Mr. Shedrack Madlion is the executive director of Kaduna-based Admiral Environmental Care Limited, a one-stop agricultural centre for farmers who want to go into commercial agriculture. In an interview with MARCEL MBAMALU, in Lagos, Madlion said Nigeria needs an all-inclusive approach to job and wealth creation in agriculture. Casting aspersions on the Federal Government’s Agricultural Transformation Agenda, the 40-year-old farmer, who participated in the 2013 Nigeria Economic Summit (NES 19) that was concluded in Abuja recently, argued that fertiliser ranks 14 in the order of priorities and, therefore, should not, as is currently the case, dominate the scheme of things in the reform process. Excerpts: You participated in the just-concluded NES 19, which promised a lot for Nigerian farmers. What did you take away from the conference? Conferences and seminars have not taken us anywhere in Africa and Nigeria in particular, because an African parable says you cannot shave a man’s head in his absence.Meaning? A conference of such nature on agricultural transformation is geared towards taking agriculture to a new level and replacing aging farmers with young ones; yet, there were no real farmers that were seated in the comfort of the Transcorp Hilton to discuss what affects them. Please note that 87.9 percent of Nigerian rural dwellers do nothing else but agriculture. The man that you are making decisions for and designing a policy on his behalf is not there when you are designing his policy. Don’t forget that there was a session for Nagropreneurs, who represented young people engaging in agricultural activities; are you saying that such people are no real farmers? There were no farmers from Saminaka, in Kaduna, where 29,000 metric tonnes of maize are grown in this country. That man in Giroro, Sokoto, where 37,000 metric tonnes of onion are grown and 60 percent do not get to the market place was not there in Transcorp Hilton. There was no man from Ugboka in Enugu State, where rice is produced. The food that was served in Transcorp Hilton, put together, is imported. So, whom are you deciding for? This country lost 14 states in 2012 to floods. Rather than government encouraging high-level mechanization — bringing tractors and enhancing our extension farming programmes — and using our shortfall and natural challenges to move this country forward, we have a minister that discusses only cassava and tells us that, because we have excess cassava, we should add cassava to our bread. A child between the ages of one to six will not digest cassava bread. I am not a food nutritionist, but cassava has no protein content. A child between the ages of one to six needs high level of protein to be able to reach his IQ potentials. We cannot say that, because Saudi Arabia has excess sand, they should have sand in every food they eat. It doesn’t make any sense to us. Between Borno and Gombe, we can grow the biggest and the highest quality of wheat we can use to grow our own flour. What has happened to Tapioca? What has happened to our garri? What has happened to our starch? These are where we need to deploy mechanisation, not in subjecting Nigerians to eat cassava that you need to harvest, wash, and blend the same day for you to get flour. If we need to be very sincere with ourselves, if we list all agricultural needs from one to 16, fertilizer and crop fall between fourteenth and fifteenth positions. A small community in India that is not up to Zaria or Kaduna, called Bombay, in Punjab, India, has got 34,000 functional tractors. In the whole of Nigeria, we do not have up to 34 functional tractors. We lose 337,000 metric tonnes of oranges every season, yet four million litres of orange concentrates that come from China, California and others are dumped into this country. Isn’t that why some people think that the private sector should be made to play a more prominent role, since government cannot do it alone? The landlord that wants to rent out a house must, first, make it inhabitable for tenants. You cannot rent me a house whose roof is not there; you cannot rent me a house without floors or sanitary system; what then would you be renting? The (Agriculture) Minister contradicts himself: You talk about agribusiness development and youth replacement, yet you only talk about cassava and fertilizer; you say you are doing farm census with billions of naira of taxpayers’ money (Nigerians do not ask questions); who are you counting? How does the biometrics of farmers put food on the table? Many would say that it actually does when the result of the biometric data capturing is used to plan ahead in building needed infrastructure and support for rural farmers, as in fertilizer distribution; don’t you also agree with that? Farming here is in the subsistence level. Since 1976, there has not been any national soil sample analysis to check the compatibility of our soil to the input. We do not have enough standard laboratories to check the quality of chemicals being brought into this country and are being used by our farmers. Knapsack sprayers, a simple spray tool, are not produced in Nigeria. This is a country in which N1 billion worth of rice is consumed every six hours. For a whole day, N2 billion