The revolution to put food on Nigerians tables — Agric Minister Adesina: By Jimoh Babatunde To him, inclusive growth in the economy is not complete without the rural dwellers whose life depends on agriculture, so he sees himself as being on a mission to integrate the rural dwellers through transformation of agriculture. Today, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, Agriculture and Rural Development Minister, sees his journey in the corridor of power as an opportunity of being an instrument in transforming the country’s agriculture. In this chat with Editors in Lagos, he talks about the Agriculture Transformation Agenda of the government and what they have been able to do with fertilizer, various crops and the investments they have attracted to agriculture which have helped in bringing down the food import bill of the country in the past three years. ON INVESTMENT IN AGRIC Akinwunmi Adesina Akinwunmi Adesina What we are building right now in agriculture is a very effective value chain that goes from the farm to the table and this involves smallholder farmers and the big off takers like flour mill of Nigeria, Nestle , Honey well and all of that. We are very excited about the new energy the private sector is bringing into agriculture. We are working in the ministry in Kogi state with one of the world largest food manufacturing companies that will be investing 250m US dollars into a cassava to starch plant and we are advising that this particular plant is about 63000 metric ton starch plant. I just used that as a leeway to make a point that investment in Nigeria agriculture today is raising very well. We have in the space of just three years being able to concretise on the ground investment of well over $5 billion into the agriculture sector. The most recent of them is the one by Aliko Dangote who has offered investment spanning over $1b into commercial rice production, which is the largest single investment into food production in Africa. By the way when we were in Washington for the US African summit, Dangote’s investment was the buzz that people were talking about that Nigeria is now driving towards self sufficiency in rice. This means that the President’s policies are working and it means that the government position that we would give incentives to private sector to drive agriculture is working. I am even more excited that most of the private sectors coming into the space are Nigerians private sector, not just global companies. I think that is the way it should be, if you go to other part of the world, it is the local companies that take the agriculture spaces. In terms of overall food production, when we started we set a target for ourselves that we will produce 20million metric tons of food by 2015. I think if you don’t set target, you can’t measure anything, I am please to tell you that by the end of this wet season we would have produce 21m metric tons of food. Total between 2012 and 2014, this is well ahead of 20m metric tons we promised for 2015. I am confident by 2015 we far exceed the target that we have set. The reason this is so is that the policies on fertilisers and seeds distributions continue to grow, that particular policy was where we ended 40years of corruption in fertilisers distribution in this country within 90days. We used the mobile phone system, the E-wallet system to get fertilizers to farmers. That is getting global and regional attention, but for us we have been able to reach 14million farmers by this wet season, that is between 2012 and now. In addition to that we have a situation where the number of seed companies in the country is just growing because the farmers are demanding for seeds. The number of seed companies increased from five when we started in 2011 to 80 seed companies today. As for the fertilizer companies since the farmers are demanding for seeds, the investment in the fertilizers manufacturing sector has also gone up. In fact the total investment just for the fertilizer manufacturing has been $5b coming from Dangote group with 2.5b$, Notore $ 1.3and Indorama among others. This just tells you that the combination of very smart fertilizer policy of E-wallet, private sector driven approach and very positive incentives by the petrochemical policy has actually combined together to give this boost. So we expect that maybe in three to four years, Nigeria will be direct exporter of fertilizers, we will stop flaring gas into the air and we start using that gas for producing urea. You can see that once we got the input sector work, the private sector responded and that is why I have always said that the trigger by the public sector led to the private sector response. Look at it today, for the electronic wallet system that we are talking about, the benefit of that is enormous because the farmers have been empowered. We essentially restored dignity back to the Nigerian farmers. The farmer does not have to pay anybody, it does not have to be grateful to anybody, and we cut off all the middle men that are in the system. I think that is very important. For other countries that I have mentioned, you look at today, India, Brazil, china have actually been to Nigeria to learn about what we are doing. Today, almost all Africa countries are moving towards E-wallet system of Nigeria. Just this week, the government of Kenya announced it was going to be on E-wallet system, they have been to Nigeria and they want to introduce it. Tanzania has begun, Rwanda has started and Ethiopia among others, you can see that a country those three years ago was paraded as having a corrupt fertilizer system is now exporting