There is hunger in the land. Nigeria’s population keeps increasing and farmers keep decreasing. Nobody wants to farm again. The few people still engaged in farming are old or getting old and because of government’s neglect of farmers, their children have no plan to take over the profession.
The farm settlements established decades back are deserted and desolate. It is, therefore, cheering news that the present administration plans to engage graduates in agricultural production across the nation’s 109 senatorial districts.
Minister of Water Resources, Suleiman Adamu, while flagging-off the Graduate Farmers Employment Scheme, said the current economic situation in Nigeria had made integrated farming more imperative as agriculture had the potential to boost the nation’s ability to feed itself and provide the largest opportunity to create jobs for the country’s teeming unemployed.
The 12 existing River Basin Development Authorities, scattered all over Nigeria, he said, would be re-energised for this purpose. We commend this govern ment’s back-to-land move as it will help reduce unemployment, as well as boost food production and ultimately help us out of the recession that the country is going through.
Successive governments have always paid lip service to helping farmers and boosting agriculture without really doing much relying solely on revenue from oil for budget and survival. Serious attention has not been paid to farming over the years; farmers who are scattered in the hinterland are left unorganized using crude and energy-consuming implements.
So, this has turned Nigeria, a country which professes to be agriculturallyoriented to a country which relies on imported food. In times past each region was synonymous with its cash crop.
The North produced cotton and groundnut in abundance; the West produced cocoa for export while the East produced palm oil. History has it that Malaysia, the highest producer of palm oil in the world, took palm seedlings from Nigeria.
Now the groundnut pyramids on the currency we spent while growing up have all disappeared! Nigeria is just struggling now to be counted among exporters of cocoa and palm oil! How did we get here? Before independence, up till the early 60s, agriculture was the pride of Nigerian export.
Cash crops like cocoa, groundnut and palm oil competed. It was a time when governments, at all levels, took agriculture seriously.
There was dynamic research and effective extension strategy for food and crop production; there was the Revitalised Commodity Extension Strategy where emphasis was on selected crops like palm oil, groundnut and cocoa and the Farm Settlement Strategy, a concept to entice young school leavers to farming as a career.
The ‘oil boom’ era of the 1973 and 1980s changed all of this. It diverted government’s attention from pursuing and entrenching these laudable projects.
Now that the fortunes of oil have nosedived, there cannot be a better time than now for us to turn back and invest heavily in agriculture. We can learn from the then regional governments that established farm settlements in zones within their regions to engage and encourage youths to farm and to boost food production.
Interested youths were taught at the agriculture training institutes the art of managing medium and large scale mechanised farms, livestock husbandry and how to operate various agricultural equipment. Government provided each of these young farmers land according to their needs, as well as a 2-bedroom farmhouse.
Accessible roads were constructed within such settlements and to their farms. Tractors and other modern farming equipment were made at their disposal in ploughing the land at subsidised rates.
We suggest that, in addition to these, government should establish schools and clinics as well as providing electricity in the new farm settlements so that young farmers can stay with their families and concentrate on farm work and not be attracted to the city.
Low interest agricultural loans should also be made available to these young farmers as well as giving them access to high-yielding and disease resistant variety of seeds from research institutes. Nigeria is blessed with uncultivated fertile vast landscape.
There are 774 local governments in Nigeria. If farm settlements are established in half or two thirds of these councils, government would have succeeded in reducing unemployment and indirectly curbing crime, as well as increasing food production which will ultimately boost the economy. An enabling environment should also be provided for people to farm.
Most importantly, government should make legislation against herdsmen grazing their cattle on people’s farm.