worth of rice is consumed. For every one hundred dollar earned in this country through oil, six dollars go to food importation. You don’t deem it fit to enhance poultry production; frozen foods from South Africa are still brought into this country through our neighbour, Togo. We have a Ministry that is talking about nine-month-old crop; yet, it is not the culture of all Nigerians to eat cassava. We, in the North, are used to our Soya, Sorghum, maize, rice and talia. We are talking about what should be sustainable to Nigerians and you are talking about cassava. Talking about rice, the former minister for national planning, Shamsudeen Usman, actually said that importation of rice has dropped by 50 percent? That is not true. How can importation be reduced by 50 percent and the man in Abakiliki is looking for market for his rice. We have rice mills that were built in this country, during the time of Shagari, but have never milled a single grain of rice. An example is the Bansara rice in Cross River State. They have never milled a single bag of rice. You say importation has reduced; yet government still gives waivers to their cronies to import rice. How then will the man in Benue State compete with the Taiwani rice or the one from Cambodia or Vietnam? Take a look at yam as well. Yam is our primary source of buffer, as carbohydrate. It is fried, pounded, done as chips, and used as thickener. Yet, the men that are growing yam for us are ageing. Before now, Benue State stood as the biggest yam producer, but today the man from Benue has to stop over in Nasarawa to buy yam when he is going back home. There are two transitions that are dangerous to this country: the transitional shock and food insecurity shock. If we survive the transitional shock, this country will survive the food insecurity shock. The transitional shock is what we are going through: the political instability and the instability in the political parties going by recent happenings. Another one is the growing population in this country without enough farmers to feed those mouths. My assumption is that 47 percent of Nigerians go to bed without eating good food. About N15 billion was released to farmers at the close of the summit by the Vice President, after farming season would have been over. You are in a country where 33,000 metric tonnes of tomatoes do not find their way to the market. In Lagos State, there are still gbanjo tomatoes. Some Nigerians don’t have access to fresh tomatoes; so, they have to eat the one that is crushed and smelly, because they cannot afford the ripe tomatoes. We are in a country where our people cannot afford to buy a tuber of yam, they still buy yam that is cut in halves. I am not exaggerating; this is real. In textiles, a sector that could take up to 16 per cent of Nigerian16,000 people is there. I hear the minister say that 3.5 million people have been gainfully employed under the transformation of agriculture. It is a white lie. These are real official statistics gotten from painstaking “census” and quoted by international organisations; how do you now fault government figures; do you have a more realistic one?Look at it this way: 3.5 million youths in agriculture will bring the GDP of this country beyond 47 per cent. Nigerians will feel the impact; and there will be glut in food production. But you know that no Nigerian youth will want to go into agriculture with hoe and cutlass; you cannot use blackberry, watch DSTV, look at beautiful magazines and you will tell me the young man will go home and do agriculture with hoe and cutlass. You are lying to yourself; that is not true. In this country, out of the 25 banks that we have, the ones that are standing with one leg and two legs inclusive, we don’t have more than three of them that have agric desks, who understand the dynamics in agricultural financing. You have a minister that is telling you about the credit agriculture finance programme, can he tell you the percentage of those who have paid back? Banks that participated in the Abuja conference (NES 19) attested to the fact that there is less than 0.05 percentage default; in fact, two of the banks insisted there was zero loan default last year… The real farmers never had access to that money. If you don’t have property in Kaduna, Abuja, Lagos or any or of the highbrow states, you don’t have access to those funds. Our banking system does not give room for one to be given loan on account of his character or believing in the business, but it is the security you provide that grants you access to the loans. What are the solutions, coming from a practitioner’s point of view like you? It is very important that we look at agriculture from the one-community, one-product perspective. Let us begin to have policies that would allow for ‘guarantee minimum scheme’. Don’t subsidise our fertilisers. Don’t use our money and say you want to buy phones for the farmers. We don’t want farmers to be counted. What we want is for us to be provided with adequate information and extension service programmes.How does government provide those when it does not know you or where you are; don’t you think we are coming back to the basics again — the biometric data on farmers? The infrastructure is