Stakeholders in the agricultural sector have engaged in a dialogue at the Animal Feed Summit to address some challenges facing the industry and how to develop alternative feed sources to achieve animal feed sustainability.
The Summit which was organised by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development in collaboration with Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID) and Sahel Consulting drew participants from the academia, feed industry and other agricultural value chain players.
The Executive Director of CJID, Dr Tobi Oluwatola, while highlighting the importance and aim of the summit, said feed represents 70 per cent of livestock production.
He said Nigeria is producing less than 25 percent of its demand for livestock, hence there is the need to buckle up in feed feed production.
“We in collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and Sahel Consulting decided for this particular dialogue was that animal feed is a very critical aspect of the value chain because it represents 70 per cent of the cost of livestock production, and livestock production is where we get our proteins and we are really lagging behind on that, we are producing less than 25 per cent of our demand, so we really need to buckle up in that respect, that is why that aspect has been tackled.
“But again, it doesn’t end here, the conversation, next year, it will be another aspect that we will pick in other sectors as well.”
He said they hope to achieve self-sufficiency in animal feed production at the end of the summit and create millions of jobs especially for the youth.
“The goal we hope to achieve is to make sure that we have self-sufficiency in terms of animal feed production, make sure that we create jobs. In the animal feed industry, we believe we can create 20 million jobs.
“We also hope to ensure that the cost of livestock production in general comes down, and that may mean that there will need for some subsidies”, he added.
Fisayo Kayode, Senior Program Manager at Sahel Consulting said this year’s summit is looking beyond the conventional feed sources to seeing how they can also integrate farmers into understanding the importance of sourcing alternative feed resources.
She said the reason why Sahel Consulting is partnering with the Ministry of Agriculture and CJID is to ensure that they also putting out there what the farmers are facing, what their needs are and how the different stakeholders both public and private sectors can meet there needs through partnerships, collaborations, coming up development initiatives that can promote productions as well as local and foreign investments.
“We are glad to work with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and the CJID on this programme. This is the second summit for the National Animal Feed.
“We are happy that we are here for the second time because feed access is very critical for farmers. We work on a project called Advancing Local Diary Development in Nigeria and we have seen how smallholder diary farmers struggle to access feed.
“This year we are looking beyond the conventional feed sources to seeing how we can also integrate farmers into understanding the importance of sourcing alternative feed resources.
“In our livestock world, we like to say that feed security is also food security because as we are aware in Nigeria we mostly rely on animal sourced food to meet our protein requirements, and because of our growing population, we need to ensure that we have enough availability of livestock and sourced feed.
“So, we need to ensure that we are producing enough feeds to feed these livestock, because without quality feed they wouldn’t produce as much as we require to result into the availability of animal sourced protein for the human population”, Kayode added.
Programs Research Officer, Agriculture Desk at CJID, Ntiedo Ekott added that “this is the second National Feed Summit that we bring stakeholders together to discuss on the National Feed Policy document and also to harness the alternative feed resources supply and to look at the core challenges that affects food and feed security in the country.
“We are hoping to get the policy document on feed and food supply ready on time, then to push it to the government for effective implementation. The core of the whole thing is food sufficiency and food security in the country”.
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