I cannot be a minister of food importation Agric Minister Daily Trust Category: Agriculture Published on Wednesday, 05 June 2013 05:00 Written by Mannir Dan Ali, Tosin Omoniyi & Musa Abdullahi Krishi Share In this interview, Dr Akinwumi Adesina enumerates the giant strides made by the ministry under his watch including the impact the Growth Enhancement Scheme is already generating in rural farming and development. Excerpts: We would love to know the key areas of achievements your tenure has brought about? At the start of the administration we made it very clear that although Nigeria has been depending solely on oil for many years, oil alone cannot sustain the economy. Nigeria has potentials in agriculture. For me the greatest challenge is that the potential has always gone to waste. In the north we have vast expanse of land. We grow maize, we grow wheat, we grow sorghum, and we have cotton, soya beans and so on. But we let all that go. We have 84 million hectares of land of which no more than 40 percent of it is cultivated. We used to be number one in cotton production in West Africa which employed many people in the north. We used to be number one in palm oil production but now we import from Malaysia and Indonesia. We were number two in cocoa production in the world but we have lost that to Ivory Coast, Ghana and Cameroon, and following up very quickly is Indonesia. We have huge potentials and capacity that we are not unlocking. The reason for this is that way too long we had taken agriculture as a development activity in which we were simply managing poverty in rural areas. So fundamentally and structurally for me the first thing I had to do was that we shift from agriculture as a development program to agriculture as a business program. Everything about agriculture is business. Seed, fertilizer, irrigation, storage, processing, adding value, logistics, transport, export are all business activities. The drive when I became minister was to try to unlock these huge potentials. Nobody eats potentials, it has to be unlocked. I came into this job with urgency because our dependency on oil is becoming a problem in the sense that we are not creating jobs. We have a lot of unemployment in the rural areas and yet we are pounded with imported food. For me as a minister I cannot take that. I cannot be a minister of food importation with all that potential. We spend billions of naira everyday importing rice. We can grow rice from Sokoto to Kebbi to Zamfara, Kano, Katsina, Jigawa to Buachi. We can grow it in the South too. We spend so much in importing wheat. You take a look at the entire Yobe, Kano areas; these are good areas where we can grow wheat. We are spending 635 billion naira importing wheat which doesn’t make sense. Second, we have begun a very serious process of import substitution. When you are dependent on food import you are creating jobs for other countries. You are making their economy to work but at home you are creating joblessness. As we spend money on importing food, the naira weakens. Foreign exchange goes down. Our farmers are displaced by those needless imports. Finally we create insecurity because people cannot find jobs. The third thing we have done is that we have cleaned up the corruption in the fertiliser distribution business. The business was very corrupt in the past. It was a secret business in which some powerful people controlled the entire distribution business. Government bought and sold fertiliser but it never got to the farmers. Not more than 11 percent of farmers got the fertiliser sold by the government. You go to the north we have more land and you find out that people were being given fertiliser in bowls. Government was spending so much on fertiliser but poverty was rising in the rural areas. I lived in Maradi, in Niger for one year where I did my PhD thesis in the 80s. I saw trailers of fertiliser being moved from Katsina to Maradi and other parts of Niger. That was how we were doing it. Government was subsidizing corruption and not farmers of Nigeria. It took exactly 90 days to clean up that corruption of 40 years. How did you do that? We had to attack the corruption at the source. The source was that the government was doing what it was not supposed to do. It was buying and distributing fertiliser. There was not a single supply chain for fertiliser in the country. There was none for seed. The only thing was get government contract and such people will bring 50 percent sand and 50 percent fertiliser. They will buy grain and sell to government and farmers as seed. It was a system where the government was constantly losing money but a number of fat cats were getting rich all the time. We took government totally from the business of buying fertiliser. Look, government does not buy Fanta or Coke but if you go to any part of the country you will find these products. People were making a lot of money from the fertiliser business, people in government, politicians and many others. It was just a big racket. The only losers were the millions of farmers in Nigeria. Look at Tack fertiliser. It was supplying at 1.80 percent. Before we used to have a system where people will go to the dealer, get letters, then come to the ministry of agriculture and get contract. Today you won’t find anybody here. The reason is that we developed a system that works. What was the result? Last year the seed company sold on their own 1.5 billion naira worth of seed. This