The Director-General of an ambitious Nongovernmental organisation, Nigeria Young Farmers Network (NYFN), Promise Amahah, in this interview with SANDRA OBOCHI and DEBORAH OLUSEGUN, identified skill gaps amongst others as the bane of the country’s agriculture sector, pointing out that “we are collective agricultural illiterates.” Excerpts:
Before the discovery of crude oil in Nigeria, the agricultural sector was the main revenue earner for the country, now that oil revenue is dwindling do you foresee the nation going back to the heydays of agriculture?
Agriculture is limitless, so, yes the country has started retracing its steps towards agriculture. That is why a lot of young people are beginning to show interest in Agriculture.
You have an ambitious plan to promote agriculture amongst Nigerian youths, sadly a vast majority of farmers are complaining of lack of support from governments at all levels in the country, what is your take on this?
You need to identify the kind of support you need because, for me, the plan we have is a knowledge-driven plan. Many people ask for support and the government has invested so much in the agricultural sector and there are no results.
There are no results because you invest money when there is a lack of capacity and once there is a lack of capacity, investments become useless because it cannot be converted to productivity. The requirements for supports for me is on one side and on the other side is the need for knowledge gaps to be identified and provided.
If you ask for support and you are given support, you lack the knowledge of how to maximize the support, that support will still die in your hands.
Earlier in your submission, you talked about farmers capacity, in specific terms what do you mean?
Capacity in this respect means knowledge and skills, most farmers do not even have business skills, they do not know how to do record keeping and lack understanding of agribusiness investment. An average farmer should be a person that has the knowledge of investment, have the knowledge of technology and equipment and machines.
Capacity building needs training and skills development, you need to be able to provide the necessary information to them and skills so they know how to make better agricultural decisions. However, going back to agriculture does not determine success in the sector.
They are two things different things, if you go back to agriculture and you still do the wrong things, you cannot get the right results, so going back to agriculture is one thing and making critical decisions that will lead to agricultural development is totally another thing.
Why is the cost of locally produced foodstuffs in Nigeria more expensive?
Answer: For instance, we hear that Nigeria supplies power to Ghana and that country experience more power than even Nigeria that supplies it. So, if you spend N500 to produce 1kg of rice and it costs your contemporary in Ghana N100 to produce the same quantity of rice, both of you cannot sell at the same prices.
So, that is the reason local products are much more expensive than imported products. Countries like Thailand has relatively (easier) access to power. They have a low cost of production, their interest rate for small businesses are relatively low, in fact, outside this country, you can get an interest rate on funding for as low as 3 per cent but here, the banks charge as high as 25 to 30 percent as interest rates.
It explains why we can never break even and this is one of the issues we are set to address in the organization we are promoting. We can start fixing the critical issues that lead to expensive locally produced commodities.
Ordinarily, it is expected that locally produced rice should be a lot cheaper. For people producing rice, if you factor the cost of diesel into the cost of a bag of rice and transportation from farm to the processing facility, it becomes very expensive.
Now, Nigeria has one of the cheapest labour rates globally. It is not enough to say consume made in Nigeria goods if made in Nigeria goods are not affordable, the consumption becomes a challenge.
And, that is why you see customs officials always battling with smugglers who bring cheaper goods from outside. Once those cheaper goods come in from outside, the average Nigeria is not worried about patriotism.
If they buy local rice today and cannot afford it tomorrow will it make sense? So, with the little they have, they can afford cheaper foreign rice and still have something left. This leaves a need for public and private partnership in addressing the infrastructure gaps. A lot of young people are excited about poultry farming but the issues are enormous. So, we cannot run back to a system we have not fixed.
When border closure was announced, I wrote to the President Muhammadu Buhari, warning that Nigeria was ill-prepared for closure of the border when our local system of production has not been strengthened. And, such a drastic step was to be taken when there was something in place to suffice for the loss.
In Nigeria, we are collective agricultural illiterates, being that we lack knowledge about how the agricultural business works. And, the business does not work in isolation, for example for each maize farmer, there is a requirement for a supplier of fertilizer, a thresher and so on. There is a connected economy across every value chain in agriculture and we need to embrace this economy and to do that is a function of knowledge.
The government should invest more in public enlightenment for capacity building. So young people now know that agriculture is not an invitation to poverty you pick one value chain and harness it for profit.
There are reports that Nigerian agricultural produce, when exported, are rejected due to poor yield. What is your organisation doing to make sure youths do not encounter this problem?
It is still linked to the knowledge gap. We are educating young people to know that this is the reason why they cannot export to certain people and this is beyond yield.
It is a function of organic capacity, most of these farmers are more aware of chemical fertilizers to produce crops and the international community does not want this, thy prefer organically produced crops and so we need to learn how to produce organic crops. We learn the standards of international export. Remember when we tried to export yam from Benue, the yams were rejected at the port. One major issue was that before the yams got to the United Kingdom most have gotten spoilt, packaging, preservation are important.
Recently, I got an order for 5,000 tonnes of potato to America, we went round to from Ogbomoso to Jos and it was difficult to find farmers that will qualify for the standards required. So, who is training our farmers on quality. Not only training them, but helping them identify opportunities in that standard. Scientists and researchers who are from our academic institutions can develop solutions and innovation for the preservation of crop that they can make money from and provide that as a service to farmers who are also exporters. So beyond just providing knowledge and information, we connect them to the opportunities.
So your platform also serves as a consultancy platform?
It is called extension advisory, it is also called agricultural extension. Farmers are trained on best practices formerly called global best practices that if you want to have more returns of investment from your agricultural activity, this is the way to go.
So within the network, we have members of the network that their responsibility is to transfer this knowledge and capacity down to the grassroots. That is why we have our membership from ward to local government and then state government so, we can coordinate such extension services of our member. But remember what we is not giving out dollars but knowledge that will help to make better decisions from the business.