transparency. The African Union now says the Nigeria model for electronic wallet for fertilizer is what should be used along all African countries. And I think that is what all of us can take pride in for that to happen at the continental level as a decision. So, I am very excited about that, and we have a lot of interest in investment in our country by foreign seed companies. For example, Sygenta which is the world number two seed company is already in Nigeria. They have their company here in Lagos; they have hired about 38 staff that is working here to develop new technologies. We also have others. I think the demand for seeds is rising so fast that we need the small medium sizes companies and the large seed companies. I expect Nigeria to be the focus of attention for seed in Africa, no doubt about that, because of the way we are going. ON FARMERS’ REGISTRATION You know in any business if you don’t know your customers, you are doing the wrong business or you are trying to cheat customers, so I took the decision that we need to know the farmers we are actually supporting. So we started the country’s first ever national registration for identification of farmers. As for this year we have 15million farmers that are genuinely registered and they have cards, so we know who they are, we know where they are and we know what they grow. So , we have now developed a new technology which is called TAP technology , this allowed us to overcome a challenge we had in rolling out the e-wallet in some areas that didn’t have good GSM network, so we decided to introduce this technology. What it does is that a farmer gets a card which is called a mere field technology card , so that card has all their biometric information, so the government is loading into that particular card all the allocation for seed, fertilizers and inputs. So all the farm inputs retailers in the country have been given four tablets , the beauty of this technology is that to redeem your inputs, the farmer brings the card, he comes to the input retailers and tap it on the iPod and all the biometric of the farmers show . How revolutionary is that? Let me tell you. In terms of time to register the farmers we have cut it down , so with 250 staff or enumerators we can register per day 10,000 farmers . You can see the speed of registering farmers. The second is the speed of redeeming seeds and fertilizers by farmers has been cut down to a minute sixty seconds. So instead of waiting on a queue and all that because of people going through records, we have got rid of it. This means farmers don’t have to wait long, you have saved their time. Identity management is better. The speed of reconciliation of transaction is immediate and all that information shows off at the banks and the Central Bank. I want you to know that with the TAP technology we are the first in the world to develop it. So we are not just first in the world to do E-wallet system of getting seeds and fertilizers to farmers, we are also the first to do this TAP technology. The British government actually supported us in the development of this technology. I am very happy to tell you that we have piloted this in FCT and Sokoto, with close to about 500,000 farmers. And the redemption rate is close to 80% compared to 11% that we were getting before. The point I am making is that we are modernising agriculture using new tools, ICT and the world is recognising that . ON COCOA PRODUCTION I can accept if Nigeria loses to Ivory Coast or Ghana in football matches but I will not accept if we lose cocoa to them . We have more potential, we have more lands than they do. So the President directed that we should revitalize our cocoa plantations, what we have done is that we have redistributed a total of one million hybrid pods of cocoa. It is a high yielding cocoa varieties that give yield of almost of about 2.5 times of what farmers are currently getting. The President directed that we give 39 million seedlings to cocoa farmers in the south west , south east and south south free of charge. So, we are re planting our cocoa plantation with high yielding varieties. We are also providing our farmers with the insecticides and lot of polythene sacks that they need for proper bagging of their cocoa and it is working so well. Akinwumi Adesina Akinwumi Adesina The amount of seedlings that we have given is enough to plant 40,000 of hectares of new plantation. We are expanding our cocoa plantations by additional 40,000. So I expect that our cocoa production will rise from about 350,000 mt to anything between 78,000-800,000 mt in the next two years. I think the value of cocoa we export is rising. In 2013 we did roughly $900 million of export of cocoa beans, in 2014 that went to $1.2b and we expect that by 2015 it rises to about $1.5. So, I am excited by what is going on, but I want us to process more of our cocoa in Nigeria as supposed to exporting them abroad, because the size of the chocolate market globally is $80b a year of which farmers producing cocoa beans make only 3-5% of the margin. Manufacturers of chocolates and confessionary make over 67% of the margin, so you can see that monkey dey work Baboon dey chop. So, we are determined to revise that trend and we have started working with Ondo state government that has already set up a chocolate academy where the first chocolate manufacturing is actually being produced by a company called Spagvola. It is fantastic, 70% dark chocolate coming out of Nigeria. I just had discussion with Nestle that I want us to use more of our cocoa beans in making not just chocolates but cocoa drinks so that we can