Why NIHORT is giving land to farmers —Attanda, Executive Director

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2 years ago

Muhammed Lawal Attanda was in March 2022 appointed as the Executive Director of the National Horticultural Research Institute (NIHORT), headquartered in Ibadan. He speaks with PAUL OMOROGBE about the steps he has taken to empower horticultural farmers, promote research output and establish harmony in the institute once known for crisis.

HOW has it been leading NIHORT since last year?

It has been quite thrilling and challenging. Thrilling in the sense that we are meeting our targets and achieving our goals and challenging in the sense that it has provided an opportunity to expand our frontiers of horticultural farming activities in Nigeria and meet the targets of our stakeholders, specifically the mandate as given by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and our supervisory agency, which is the Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria.

Opportunities have opened up to meet the targets of the Federal Government on food security, food sufficiency and affordability, especially relating to horticultural crops. And as you know, there is nothing you are going to eat without horticultural inputs – talk of tomatoes or when you talk about vegetables when you talk about the spices for nutritional and medicinal purposes.

So far, so good with the support of the Federal Government and the Federal Ministry of Agriculture as well as the Agricultural Research Council and our staff here.

What are the opportunities that you have identified?

For example, pick any of the horticultural crops like mango. Nigeria is the fourth or fifth largest producer of mango in the world and we are lucky that anywhere you plant it, it grows and we have it in abundance. Opportunity came last year and we met some challenges on the ground and we were able to surmount them. We beefed-up security, we retrieved most of the orchards as a result of the COVID break and industrial action. We were able to retrieve most of our orchards. So this year, we had a bumper harvest of mango. The market could not absorb the quantity of mangoes that we had for eating raw. So we had to add value. We have the technology here in NIHORT over the years on how to process mango into juice organically without adding any preservatives or additives. So, we did that and brought it to sell. That is one of the opportunities. At the onset of next year’s fruiting of mangoes, we are going to take that technology to the farmers.

There are other examples of opportunities: the Federal Government has mandated us under the Ministry of Agriculture on unemployed youths across the geo-political zones. The project has been ongoing for three or more years now. When I came, I said why don’t we model it and when it succeeds we can replicate it across the country. For your information, we have our out stations across the country in each of the six geo-political zones. We have in Baguada, Dadinkowa, Otukpa, Riyom, and Mbato.

As we speak, we have more than 40 people in our horticultural academy for youths selected across the local governments in Oyo State. We have done the lowland farming which is irrigated planting. We did that between October last year and March this year. Now, we are doing upland which is rain-fed. The outcome has been fantastic.

We trained, monitored and mentored them. We gave them stipends for 10 months and inputs to handle both irrigated and rain fed farming. We asked them what they want to plant. Some are going for vegetables, tomatoes, pumpkins and all that. We have our marketing unit that provides off-takers for these products. We have a sharing formula and we also pay tax to the government.

Another opportunity I can tell you is that we were able to resuscitate our power system. So our gene bank is really working now. We are able to collect germ plasm from across the country. When we have this germ plasm in our gene bank, most of the extinct plants will be in our reservoir. These are some of the opportunities that we have. We have a broad-based system that we are trying to build.

Now let us talk about the challenges

Challenges are continuous things. When you solve one problem another one comes. Generally, challenges of funding are there. We need to optimise the little resources that we have, but we don’t mind if those resources are also uplifted. That will go a long way in solving our problems. Another challenge we have is that when you have a system, there is need for synergy. When you want to achieve something there is the issue of bureaucracy and disconnected communications. We are trying to surmount these things.

Another example of challenges is this. Recently, we released three varieties of tomatoes that can adapt to all the agricultural zones in Nigeria. We have three of them each for the northern, southern and central zones. We have drought resistant varieties of tomato now. The challenge now is we need funds to do the seed multiplication. So, we must have the breeder seed, the foundation seed and the certified seed that will go out to the farmers. We have written to our parent ministry and they are working on that. We hope the funds will come.

