT per year. But more impressive has been the rapid rise in the number of small scale rice mills, who are processing a bulk of the rice paddy in the country, stimulating jobs all across rural areas. The number of small scale rice mills is estimated to be rising by 29 to 40 per cent annually. Several now have de-stoning machines and compete fiercely for paddy with the large integrated rice mills. High-quality Nigerian rice are now in the market, including Umza rice, Ebony super rice, Eko rice, Mikap rice and several others. In Enugu State, young graduates have produced “coal city rice”.
Olam, a global conglomerate, is investing over $70 million in a 6,000 ha fully mechanised rice farm in Nasarawa State and is about to complete a 210,000 MT integrated rice mill that will process Nigerian paddy rice into finished milled rice. The mill, which will be completed by July 2014, will be the largest rice mill in Africa. A new privately-zoned rice mill, Quarra rice, was established in 2013 and has rolled off its high quality rice into local markets. Unknown to many Nigerians is that these well-packaged high-quality rice brands are all locally produced and milled in Nigeria. Stallion, a large rice importer, has started producing locally milled rice, Stallion Shinkafa”. The era of stony, poor quality rice, which was often called “local rice” is gone. That consumers cannot differentiate local and imported rice based on quality, is a major achievement, which will deepen as more of the locally produced paddy is milled.
To further boost our rice production, Nigeria is working closely with state governments. The number of states that participated in the rice transformation agenda increased from 10 to 22 between 2012 and 2013. Nigeria is partnering with China to introduce hybrid rice varieties, which have yield potential of up to 12 tons per hectare. The decision by President Jonathan. to launch the dry season farming in 2014 – a first in the history of the country – has dramatically turned around farm production, as farmers can now grow food crops in both wet and dry seasons. Over 360,000 jobs have been created through the rice transformation agenda.
Fertiliser:
The backbone of any agricultural revolution is access of farmers to modern agricultural inputs, especially fertilisers and seeds. For four decades the government operated a system of government direct purchase and distribution of fertilisers. The system displaced the private sector and was riddled with corruption and massive rent seeking. As a result, only about 11 per cent of farmers got the subsidized seeds and fertilisers distributed by the government. With strong support of President Goodluck Jonathan, we ended the corruption of four decades, within 90 days.
To reach farmers directly and cut off the middlemen and rent seekers who for decades have dis-empowered farmers, we turned to the power of mobile phones and launched the Electronic Wallet (E-Wallet) scheme for farmers. Under the E-wallet scheme registered farmers get electronic vouchers for seeds and fertilisers on their own mobile phones, which they use to purchase farm inputs directly from the private sector companies.
The e-wallet has been a remarkable success. Within two years, the e-wallet system reached over 8 million farmers directly through the mobile phone farm input delivery system. This has helped to improve the food security of 40 million persons in rural farm households. Women farmers, who never got seeds and fertilisers under the old system, have a new fortune, as the e-wallet system empower them and raise their food production. Dignity has been restored to the farmers.
Nigeria is the first country in Africa, and in the world, to develop the electronic wallet system for reaching farmers with subsidised farm inputs on mobile phones. The impact is reaching well beyond Nigeria. Several African countries, India, Brazil and China have expressed interest in adopting the electronic wallet system in their own countries.
Horticulture:
Nigeria is the second largest producer of citrus in the world, the largest producer of pineapples, mangoes and tomatoes in Africa. But we import orange juice and concentrates from South Africa and tomato paste from Latin America and China. That is now changing.
A number of private investors now invest in horticulture. Teragro, a local private firm, has established a $ 6 million plant to process oranges into concentrate. Dansa Foods, another local private firm, is investing $35 million in the establishment of a tomato processing plant. The company is also investing $45 million to set up a 6,000 hectare pineapple plantation and processing plant.
To develop the export market for fresh produce from Nigeria into Europe, a fresh produce value chain development programme has been launched in partnership with the Ministry of Aviation, entailing the building of cargo airports to enhance our competitiveness in the export of fresh produce.
http://leadership.ng/business/372565/food-security-agricultural-transformation-agenda
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