increase our consumption of cocoa, because money is made up the chain not down. ON PALM OIL PRODUCTION Nigeria as you know was a dominant player in crude palm oil production and we lost that space to Malaysia and others . We are working very hard to get back on track, to do that we are replacing what we call semi wide growth, they are very tall plants . It is like tall for nothing , the amount of yield we are getting is very small. So, we are distributing 9million sprouted nurse of seedlings, again the President said we should give that free of charge . This is a president that believes strongly in Nigeria’s agriculture and support for farmers. We are giving it free of charge to farmers, small-scale plantation operators to medium operators and large scale operators free of charge . We are also distributing quite a lot of mechanized harvesters so that they can harvest the fresh fruit bunch that they have at a lower cost. I was quite excited working with the likes of Presco, Okomu and the others which are good for us. ON MAIZE The other crops I want to talk about is maize. It is a very important crop not only for food consumption but for livestock feed production, particular poultry feeds. We have been doing quite a lot. I think this year we produce 7million metric tons of maize compared to 4.5million metric tons. The important thing with the maize is that we are also working to reduce Aflatoxin in maize which destroys maize. We are working with IITA and others on new technology that reduces contamination for maize. Take Sorghum for example, it is grown in the North East and North West of Nigeria. We are doing quite enough, this year we have reached over 35000 farmers in the NE and NW growing Sorghum with improved varieties and farm inputs to produce a lot. So, the point I am trying to make is that the Agricultural Transformation Agenda goes beyond rice and cassava; it goes into several other things. We are doing a lot in fishing; we are doing lots in other sectors not just rice and cassava alone. We are doing quite lots in livestock, dairy production as well. ON AGRICULTURE FINANCING The facility that we have with the Central Bank of Nigeria which is NIRSAL facility is working well. I am very delighted that the new Central Bank governor is very passionate about agriculture . In fact when he was sworn in the first place he came to was my office and we agreed that we work very closely together. Basically, what he said was that he wants to see the banks’ lending more to the value chains. But a lot has happened with bank lending to agriculture. If you look at seed companies for instance, when we started nobody was lending to seed companies, but in 2012 we were able to get the banks to lend to the seed companies $10million , but by 2013 the bank lend to the seed companies $53million . If you look at the fertilizers retailers and the agro dealers together, the bank lend them $100million in 2012, but by last year $500million, you can see how the banks are lending more to agriculture. What does that tell us? It tells us that the banks are seeing the money trails and they are following it. They now understand that agriculture as a business is a very viable one. The most interesting thing for me is the rate of default, till date the default is zero percent and level of nonperforming loans is the best of any sector and that is why you find the banks putting more money into agriculture. This was the sector they will not even consider before now. We have launched a new fund from the ministry called FAFIN , which is fund for agricultural financing in Nigeria. It is a fund that is jointly between the ministry of agriculture and the KFW, the world largest development bank and the ministry of finance in Nigeria. This fund is privately managed, equity and quasi-equity and it is to support agro businesses with long term money and not short term. This is very unique as the size of the fund so far is over $20 million from us and the German government. That fund is going to grow in size to $1b. The Sovereign Wealth Fund of Nigeria has invested in that fund and that is to tell you the credibility of that fund. We started that fund from our ministry, that is how creative we are in trying to take advantage of the private sector money to work for agriculture and it is privately managed by a competitively recruited company as 15 companies bided for it globally, but we selected a company in Nigeria called Sahel capital as the fund manager. It has also a technical assistance facility which is being supported by the ministry of agriculture and the Ford Foundation. ON RICE I have said that if you are not ashamed of something, you will never change it, the very fact that Nigeria import rice is a shameful thing to me , because we should not be importing but exporting. Mr. President Transformation agenda on rice is working very well. We started in 2012 and from then till date, we have been able to expand our rice paddy production by 7million metric tons . if you look at the number of farmers that have moved to rice production when started in 2012, we had 406,000 farmers doing rice, by 2013 we grew that to 2.6million tons and by 2014 we grew that by additional 3million tons. If you look at the cultivated areas in rice we have put in an additional 2million hectares under rice production. Why is this important, it is important because the area is being planted with new rice varieties than what we had before. These new rice varieties are high yielding varieties , they give our farmers five tons per hectares compared to 1.5-2 tons per hectares we were getting and they are not GMOs. They