Expert disagrees with FAO, says Nigeria needs mechanization, not palliatives

An agricultural expert, Engineer Olagbaju Akeju has described as a wrong step the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)’s culture of concentrating only on giving inputs to farmers rather than helping with mechanization of the sector towards commercialization and upgrading of subsistence to medium and large scale farmers.

He made this observation while responding to the NTA live programme of Agric Minister, Alhaji Nanono in a telephone conversation with Food Farm News, recently.

He said the narrowing down of the definition of food security by the organisation to  accessibility, availability and affordability and the social welfare of giving inputs to ensure subsistence farming rather than commercial, where a farmer would have 4-5 hectares of land for crops cultivation for enhanced economic powers and job creations was inappropriate.

 Akeju, a former Director at the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (FMARD) said that FAO and other international organizations should desist from using social welfare to describe Nigeria’s food security situation, saying that the business angle of the agriculture sector must as well be given consideration by asking how would a farmer be able to move his crops production from the point of one hectare to five or more for the purpose of expansion and wealth generation to afford some basic need of life for himself.

The former director said he supported the position of the minister in terms food sufficiency in the country before the arrival of covid-19 pandemic through interventions, saying panic buying and movement restrictions coupled with climate change impact and post harvest wastages and other factors have combined together to bring about paucity and hike in the price of food. 

Said he ”For our Agriculture to develop, we must move from the point of small scale to medium and large scale. This is what we should be promoting, and I think this is what the Minister of Agriculture was trying to say. There must be a minimum of five hectares for a farmer; this will help them to begin to see agriculture beyond just feeding oneself, but the level of commercialization.

 The business aspect is not well defined by the FAO interpretation of food security as being affordable, accessible and available, and that is why departure from subsistence farming to commercial farming is a bit difficult for many farmers. It is when the business aspect is there that agriculture will develop.’’

He advocated for the development of the downstream sector of agriculture saying that this is where more jobs could be created to drive the upstream of farming and crops cultivation in what economists would call demand driven production. 

Akeju, who said upstream agriculture could not create jobs as much as downstream where more can be created saying that : “Upstream only emphasize on planting of maize or rice, and how many hands can you hire? But when you want to convert the maize to starch, that is where job creation is much in terms of cleaning, sorting, marketing, bagging, transporting, and other food vendors in such processing areas. When we get our policy in order that is when our upstream of agriculture will develop.”