Nigeria has sufficient rice, says AFAN President
For Nigeria to attain the much-desired food sufficiency, its agricultural sector needs focus, education, mechanisation, storage, and ofcourse security, according to Kabiru Ibrahim, National President, All Farmers Association of Nigeria (AFAN). In this exclusive interview with BusinessDay, he also insists that despite soaring prices, Nigeria has sufficient rice to feed its populace. Ibrahim spoke to Onyinye Nwachukwu and Cynthia Egboboh, BusinessDay’s Abuja Bureau Chief and Corresponding respectively. EXCERPTS…
You are leading the association of Nigerian farmers, first of all, talk us through the agricultural sector, in terms of policies, support, challenges and ofcourse output?
Let me start by saying that the good thing is that anybody can be a farmer; there is no law in the public service or country today that says you cannot partake in agriculture. But of course, you cannot be in public service and do other businesses. But you can do farming, so it doesn’t take anything. We know that 70 percent of our population are farmers. If you are rearing chickens in your backyard and planting vegetables, that is farming, but at a subsistence level. However, there are commercial farmers who do it as a business; they will have workers, create jobs, and some will even add value to what they produce. That is advanced agriculture, which is the dream of every country that aspires to food security. They encourage the commercialization of agricultural activities; they do not sell all what they produce in raw form, but even when they do, they sell it to aggregators, who then take it to where value will be added.
The value chain is such that everybody can benefit, and that is why small countries like the Netherlands, with a population of about 17 million and 55,000 farmers, earn income from agriculture only second to the United States of America. For Nigeria, because we have very large irrigable and cultivable land and a very large population, there is no reason why we should not have food security, but we need to harness our potential. Unfortunately, there are some people who eat fat on the possibilities in agriculture. They probably do not own farms, they have political influence, they have relations in positions of respect, and they dress well, go to offices, claim to be farmers, and take what should rightly go to farmers. I needed to bring this out because there are some people who call themselves farmers and make a lot of noise, but they really do not own a farm or know anything about agriculture or farming.
Now, there are so many challenges; the biggest one is insecurity. You and I know that farming is essentially a rural vocation, though there is some bit of urban agriculture. But today, in the villages, hinterland people are unable to farm because of insecurity, so we have a serious deficit of what we need to become food-sufficient in Nigeria. Secondly, in order to scale productivity, you need to mechanise; you need to replace human power with machine power, and mechanisation is still very low in the country. The penetration of tractors in Nigeria is still very small, even compared to some other countries like Kenya.
Source Link : https://businessday.ng/interview/article/nigeria-has-sufficient-rice-says-afan-president/
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