In this interview, COLLINS NNABUIFE spoke with the founder and national president of African Young Farmers Association, Bakare Oladimeji, on some of the government policies in agriculture geared towards attracting youths to the sector.
What is your organization all about?
The African Young Farmers Association (AYFA) is a network of young agriculture entrepreneurs which later developed into a Non-governmental Organization in 2010, and was incorporated in 2012 as needed NGO providing support for young farmers and also encouraging young people especially the unemployed to take advantage of the opportunities in the agricultural sector for a means of livelihood.
How are you convincing the youths to venture into agriculture which they perceive to be stressful?
We are making them see the positive side of agriculture, if everybody looks at the negative side of agriculture, nobody will want to go into it, but there are a lot of positive side of it and we have believe in the prospect, even if the idea of the prospect is not enough, you have to also understand how you can break through so many challenges because there are a lot of challenges involved.
So, when you make them identify the challenges and give them options and way forward to addressing and overcoming those challenges, then they will be willing to involve in agriculture.
How will you rate government’s encouragement of youths in agriculture?
The body language shows government is possibly disposed to supporting agriculture especially youth involvement, but the reality on ground is that the youths are not feeling the impact of the government in the efforts to mobilize the youths from unemployment and giving them agriculture as an option.
If you look at the ones that are farming, they are facing frustration every now and then, agriculture should be taken more seriously by the government.
Government should invest more efforts, energy and resources into making agriculture lucrative and acceptable to the youths, presently as it is, it is not, because even those in agriculture are already are already finding it difficult to sustain and you are now bringing in people who are looking at the obstacles and challenges, they are finding it difficult to believe that this sector can absolve them.
There are some of the things we are looking at, government should realize that it is high time they put more attention on support services that will make agriculture to be more easily acceptable to the youths and those ones in it can sustain within it and those ones that are coming in can feel they are going into a sector that can absolve them and provide them with tangible means of wealth creation, except that, am sure Nig erian youths will not want to go into farming.
In your programme, do you have any provision for mechanization and what do you think of government’s support in mechanization?
Yes, we have a support service to assist our youth farmers especially the smallholder farmers, micro scale farmers to see how they can scale up their production to a large scale, and that will also necessitate the provision of mechanization services.
Government is not doing well in this regard at all, looking at the land tenure system and land acquisition. We can’t be saying we are promoting agriculture and land will be very difficult to access, when there is no farm land, there won’t be farming.
So the government needs to first look into how to make land accessible and available to prospective farmers and also make more land available to farmers.
Also, the government should look for how to provide services in the area mechanization and equipment; we can be talking of upgrading our production and still be talking of manual labour.
Right now, it is difficult to access tractor, even when you see one, it is very expensive for the farmers to afford. These are areas that make cost of production to be high compared to what is available in other countries.
So the government need to synergies with the private sector and encourage the participation of private sector in the area of farm mechanization, agriculture input supply, agriculture service providing, because these are the things that will make the end users who are the farmers to become more comfortable and interested in expanding agriculture, but if you are doing a small production and things gets rough a day you are not making much from it because of production capacity, then how are you going to increase it, so the government need to look into it.
For instance, in Nigeria, we don’t have any company assembling tractors, they are all imported and the cost of tractors are not affordable, even groups are struggling to acquire one, it is beyond the reach of an average individual and it is not even available.
Government should be able to design policies and put in place strategies that can attract investors, private participation into agriculture, government alone can’t do this. Government really needs to look at other alternatives of enticing and encouraging people to take advantage of this opportunity we have to expand food production in Nigeria.
Is there any way you are providing funds for the farmers, and what is your take on agriculture funding by government?
In the last couple of years, the response of government toward agriculture financing shows some positivism, but in reality, with this policies and projections nothing has been done.
Agriculture financing is not easily accessible, the banks are not doing well at all, the procedures involved in accessing fund is too difficult for a typical rural farmer to access. The frustration is too much, if funding cannot be accessed, how are we going to promote agriculture. The micro finance banks who are supposed to support the micro farmers with resources, they are not there to support the farmers.
Government need to do a lot of work in enhancing proper dissemination of fund to farmers through the agriculture financing.
and then