not there. We have ADBs that were built in this country before even the honourable minister was born. Over time, you can now bring in technology to it. On the census we are talking about here, the farmers in Ugboka were not counted. The farmers from Uruala in Owerri were not counted. Those farmers that are in Omora, the people that put food on the table for this country, are not the mechanised farmers; they are the rural dwellers. If you take away our mothers from the pickups that take them from the villages to the towns for upward transportation, Nigerians will import yams from Jamaica. As I speak with you, 67 per cent of the beans you eat in this country come from Burkina Faso. Nigerians do not grow it. The communities, in Borno, Yobe, Bauchi and Katsina states, that have been growing beans for us have been under siege for the past two and half years. These are where we have got a lot of insurgency. The unifying thing that has kept this country together is food. 215 trucks of tomatoes are brought into Lagos every single day. There is nowhere in Africa where cattle are being consumed as it is done here, given the fact that millions of people enter and leave Lagos everyday. It is very important for us to take agriculture seriously. Who is the off-taker of what the farmers in Enugu have produced? When I produce okro, who is going to take it from me? If I am producing onions, who is going to be the off-taker? Government should be able to give me a conditioning centre, where I will be able to dispose it. I am not saying that we should subsidise agriculture like it is done in America, but we can do better. Agriculture is science; it is not politics. Any nation that plays politics with food will starve its citizens. I have seen countries that have no good roads and hospitals, once they can produce food they can save their citizens. What threat does the land tenure system, for example, pose to agricultural production? Except in the Southeast region, the 19 other states of the country do not have problem of land. 75 per cent of arable land in northern Nigeria has not been scratched. When land becomes a problem is when you talk about the Igbo man — the man from Ebonyi, Enugu, Owerri, and Abia. If you ask all the people in the Southeast to go back to their place, there won’t be four square metres to step their foot. These are the areas where there could be land problems. We have land in the north and these are where we have the capacity to grow all that we can grow. I have been saying that one of the problems that Nigerians have is that they are idle. If the textile firms were working in Kaduna, there won’t be Boko Haram. If the industries in Kano were functional, there won’t Boko Haram. If the 127 warehouses that were built in Borno were filled with goods that will be moved to Cameroun, there won’t be Boko Haram. But when you deny a man of what he knows how to do best, what else do you expect him to do? What denial are you referring to? There is inconsistency of policy. Government used agriculture as a way to plant hope in an ordinary man and keep him going. When government makes pronouncement on agriculture, election is forthcoming. We have over 200 dams in northern Nigerian where the spillways are broken. How then do you grow? No nation depends on rain-fed agriculture. The crop does much better with irrigation system than with rainfall. The honourable Minister has not talked about plans for irrigation programme; he talks about fertiliser. He is a minister for fertilizer and cassava. He has not talked about livestock or extension farming programmes. He does not tell me how there are policy changes to get youths interested in agriculture. You brought in young men from Ogun state, not from the six geopolitical zones of the country. It could have been so joyful that we brought in young men from Bornu and Yobe to give the people hope. We have not gotten it right. One of the sweetest peppers in this world that could fetch Nigeria N1.3 billion every year is from Nsukka; it is called Ose Nsukka. Between Opi, Ihealumona and Udi are pepper-growing areas. The sweetest pepper in Nigeria is grown there. Cashew is the only thing we are exporting from here. Today, you cannot grow Achara. There is ofe achara (achara soup), and the achara is grown in Orlu, Akatamkpo, Ahiazu and others in the Southeast. By the time this generation is off, Achara soup would have gone. We have influenced the whole of West Africa to eat Ogbono soup, but have you asked what programme we have got to replace Ogbono as a tree? The Ogbono trees we are eating from today are the same trees that were planted by our forefathers. As I speak to you today, palm oil is coming in from Malaysia and Indonesia as groundnut oil, as palm oil, in this country where the seeds were taken from. As the days go by, cost of food is rising and you say we should use cassava to do bread? That is the only technology you are bringing to us. Why don’t you think of packaging abacha; it is a by-product of cassava. Why don’t you think of having garri and let us drink it for food. Are they not value chains?
Posted on: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 11:23:54 +0000
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