As Nigeria continues exploring ways to achieve food security, the Nigeria Agribusiness Group (NABG) has highlighted the importance of empowering small-scale farmers to do agriculture as business which will in turn add value to their production.
The Director General of NABG, Jafar Umar in his interaction with journalists at the Nigeria Integrated Agribusiness Agenda, said the majority of the producers of food consumed in the country are the small-scale farmers who are millions in number.
He said currently the small -small-scale farmers have low capacity, hence there is a need for a shift from subsistent farming to a more commercial agriculture.
“The number one agenda right now is food security, we are unable to feed ourselves and in cases where the food is available, it is extremely expensive. It is clear that the producers of these foods are small-scale farmers, we have millions of them in Nigeria, but because their capacity is poor, there is a need for a paradigm shift, and there is a need to move from subsistence agriculture to more commercial agriculture.
“So, the timing is now, I fact it is overdue, we should have been on that case before now, so we are trying to support that transition from just a farmer to a producer and to business, so we feel that it will go along way in making our food security agenda more robust”, he said.
“The NABG as part of this project we are working on is heavy on policy work, so we are looking critically at some of the current policies and how they impact smallholder farmers, and in doing that, we are identifying areas that need either improvement or support implementation of those policies in a way that it will impact on the farmers.
“We know policy is all about the government, so we are working hand-in-hand with the Ministry of agriculture and food Security and some of the agencies, for example we are work with the Seed Council to ensure that we boost productivity with the right seeds and so many others,” Umar added.
The Nigeria Integrated Agribusiness Agenda which was organised by NABG and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation focuses on advocacy for small-scale producers.
Also, the President of NABG, Arc. Kabir Ibrahim said if the smallholder farmers know that they are incentivized and that whatever they produce will be off-taken and they will get good value, they will do more.
“Also, when you put in the programme that the value-added product will also mean prosperity for them, they will do more. So, the large users (processors) will not go about looking for anything, in fact they will have more than enough once the smallholder farmers are sufficiently incentivised,” he said.
Kabir noted that the population of farmers in Nigeria today is more than 70 per cent because the country does not have sufficient mechanization. He said with mechanization in food production, the number of people in the field will contract because machine power will replace human power.
“Now, the processing that we do will create jobs and job opportunities for these people who are hitherto small-scale producers. This is how the United States for instance evolved.
“For now, the central discussion will be on the small-scale producers, not only farmers, there are people who add value even at local level,” he noted.
Tajudeen Yayaha, CEO of Extension Africa on his part, said the meeting is crucial because part of what they look at is how they can transform farmers from small-scale to a platform that helps companies to go in and work with these farmers and get the benefits they need.
“We have to think of farmers beyond just small-scale farmers to small scale businesses that need support services to grow and we also have to be able to discuss in this kind of platform to understand what values are we really giving to farmers and see what values farmers need from us,” Yahaya added.
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