Getting what we have to the end user, I will not say it is a challenge, but it is one of the constraints that we have. For example, when I came, we did not have project vehicles to go to the hinterlands. So we need to procure them. But by and large we have been surmounting these challenges. For the tomato varieties that we released, we are in the process of seed multiplication so that we can have the certified seeds that can go to farmers.

Another challenge is the purchasing power of the farmers. With the outbreak of tuta absoluta disease, we sprung into action. We have a breakthrough technology to cater for the outbreak. We produced a solution and took it to the field, but the farmers could not really pay for it. They need a subsidised rate for it. But we did not have the capacity to subsidise this bio-pesticide for them. It is organically made and environmentally-friendly. It is 100 percent locally-made, certified and we even have a patent on it. But the farmers cannot afford it. So, the ministry has to come in. We are in that process now to get it across to the farmers. I believe with all hands on deck we can surmount all the challenges.

Did you know that NIHORT used to be called ‘NI-HOT’ because it was going from one crisis to another? How are you able to surmount this?

I met it but it has been resolved now. NIHORT is now ‘NI-cool’ as you can see even from the environment now. One thing I always say is that it takes two to tango. And the most powerful thing in the world is effective communication. You see Ukraine and Russia fighting now, but they will still come to a roundtable and discuss. So, why don’t we discuss before going to war?

When I came in, I started consulting. And there is nobody you talk to that will not listen. Even if you talk to a madman calmly he will listen to you. But when you talk and you keep a trap or a cane beside you, nobody will listen to you. We do a lot of consultation. We have a mode of effective communication and transparency, justice and equity and fairness. The moment people see that, they keep calm and listen to you. But if there is rancour or some element of injustice or unfairness, things will not go well. But by and large, NIHORT is cool now and we are moving ahead. If you move around and do your random sampling you can see that a lot has been achieved in that area.

Where do you intend to achieve in NIHORT by the time your tenure is over?

I am looking forward to a perfect working system and working environment whereby virtually all our operations is auto-piloted. For example, if I am going to the field during the dry season, I don’t need to tell anyone that I need irrigation. If I am going to prepare my land, I don’t need to call farm management to tell them that land is to be prepared. They know everything that needs to be done. I am looking forward to that kind of system. That is what we are trying to put in place now. There will be synergy. We will work across the board and not at cross purposes. And we have been doing things in that direction even in our next line of research activities. I am looking for a working system where things flow seamlessly. I am looking for a strong institution and not strong individuals.

I learnt NIHORT is giving land to farmers. How does that work?

There is a policy from the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development that we should increase the acreage of land cultivated. I think that was in 2020 when we were coming out of COVID lockdown. All the agencies and parastatals were communicated that we should open up lands. The ministry did theirs too. So, we in our own capacity, since the Federal Government has given us land – even here in Ibadan we have one of the lowest, in Mbato we have over 500 hectares, in Baguada, we have 400 hectares. Here in Ibadan, we have only 200 or 300 hectares.

In obeying the instruction of the Federal Ministry of Agric and Rural Development, we evaluated farmers and stakeholders across the agricultural value chain. We verified their authenticity – I am not talking about briefcase or contractor farmers. We are talking about real farmers.

We evaluated them and some of them met the criteria. So, we went into an MOU with them. And then we gave them some part of the land and we are transferring technology to them. The problem we have in the agricultural sector in Nigeria, and not just the horticultural sector, is passing the output of research to end users. This is due to proximity. When we have them close to us, we can monitor what they are doing and transfer the knowledge to them. These fields will also serve as demonstration plots whereby we transfer the output of our research to them, and then they see it. It is just like a mentoring and model system. So, we gave them some portion of the land. However, it is our mandate crops that we asked them to plant; anything outside that we do not take.

In dealing with them, we took some of them as representatives of the group of farmers either from their cooperatives or the stakeholders, and these are the people we interface with. Periodically, it is renewed. It may be two years or three years. It is not perpetual because this land belongs to the government and the government may need it at any time.

More so, we are doing this because of what we call rotational cropping or fallow cropping. You use this part this year and when the nutrients are depleted we move to another part. We practice organic farming too. It is well designed and thought-out based on the instruction from the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.

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