The Executive Secretary of Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria (ARCN), Professor Garba Sharubutu, in this interview, speaks on the efforts being made by the Council to achieve food security. He also speaks on extension service revamp and many others. COLLINS NNABUIFE brings excerpts.
PREVIOUSLY, you said you are working on early maturing crops for farmers, can you mention these crops and how far you have gone with that?
In the wisdom of the Minister of Agriculture, there is always this threat of hunger and lack of guarantee for food security in view of the challenges that are staring us in the face. We have identified the early maturing crops as cowpea, maize, rice, millet, yam, cassava which can stabilize the country given the threat challenges we are witnessing. The point is that the late maturing crops as important as they are their gestation period is long, and because it is long, in between one harvesting season and the other, you are definitely going to have problems.
First of all, what are the threats? It is the threat of production losses which are drought, lack of arrival of inputs on time. But what informed the decision of the Minister? It is the issue of Covid-19 and the issue of insecurity.
Situations where you cannot guarantee staying off your farm for a very long time constitute a serious threat to the food security situation. So based on that, let us look at early maturing crop, these are the staple crops we have in the country where somebody can easily take it with little ingredients. In addition, their cost of production is low and in the southern part of this country, the weather is such that we can have plantings per growing seasons.
If you go to somewhere like Ekiti or Ibadan, Imo, you will find out that you can grow maize twice per season. However it will require a good knowledge of the crop, its growing habit and nutrient requirement to achieve this, and this is where the experts come in.
We have to improve our extension activities. Extension mainly was with the Agricultural Development Programs (ADPs), but you know after the exhaustion of the funds provided by international donor agencies, the ADPs all of a sudden went low completely because the various state governments were unable to sustain it. The personnel may be there, but extension is not all about just personnel, there are facilities and equipment that you have to use in order to carry out this extension activities.
When you get to farmers, there is what we call extension teaching methods, and there are various ways in which you can reach a farmer in order to sell an idea to him; motion pictures, palm flex, still pictures, the language of communication, community meetings, and there are situations where you need to use a combination of these methods, and the quickest one we have found to have serious impact is while having community meetings, you also need to use pictures both motion and the rest, so we have to provide these facilities.
In addressing about 100 farmers, if you don’t have public address system, while you are talking, other persons will be distracted because they are not hearing what you are saying, and so your extension teaching method will not be effective. So you need a public address system and vehicles to move from one village to another to hold meetings, you also need video materials to demonstrate how to undertake good farming practice. All these are provided for in the Act establishing ARCN.
So it is based on that and in order to improve extension work that the Minister has instructed us to have outreach centres, continue with the adopted village programs, adopted school programs, and in this situation, our research centres and colleges can get to a rural community where farming activities takes place. We are also encouraging our institutions to establish centres in the rural areas and schools for the community. These centres will each have a classroom, store to keep our materials, meeting hall, then we will also provide the extension teaching materials within that environment. Apart from that, we are also expected to have a place we keep our demonstration livestock or we have a small demonstration crop farm, so that as we are teaching them, they are seeing it practically.
What are you also doing about producing drought and flood-tolerant seeds?
These are the production issues we are talking about, when you say you are developing seed, you are targeting increase in production, you are targeting resistance to disease, you are targeting resistance to drought and of course resistance to flood. So that is what seed development is all about. Sometime in 2014 or 2015 there was this issue of Tuta Absoluta in Tomato, it was our research institute that came up with remedy, and National Horticultural Research Institute (NIHORT) was able to develop measures for which to counter Tuta Absoluta. That is exactly what we’re trying to do, when the Armyworm of maize was threatening this Country, IAR&T and IAR had to come in with the solution.
When we say early maturing, it is early maturing because it will be able to mature quickly, sometime in 1986 or 1987, there was this mass replacement of our palm trees with what we have been able to develop at Nigerian Institute for Oil-Palm Research (NIFOR), we were replacing the tall late maturing palm trees with short early maturing ones, but that does not mean that we will neglect the aspect of disease or drought resistance. The process of developing some of these new products has to do with testing. When you say you have developed a new product, for example, the cowpea that was jointly achieved by AATF, IAR and ARCN, immediately they brought the seed, we had to test run it against even disease of humans, how does it affect humans? How does it affect the environment? How does it affect productivity? What will drought do to it? So all these things are part of the process of developing our seeds.