is the first time a fertiliser supply chain is being developed in Nigeria. And the fertiliser company last year sold 15 billion naira worth of fertiliser straight to farmers not to government. That is 100 million dollars. We were able to help our seed companies get loans from the banks as a result of this. That is the first time they ever got loans from Nigerian banks. The banks lent 3 billion naira last year to the seed companies and agro dealers. This year as a result of the success we had, the banks want to lend 60 billion naira. For Tack alone, Main street Bank is lending 6.8 billion naira to them and agro dealers. The banks have changed the way they look at agriculture. Farmers say it is still the same for them as they don’t have access to the fertiliser. And some of them do not have access to soft loans due to the harsh conditions attached. How do you react to this? Let’s leave the issue of loans for now and look at the access to fertiliser. Last year we decided that we must know our farmers. If you are spending money on farmers as the government is doing and you do not know them it is like spending money on faceless people. There will not be any accountability in the business. We decided to have a data base of the farmers. We started with 4.2 million farmers last year in our data base. This year we have registered 10 million farmers. We are doing it so that we can target and reach them. Last year we launched the e-wallet system where we can reach farmers directly by phones. We reached 1.5 million farmers which means we impacted on about 8 million people if you look at the average farm size which is about five members in a family. They got two bags of fertilisers and all their seeds free. They got 40 kg free for maize and rice. Two bags of fertiliser will give about 200 kg of maize or thereabouts. Do you think that is enough? Before the farmers were not getting anything. About 11 percent were getting fertiliser in this country. Now you see them getting something. What I hear is that they need more, not that they are not getting it. Remember we are trying to develop a system and roll the system out nationwide. That is an incredible success to me. Nigeria is the first system, not just in Africa but the world that has developed an electronic wallet system to reach farmers with subsidised products. Today, Brazil, India and several African countries have approached the World Bank, African Development Bank and European Union to take the Nigerian electronic wallet system and scale it up in their countries. Now for the first time as a minister I can tell you who get the fertiliser, when they get it and how they get it. We took a system that was a totally corrupt black hole. We made it into a very transparent system to the extent that last year the system saved the government 25 billion naira. It is a very close partnership between the government, farmers and the state governments. The farmers pay close to 7.2 billion naira, state governments paid 3.8 billion and federal government paid about 5.2 billion naira. It is a system where the federal and state governments and the farmers share cost in fertiliser access. When it comes to the issue of two bags you must know that it is a subsidy and not a gift from government. It is not supposed to replace the fact that farmers should get access to financing opportunities to aid additional input. Also look at the issue of large versus small farmers. I hear people say that they are large farmers. The growth enhancement scheme is not meant for large farmers. For large farmers to think that government should be giving them subsidy is an aberration. That is why we developed financing opportunities for them at the Central Bank to provide access to funds for them at lowered rates. I support large farmers but they have a different instrument for them to use. Get the finance you need at single interest digit and use the funds to buy the input you need. But why are the small farmers still complaining despite what you have done for them? 1.5 million farmers that never got fertiliser or seed before now get them. I can show you the list. We have their numbers and their locations to show you how transparent the process is. Remember we have just started the program and we are scaling up. What is important is that we are targeting farmers and reaching them. They are not getting sand but fertiliser. As we increase the number of our targets we are also reaching more. Of course we have challenges which I will briefly tell you. First of all it is a new program. And as for any new program, it takes time for people to understand it. Also in some areas when the farmers got the alert, they actually thought it was ‘419’ (advanced fee fraud). There was that sceptical component of it. And thirdly, some of the farmers did not actually understand that they needed to actually pay or co-share in the cost of the fertiliser and that it wasn’t a gift, they had to pay 50 percent. Finally we had some areas that had network challenges and we couldn’t reach the farmers. But these are teething problems we would soon overcome. But Nigeria has a much larger number of farmers going by the population of the country... That is incorrect. That is one thing with Nigerians; we throw figures around without actually looking at facts. The farmers in Nigeria are not up to 50 million. It is not everybody that is in the rural area that is a farmer. The dependency ratio is very high