are conventionally bred varieties. So look at the impact, the best decision taken by Mr. President was to launch dry season farming where we will produce food in the rain season and then in the dry season, this is the first time ever that it is happening in this country and it is working effectively. The number of states in Nigeria that are into rice in the dry season has increased from 10 in 2012 when we started to 23 states . The number of states that are growing rice in the wet season has grown from 29 states in 2012 to all states and the FCT. In other words, area is expanding, yield is expanding , number of farmers is expanding and number of states growing rice is expanding. Without any question at all, we have turned the economy in terms of rice in Nigeria. It is not just producing the rice, it is also about the growth in the mills that we have in the country. When we started in 2012 there was only one integrated rice mill in Nigeria. What I mean by integrated mill is one that can buy our own local rice paddy and processed it into finished rice. The mills we had in Nigeria were polishers , just polished imported rice like shoe shiners. We did not have that, but today we have 18 integrated rice mills, these are large mills in the country. The investment by Olam in Nassarawa state is incredible, it is 6000 hectares producing a lot of their own rice. They invested in a mill which was commissioned by President Jonathan. The size of that mill is 210,000 metric tons, which was the largest in Africa by the time it was commissioned. Aliko Dangote is going to invest $1b into commercial rice production and modern rice mill in Nigeria, so all of that tells me that we are about being self sufficient in paddy rice production because of the ways our paddy is growing. Where we are putting attention today is the milling to make sure that our rice meets import quality, but I am excited with the kind of rice we have now. You have ebony world, a mill by the Eboyin state government and the governor sent me a lot of bags of rice and that rice is fantastic. You have rice produced there by one Chris Okeke, you go to Labana in Kebbi, you go to Anambra state or the small mill in Jigawa by Damondi. It is just a small 10,000 tons but their rice is fantastic. There are many other small size companies, medium size companies and large size companies that have gone into rice milling and they are doing fine. What I want to say is the growth of the small-scale mills, as they are growing the fastest at about 40% annual growth rate. They don’t have more of the over head costs, so they are more efficient. So ,We now produce Nigerian rice that has international quality that is tastier than any imported rice, that is proudly Nigerian rice and you find them really rushing to the market. What people used to think of local rice with stones, black , smell and some type of contractions that we used to have are no longer the same. But when people go to the market now they don’t realize it is Nigerian rice. I need to give you the name of a woman who has been in the business of rice for the last 40years and she is the largest seller of rice in Cappa,Lagos. She has been selling imported rice, the producer of Umza rice in Kano, a whole Nigeria rice owner went to this woman to tell her he wanted to supply her Nigerian rice, and she said no that she needed to eat it first. She was given sample and after eating, she called the owner of Umza rice saying she has been in the business for over 40 years and has never seen any better rice than the rice he brought to her. Umza came to my office to tell me , I asked that the woman should be put on phone and she said she has asked that she be supplied 50 trailer loads of the rice because it is better than any of the rice she has stocked. The point I am trying to make is that Nigerians need to understand that the game has changed . Nigerian high quality per boiled rice is entering the market that can confidently compete with any rice there. They are coming from small millers, medium millers and large millers. When somebody like the woman in Cappa, Lagos can tell you the quality of Nigerian rice is good, I know that in another three to four years, Nigeria will become like Thailand of rice in Africa, because we will be selling that rice and dominate Africa . I believe with Dangote’s investment and several others that is exactly what we are going to do. So the President’s rice policy to me is confidence boosting for us . ON STAPLE CROP PROCESSING ZONES We are producing quite a lot but we are losing a significant share because of poor farm level storage . We are addressing that in the following ways . First is that we are establishing Staple Crops Processing Zones. These are zones we are attracting private sector food manufacturers to come to so that they can process and add values to our cassava, our rice , our soybeans and our maize instead of taking the products out of our rural areas. They will create jobs in the rural areas, they will create access to farmers, and they will revive our rural economies. We have fourteen of such zones already designed and we will be rolling them out with core investors, the private sectors who are going to be the ones driving the zones. In Kogi state , the core investors is working on cassava to starch, in Kano, the core group is Dansa food in the Kadawa value for tomatoes. For rice we also have Dangote in Badegi in Niger as well as Edo, and Jigawa states. Nestle will also be buying some of the produce from some of these zones, Olam will be doing same from the zones too. So we are now working as a government to