President, Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI), Chief Mrs. Onikepo Akande, has restated the need for Nigerian and West African farmers to use modern agricultural tools to boost food production in Nigeria and other West African countries.
While giving a keynote address at the just concluded Agra Innovate West Africa in Lagos, Mrs. Akande, said much food was being produced through the efforts of peasant farmers, but that so much goes wrong from the field to the table.
According to her, the farmers, mostly subsistent in their operations, are beset with many challenges of land preparation, poor quality planting materials (seeds and seedlings), dependence on manual labour without mechanisation, on-farm pests and diseases, post-harvest wastage and food loss, absence of efficient storage system and market failure, leading to sales of agricultural commodities with insignificant returns on efforts.
She told Daily Sun that farmers in West Africa, therefore, need modern tools, improved varieties of crops, facilities for (or access to) weather forecasting, mechanisation support, irrigation facilities, storage facilities, good transportation system, dependable rural access, finance and insurance, to be able to embark on productive activities and foster food-based commercial activities within and between countries.
She added: “The term, value chain, in agriculture, of recent, has been tossed about with reckless abandon. To understand value chain, we need to follow commodities under consideration from the field to the end-user. And the value chains vary in length and character from commodity to commodity.
“A bulk of interventions needed to fix various commodity value chains require careful and close examination of the attributes of the commodities under consideration. To unlock their potential, therefore, we need to understand their peculiar attributes, challenges, opportunities and diversity of uses, she added.
However, she hinted that a bulk of agricultural trade within and across West Africa still remains informal, dealing with primary products, adding that Nigeria, in particular, is known to be the source of export of many major staples such as cowpeas, yams, cassava, millet, sorghum, groundnut, bambara nuts, maize, among others.
He lamented that hundreds of tonnes of such commodities move daily from major markets such as Dawanau in Kano, Maigateri in Jigawa, Illela in Sokoto, Yauri in Kebbi, to neighbouring countries without official data of transactions.
She bomoaned that the conversion of currencies for their transactions is done in black markets and so the government loses the opportunities to capture the data on such transactions.
she said quality control and standards on such commodities are non-existent, which means the products on sale in the sub-region hardly meet world-class standards.
She explained that, “on the entire commodities value chains, the critical control points that require attention and remedial measures include labour (on and off field), seed quality, aggregation, processing, transportation, storage, financing, market information system and pricing.
“Over the years, the cyclical abundance and scarcity that annually occur after harvest and during periods of no harvest have greatly distorted supplies and prices. These have empowered many speculators who have access to funds at the expense of the primary producers, creating uneven playing field.”
Said she: “We must therefore bring efforts to bear on quality, standards and agricultural best practices on the field as well as global best prices post-harvest. These will help in many different ways, namely: reduction of food wastage on-farm, quality assurance of products at harvest, reduction in post-harvest wastage, suitable transportation methods and means, assurance of higher income to farmers, food abundance and poverty reduction, particularly rural poverty.”