which means you have one farmer and many dependants. Therefore you cannot use population as index to determine the farming population. According to FAO the population of Nigerian farmers is between 14.2 to 14.5 million. Before we started 0 percent was covered. So if we have covered over 80 percent we have done well. Are we to expect lesser cries about non access to fertiliser by farmers? The balance of the farmers that were not registered this year will be registered next year. We will cover the entire lot next year. Apart from delivering fertiliser and seed to them for the first time the banks have full information about who these farmers are. So they can roll on savings and loan products to suit their needs. If you are in a business and you don’t know your customers then you are killing the business. You cannot spend money on people you don’t know. Many of the banks are shocked that we were able to come up with the full biometric information of 10 million farmers in one year. We are the only country in Africa with that kind of information. How much did you spend to generate the data? It is not that expensive to generate the data. We simply deployed 11000 enumerators across the country up to the ward level. If you go to any ward in the country you will find out that our staffs have been there. Secondly we used the optical data reader form which is the same one you use for WAEC or JAMB. It is very easy to fill and digitalise. Is the phone for farmers initiative still on? There are a lot of mischievous people out there. They don’t understand and try to misinterpret what the government is trying to do. I was in Suru, Bakalori and other villages where you find farmers all the time. They all got their fertiliser by mobile phone. And look at the revolution in rice that we have in Nigeria. You know people in the north will generally plant their seeds in the main season and wait for the next rainy season. So in that long period there are no jobs, economic activities are low. When we had the flood last year we lost the little rice that we produced, the president said we should embark on dry season rice. For the first time ever the government supported dry season rice production in modern Nigeria. In what way did the government support the initiative? The president gave us 9.3 billion naira. We used part of the funds to deal with the losses of some of those affected by the flood. We then gave fertilisers and seed-two varieties for rice-faro 44 and faro 52. We gave to all farmers free of charge across about ten states-Zamfara, Kebbi, Sokoto, Jigawa, Kano, Bauchi, Niger, Katsina, Kogi and Katsina. We provided them three bags of fertiliser and 50 kg of seeds free of charge. The president said we should give seeds for rice, maize, cotton, cassava or cocoa free of charge because our farmers are not used to using high breeding seeds. So unless they can test it and see if it works they will not use it. We will continue to give them free until they get used to it. For the dry season rice, people said it wasn’t possible that Nigeria cannot feed itself with rice. In one dry season farmers surprised Nigerians with government support. They planted on 264 hectares with production of 1.1 million metric tonnes. You get more yield in the dry season than you get in the main season as there are no diseases. The only things you worry about are the quelea birds. The total amount of rice paddy Nigeria needs to be self sufficient in rice in 2015 is 3.2 million metric tonnes. In one season we did one third of that. Some of the rice importers wanted waivers but I refused. If the farmers in all those areas I mentioned in the Fadama and irrigated areas we have cannot feed Nigeria, then there is a problem. If you look at the north today there is massive revolution going on that has never happened. How are you separating the new initiative in these states from the old initiative? Take the case of Argungu in Kebbi where we supported farmers with improved seeds, fertilisers and pumps so that they can optimise the production, I didn’t say we introduced rice but we supported them to go for massive rice production in the dry season as a matter of policy. In Kebbi for instance they produced a lot of rice in the dry season. One of the farmers told me he had never seen anything like that. And that gives me the confidence that if we continue this way there is no reason Nigeria cannot be self sufficient in rice production. Let’s take the issue of the northern guinea savannah of Nigeria. They are not different from the cerrados of Brazil. The cerrados of Brazil is what they use to produce 75 percent of all they export to other countries. There is no reason why the northern guinea savannah cannot be like that. We cannot become a museum of poverty but we have to create an ocean of wealth in rural area. The way to do it is seeing agriculture as a business. How are you handling the suspicion about the genetically modified seeds amongst the farmers? Are they part of the scheme? Let me talk about one area that is important to me which is cotton seed. When my friend, Bukar Tijani (Minister of State, Agriculture) and I started work in our first year, we looked for pure cotton seed in the whole of Nigeria, we could not find. We had to go to Benin Republic where they had a public organisation which does their own cotton seed. They said our president would have to come and beg their president for the seed. I refused. We went