provide power, water and roads to those areas so that we can reduce the cost of doing business by the private sector in these areas. I am also happy to say that the World Bank and the African Development Bank and the UK government as well as IFAD collectively put a little bit above a billion dollars to support infrastructure in the areas . What they say is that they like the model and will want other Africa countries to adopt it. It is a good way of building infrastructure in rural areas, so that is very important. REDUCTION IN FOOD IMPORT BILL The last thing I will say is that our food import bill has continued to decline . If you look at our food import bill in 2009, it was N1.1 trillion , the food import bill for last year dropped to N684billion.I think I read recently from the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics the third and fourth quarter food import bill for this year has continued to decline. That is the way it should be. It is the mark of success of the policy that our food import bill has continued to decline. So all in all , I think that the policy of the President on Agriculture is working and I want to particularly show appreciation to state governments, because the state governments have been very supportive of the Agricultural Transformation Agenda. I think the private sector has woken up to realize that the new game in town is agriculture and those that did not wake up before when they saw Aliko Dangote moving into it with billion dollars, you don’t need to study economics or investment to follow him as he would have done his home work very well. We are excited by private sector investment coming in and we are also much interested that the farmers are now getting market for their produce. I am grateful to my staff that have helped us and to the media that has helped us covered a lot of the stories to inform Nigerians about what is going on. You know sometimes we passed gold by and we think it is dust and until somebody polishes it before you know it is gold. I think what you are seeing in Nigeria today is that we are polishing the agricultural sector to shine like gold and people are now beginning to realize that this where we need to be. ON AGRICULTURE EXTENSION SERVICES It is going to take time to build it into what it should be , but we have started, first is the institutional question. We have received from the Head of the Civil Service the permission to create the Federal Department of Agricultural extension for the first time in the history of this country. It is a full federal department with a full director, which is institutional. Now we are going to be recruiting a new cadre of staff for that department. A lot of extension people, so you will create job for new people coming out of schools. The second thing I want to say is that it is not just public extension systems any more, it is private –public extension system. Extension system is a service so it is not necessarily an employment service, but it is a job creating service. So we are working now to help to turn our agricultural graduates into extension service providers. I will give you an example , there is something we call soil doctor, we bought hundred of those from Colombia University in New York. These soil doctors are rapid soil diagnostic testing kits that we are deploring nationwide to be handled by young graduates that will run them as businesses. It gives you the analysis of your soils , the deficiency of your soil all within five minutes. You don’t need to go to web chemistry or send your soil to a lab that can take three months and you may never get it back. So we want to turn some of our graduates into private extension workers, so if somebody is buying fertilizer for example. In fertilizers, you have MPK, you have urea. We have been using that forever. But it might be that the problem of that soil is zinc or sulphur, but since there is nobody testing it you might not know. We have done that for our cocoa, we have found out that our cocoa actually needs different kind of fertilizer; we don’t use cocoa fertilizer which is a bad thing. So we are now working with a group in Morocco to develop a new fertilizer blend for cocoa in Nigeria. That is one way, we are also doing e-extension, extension via mobile phones, the extension research centre in Zaria gas developed an e-extension service , which is based on a platform and mobile phones. It can give farmers information on what to plant, how to plant and all of those things in local languages. So you don’t necessarily need a lot of people, you need applications that will allow farmers to have information on extension services. The other thing we are doing is revamping the Agricultural Development Projects (ADPs) , because they used to be the core of extension services in Nigeria. The ADPs have gone down, in fact many of them have gone totally moribund when the World Bank stopped funding them in the 80s. We are revamping them, they are excited because of agricultural transformation agenda as many of them have woken up. In fact we are using ADPs now for all GES program. So revamping ADPs is part of the agenda. We are taking advantage with global organisations call Sasakawa global 2000 was set up by President Jimmy Carter and late Dr. Borlaug . We have signed an MOU with them for extension services for us in 12 states. They are developing training extension agents , and they are doing demonstration plots which will play a bigger role as we go along. It is still work in progress. via vanguard.
Posted on: Sun, 31 Aug 2014 08:03:42 +0000
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