To be fair with most of our Research Institutes, we have had a lot of achievements, different varieties have been produce of rice, wheat, millet, tomato, okra, onion, cocoa even the late maturing crops like palm trees and all the rest.
If you go to NIFOR, we have a lot of seedlings of Date Palm; we have a lot of seedlings of oil palm that are there available for people for pick up. If you go to Cocoa Research Institute, we have seedlings, people are not really coming up and of course the ministry has been sponsoring the production.
The Cocoa research Institute have produced a lot of seedlings, and currently they are distributing them. The only problem we are having there is the buy-in of the private sector or the state governments. If the state governments will undertake this challenge of having the seedlings and seed to be distributing to their people, just like they are getting fertilizer and distributing, it would be the best, let the state government be involved and from state government, private individuals can easily key in.
What are the steps you are taking to get the buy-in of Nigerians to accept these seeds which are genetically improved?
There is a pyramid of adoption in extension agriculture, and there are about 4 categories, we have the innovators, we have the early majority, we have the late majority, and we have the laggards. These laggards take a long time before they are convinced, the early majority will convince themselves to do it after they have seen some other people do it. Then of course the late majority, they are also good, they only need time to be convinced and which is a shorter time, but the Innovators, immediately you introduce something, and they pick it, they are the risk takers.
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Most of our strains, species of our crops are fading away because our species are not protected. Number one, how many gene banks do we have in this country?
The forest is being debased ether from grazing, over-grazing or wood cutting, all these things are happening. So if you take it just from the point of view of our forest being depleted, you know that already this plant protection is a serious thing.
Look at our Breeders, they are not being rewarded for what they have been able to produce. So eventually what we are having now is foreign species of crops. Whatever we develop in this country, we undermine it but we go outside the country to open arms and bring in foreign seeds.
You will wake up tomorrow and you find out that our shear butter is not there. You will wake up and find out that our locust bean trees are not there. The variety of maize that we have here is no more our own; the type of rice we are growing now is no more our own. Most of the current varieties we farm are imported into the country. These laws are important if we are to achieve self sufficiency in food production.
So we have to protect our species of yam that is nutritious, we have to protect our own specie of rice, our groundnut, it is our own, we need to protect that, and that is the importance of that bill, it has to be protected. So many agencies of the Federal Ministry are expected to be involved in this like the National Agricultural Quarantine Service, National Biotechnology Development Agency, ARCN, our Research Institutes; we’re supposed to be happy with the arrival of this, so we can develop our indigenous work
Look at what is happening, all attempts to produce milk in this country, proved abortive because we have not been able to work on our own local breed in order to make them viable.
Why can’t we take the typical Sokoto Gudali or the white Fulani or the Rahaji and many more, why are we not developing that in order to give us something because our environment is there, look at what has happened to Shika Brown birds developed by the National Animal Production Research Institute, Shika, ABU Zaria. We developed a breed called Shika Brown which is resistant o disease, good in both meat and egg production, and we have totally abandoned it.
To me, the National Assembly has done well for passing the bill, and, the President has done the right thing to actually sign this bill to become an Act in order to protect what is our own.
Recently the President accepted the proposal of the Minister to develop the grazing reserves and the Forest, this one thing that people have neglected from that approval.
Forest is a conservation unit to make sure that people don’t enter there and destroy our reserves. People have not actually read some of the laws establishing these grazing reserves but talk from the point of view of ignorance. These reserves are established with some set rule and regulations on how the are managed, For example, the one that is from Yobe, while they approved for the typical Fulani man to be there, the bastardization of trees in that place is forbidden, you cannot cut trees there, because if you allow them to cut the trees, all the locust bean trees will be cut down, all the fruit trees will be cut down, all the trees that has to do with timber will be cut down. Again the settlers in this forest are not allowed to do any form of mining activities. So, the pastoralists have limitations and dos and donts as they use the reserve. Unfortunately we tend to assume that the pastoralist have been donated that land.
As for the forest reserve, the action by the President is really important given the fact that these forest reserves have been neglected to the extent that the have provided a hideout for the criminals.
There are also economic trees that grow naturally in the forest that needs to be protected. The case of Shea butter, locust bean tress, African black olive which provide for the livelihood of rural communities.
We sent a team from NIFOR to Plateau State to study the economic viability of the Olive tree. You have the trees there but they are growing in the wild with low production capacity and a gestation period of over 30 years. Work done has shown that the gestation period can be reduced and production improved these all points to the need to develop the forest.
So a good number of advantages will be there following the signing of the PVP bill into law.
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