and contracted WACOT, West Africa Cotton Company to produce certified seeds for us. That was how we were able to produce 1570, 000 metric tonnes of high quality cotton seed. We were the ones that supported WACOT in nine locations around the nation. We paid N280 per kilo of seed. The one farmers were getting was N42 and it was poor quality seed. Last year we raised 34000 farmers across nine states in the north and they planted 75 000 hectares across the country with a total production of 240, 000 of cotton. As the agricultural transformation and revolution takes place in Nigeria the demand for seed is rising. It is more than we can cope with. When we started the number of seed companies in the country was eleven. At the end of last year they have grown to seventy. Is it because of the contract allure? We don’t give contracts in the ministry. I don’t sign any fertiliser or seed contract. I don’t sign any for tractors and I will never sign one. The only thing that was going on then was corruption. People would bring in tractors that were refurbished and sell to government. We stopped all that. On the issue of seed they know that if they sell seed to the farmers, the government was already providing money via the electronic wallet to buy them. That is why they are all back into the production of seed. Multinational companies are back into the production of seeds. Saint Gentile, the world’s number one seed company is opening shop in Nigeria in June because they can see the demand for seed rising in Nigeria. In the case of genetically modified cotton, Nigeria should not be afraid of science and technology. What about the case of food for consumption such as rice and maize? We have to start from somewhere. We are the only country in West Africa that does not have high BT quality cotton. Burkina Faso has 183 000 hectares. Why is this important? BT cotton means you don’t use pesticides. The yield is much higher. We don’t have BT cotton here in Nigeria. It means we cannot compete. Their cost of production is going down while ours is going higher. I am for biotechnology. Using biotechnology the research institute in Umudike developed what is known pro-vitamin A cassava. That means we can solve the problem of malnutrition, wastage and stunting just by doing bio-fortification. Take the case of sweet potato. We have released in the country now what we call orange flesh sweet potato. This is sweet potato that has high level of beta carotene. The beta carotene is a precursor of vitamin A. Malnutrition is highest in the northeast and northwest of Nigeria. Wastage and stunting is highest in these areas. If you have bio-fortified sorghum rich in the necessary nutrients because people there take fura more, that means the nutritional values are much higher. In the north they produce sorghum, maize and soya beans. Those three are needed for high energy growth. As part of our policy we are focusing on high energy foods for the north. We are working with a private company at present to put up a high energy, bio-fortified food factory in the north. It will allow us to make soya beans, sorghum and maize in commercial quantities. By Mannir Dan Ali, Tosin Omoniyi & Musa Abdullahi Krishi We would love to know the key areas of achievements your tenure has brought about? At the start of the administration we made it very clear that although Nigeria has been depending solely on oil for many years, oil alone cannot sustain the economy. Nigeria has potentials in agriculture. For me the greatest challenge is that the potential has always gone to waste. In the north we have vast expanse of land. We grow maize, we grow wheat, we grow sorghum, and we have cotton, soya beans and so on. But we let all that go. We have 84 million hectares of land of which no more than 40 percent of it is cultivated. We used to be number one in cotton production in West Africa which employed many people in the north. We used to be number one in palm oil production but now we import from Malaysia and Indonesia. We were number two in cocoa production in the world but we have lost that to Ivory Coast, Ghana and Cameroon, and following up very quickly is Indonesia. We have huge potentials and capacity that we are not unlocking. The reason for this is that way too long we had taken agriculture as a development activity in which we were simply managing poverty in rural areas. So fundamentally and structurally for me the first thing I had to do was that we shift from agriculture as a development program to agriculture as a business program. Everything about agriculture is business. Seed, fertilizer, irrigation, storage, processing, adding value, logistics, transport, export are all business activities. The drive when I became minister was to try to unlock these huge potentials. Nobody eats potentials, it has to be unlocked. I came into this job with urgency because our dependency on oil is becoming a problem in the sense that we are not creating jobs. We have a lot of unemployment in the rural areas and yet we are pounded with imported food. For me as a minister I cannot take that. I cannot be a minister of food importation with all that potential. We spend billions of naira everyday importing rice. We can grow rice from Sokoto to Kebbi to Zamfara, Kano, Katsina, Jigawa to Buachi. We can grow it in the South too. We spend so much in importing wheat. You take a look at the entire Yobe, Kano areas; these are good areas where we can grow