Prof. Ibrahim Abubakar, the Executive Director IAR and the Regional Coordinator of the Support for Agriculture Research and Development of Strategic Crop (SARD-SC) in Africa, and Regional Coordinator for West Africa. |
African
Development Bank (AfDB)’s support to SARD-SC wheat productivity through
research innovation platform has helped to increase production from
100,000-400.000 metric tons. In this interview, the Executive Director
Institute of Agricultural Research (IAR), Zaria, Prof. Ibrahim Abubakar, spoke
on the need for sustainability of the project, for food import bills to become
a thing of the past in Africa. Excerpts…
Please could you
introduce yourself sir?
My name is Prof. Ibrahim Abubakar, the Executive Director
IAR and the Regional Coordinator of the Support for Agriculture Research and
Development of Strategic Crop (SARD-SC) in Africa, and Regional Coordinator for
West Africa.
Which crops are the Strategic Crops for the program you are
coordinating?
The African government discovered that at a time there was
food crisis, which was in 1998, the governments of Africa had money to import
food, but there was no food anywhere. So the African Development Bank (AfDB)
decided to give a grant to research and development of some strategic crop in
Africa, and the strategic crops are, wheat, rice, cassava and maize.
So on this
basis, three centers were mandated to carry out research and transfer cumulated
volume of technologies to farmers for improved productivity of these crops. The
centers are IITA, which is coordinating maize and cassava, ICARDA is
coordinating wheat and AfriRice is coordinating rice. It is known to you that
this crops are really strategic, because there are food security problem in
Africa, and if you take wheat for example, Nigerians almost every day in our
various homes and families do eat wheat, if we don’t eat Indomie , our children
eat Indomie, we eat bread, if we don’t eat bread, we eat spaghetti, if we don’t
eat spaghetti, we eat biscuit, various cookies, so all these are products made
from wheat.
Our appetites have become used to wheat in various forms, and the
demand for wheat is increasing, that is why Nigeria is used to importing.
Presently we are importing four billion dollar worth of wheat annually and we
believe this is unsustainable. One cannot continue to eat what it cannot
produce, so that is why this project is conceived, and I am specifically
coordinating the SARD- SC wheat in West Africa and it is a fact that Africa is
a net importer of wheat, in Nigeria for example, 98 per cent of our requirement
is imported, but with the achievement made in the project in the last four
years, we’ve been able to increase the yield of wheat from 1.5 to about 4 to 5
tons per hectare and also the production has increased from about 100,000 tons
annually to 400,000 tons, which is a remarkable achievement and if we are
consistent, we are able to maintain and sustain the achievement made by the
project in the next five years we will not import wheat again, but we will be
able to produce sufficient wheat that our teeming population needs to eat.
You are from research and research is very strategic to high yield of
crop, what role have our research Institutesbeen able to play in this,in the
face of limited fund?
Research is cardinals because technology has to be generated
before it’s been disseminated, if you don’t generate technology there will be
nothing to extend, so research has to continuously develop technology, improved
varieties, develop improved production practices, develop even the end use of
this product, develop technology for post-harvest, so that farm losses after
harvest will be reduced and so on, and
we will have met up with our expectation, and in addition to that this
project is surrounded by the concept of innovation platform, so we have
established about six innovation platforms in Nigeria where higher technologies
are generated, where technologies are disseminated, and the project has been
able to build capacities for not only
the farmers to produce wheat, but also the scientist to be able to generate
relevant and appropriate technologies that will be taken to the farmers.
Less than four, five weeks now the cropping schemes of your Institute
will be coming up, this year what are we looking at ,from the experience of
last year cropping activities?
Yes, the cropping scheme is coming up at the end of this
month, although it’s no longer called cropping scheme, it’s now Annual Research
Review and Planning Meeting, so we are going to have our Annual Research Review
and Planning Meeting at the end of this month, and there we are expected to
showcase achievements of last year and also plan for the coming year.
As you are aware the rainy season is by the
corner, in the next two months we shall be deep into the raining season, so we
have to plan how to go about it, we have to plan how to go about our researches
and fortunately last year we were able to achieve a little, we were able to
achieve additional three varieties of maize, SAM NUT 49, SAM NUT 50, SAM NUT
51. SAM NUT 49 is vitamin A maize, it is a bio-fortified maize and it has a
yield of about 8.8 tons per hectare, and we also have SAM NUT 50 and 51 which
are drought tolerant varieties which can give yield of 9 tons per hectare.
So
we are making a lot of progress, we have also released some cowpea varieties
that are suitable and high yielding for the farmers in the north west and also
in the south west and similarly we have been able to develop lots of
technologies and we have extended technologies to a lot of farmers, through
various projects and in a nut shell, we have made huge achievement, when you
come, you will see what I am talking about.
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