Stakeholders in the agricultural sector have presented a report on the challenges of food security and proffer solutions on how the country can overcome the challenges.
The report which is part of the HortiNigeria Programme, witnessed the presence of heads of commodity associations and directors at the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, lecturers, farmers, and other development partners.
In his remarks, the Country Lead of, the Netherlands African Business Council, Kabiru Ademoh, explained that the report was to measure the impact of government policies regarding the economy.
He said: “We are really trying to measure the impact of some of the policies on the economy. As a business council, we have our foot on the ground. We understand agribusiness, we understand the context both in Nigeria and on other continents.
“So what we have done in this situation is to measure the impact of certain policies, certain systemic shocks, how it is affecting the farmers.
“We get those data and we merge our quantitative data on the field of what has changed with the perception of the farmers. What we are able to find out is that a lot of the perception of the farmers matches with what we are noticing on the field.
“We believe that this will serve as a way to help our policy makers make better policies that help the farmers to be more productive.”
Furthermore, Ademoh likened the inefficient agricultural system to the continued war between Russia and Ukraine, post-COVID-19 pandemic recovery, to the removal of fuel subsidy by the President’s administration.
“So what we studied on this were some systemic shocks on some government policies that ranged from the effect of global challenges, like the war in Ukraine and Russia, to the post-pandemic recovery, down to the removal of the fuel subsidies, the fiscal policies of the central bank in trying to stabilize the naira, and also some of our border restrictions and import restrictions as it relates to agriculture.
“So what we have done is to take some of these factors, measure how it affects vegetable farmers in Nigeria, particularly in Ogun, Oyo, Kaduna and Kano.
“So what we have seen affecting the farmers is a rise in production costs. While we see a lot of the farmers improving their productivity, their profitability has not really increased.
“So we noticed a lot of farmers losing a lot of their profits to higher energy costs, to higher cost of inputs.
“We also noticed a lot of farmers not being able to reinvest properly or scale their operations because, with the advent of the cashless economy, a lot of their financial histories are lost.
“Most of these people use financial services from third parties like the POS vendors. So what we noticed is that a lot of farmers are not able to document their financial history, which makes it very opaque and very unattractive for formal financial institutions to help them with financing that would have helped them to scale through.”
He, however, recommended what he called the Climate Smart Horticultural Fund and the Dutch Diamond approach.
“Fund will pull resources either from the traditional banks or from impact investors so that there are ways for people that want to invest in climate-smart horticultural, to have a cheaper way of accessing financing.
“We also want this fund to be able to give out grants to young business owners that want to go into the sector but do not have the financial capacity to use some of those innovations, like smarter irrigations, better hybrid seeds, some of the fertilizers that are out of their reach.
“We hope that with this climate smart horticultural fund, we can channel and funnel investment both from the private sector, both from the government, both from donor agencies into this fund and it will support in scaling and expanding our vegetable growing sector.”
Explaining the Dutch Diamond approach, Ademoh said: “What we try to do is create a high-level delegation that represents different parts of the value chain.
“We have people in banking, we have people that make policies, we have people that represent the farmers. We believe that cascading it down to the top will get the farmers to feel the impact of policies. But the policies have to be shaped in a way that will reflect everybody in the chain of opinion.
“If we have policies been developed just by the bankers, it might not favour some of the farmer groups. But with this approach of the Dutch Diamond, we have the knowledge institution on the table, we have the bankers on the table so everyone is represented.”
According to him, “we have been able to reach, through the HortiNigeria 63, 000 farmers across North and South of Nigeria in over 3 to 4 years and that was the target of reaching entrepreneurs in the South and smallholder farmers in the North. We were looking at 60,000. But we have gone over the target.”
The President of All Farmers Association of Nigeria (AFAN), Kabir Ibrahim noted that the government was deliberate in expanding food production through collaboration with international partners.
and then