wheat. We are spending 635 billion naira importing wheat which doesn’t make sense. Second, we have begun a very serious process of import substitution. When you are dependent on food import you are creating jobs for other countries. You are making their economy to work but at home you are creating joblessness. As we spend money on importing food, the naira weakens. Foreign exchange goes down. Our farmers are displaced by those needless imports. Finally we create insecurity because people cannot find jobs. The third thing we have done is that we have cleaned up the corruption in the fertiliser distribution business. The business was very corrupt in the past. It was a secret business in which some powerful people controlled the entire distribution business. Government bought and sold fertiliser but it never got to the farmers. Not more than 11 percent of farmers got the fertiliser sold by the government. You go to the north we have more land and you find out that people were being given fertiliser in bowls. Government was spending so much on fertiliser but poverty was rising in the rural areas. I lived in Maradi, in Niger for one year where I did my PhD thesis in the 80s. I saw trailers of fertiliser being moved from Katsina to Maradi and other parts of Niger. That was how we were doing it. Government was subsidizing corruption and not farmers of Nigeria. It took exactly 90 days to clean up that corruption of 40 years. How did you do that? We had to attack the corruption at the source. The source was that the government was doing what it was not supposed to do. It was buying and distributing fertiliser. There was not a single supply chain for fertiliser in the country. There was none for seed. The only thing was get government contract and such people will bring 50 percent sand and 50 percent fertiliser. They will buy grain and sell to government and farmers as seed. It was a system where the government was constantly losing money but a number of fat cats were getting rich all the time. We took government totally from the business of buying fertiliser. Look, government does not buy Fanta or Coke but if you go to any part of the country you will find these products. People were making a lot of money from the fertiliser business, people in government, politicians and many others. It was just a big racket. The only losers were the millions of farmers in Nigeria. Look at Tack fertiliser. It was supplying at 1.80 percent. Before we used to have a system where people will go to the dealer, get letters, then come to the ministry of agriculture and get contract. Today you won’t find anybody here. The reason is that we developed a system that works. What was the result? Last year the seed company sold on their own 1.5 billion naira worth of seed. This is the first time a fertiliser supply chain is being developed in Nigeria. And the fertiliser company last year sold 15 billion naira worth of fertiliser straight to farmers not to government. That is 100 million dollars. We were able to help our seed companies get loans from the banks as a result of this. That is the first time they ever got loans from Nigerian banks. The banks lent 3 billion naira last year to the seed companies and agro dealers. This year as a result of the success we had, the banks want to lend 60 billion naira. For Tack alone, Main street Bank is lending 6.8 billion naira to them and agro dealers. The banks have changed the way they look at agriculture. Farmers say it is still the same for them as they don’t have access to the fertiliser. And some of them do not have access to soft loans due to the harsh conditions attached. How do you react to this? Let’s leave the issue of loans for now and look at the access to fertiliser. Last year we decided that we must know our farmers. If you are spending money on farmers as the government is doing and you do not know them it is like spending money on faceless people. There will not be any accountability in the business. We decided to have a data base of the farmers. We started with 4.2 million farmers last year in our data base. This year we have registered 10 million farmers. We are doing it so that we can target and reach them. Last year we launched the e-wallet system where we can reach farmers directly by phones. We reached 1.5 million farmers which means we impacted on about 8 million people if you look at the average farm size which is about five members in a family. They got two bags of fertilisers and all their seeds free. They got 40 kg free for maize and rice. Two bags of fertiliser will give about 200 kg of maize or thereabouts. Do you think that is enough? Before the farmers were not getting anything. About 11 percent were getting fertiliser in this country. Now you see them getting something. What I hear is that they need more, not that they are not getting it. Remember we are trying to develop a system and roll the system out nationwide. That is an incredible success to me. Nigeria is the first system, not just in Africa but the world that has developed an electronic wallet system to reach farmers with subsidised products. Today, Brazil, India and several African countries have approached the World Bank, African Development Bank and European Union to take the Nigerian electronic wallet system and scale it up in their countries.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Jun 2013 13:20:51 +0000
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