‘Research has to continuously develop technology, improved varieties, improved production practices, even the end use of this product…’

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.