FRIDAY DISCOURSE BY DR. ALIYU TILDE
Technology and Agriculture
We will
briefly take advantage of the confusion in our political atmosphere to
touch on other equally important areas. In the second part of our series –
Technology Our Saviour – I set out to discuss the imperative of
technology in achieving food security for this country and the West
African Sub region.
God has
blessed this country with enough land that could be put to economic use by
cultivating different crop species. We may add that He has also blessed it
with over 120 million inhabitants who are ever willing to consume the
produce. Beyond our borders, we also carry a moral obligation of making
food available to our neighbours who for reasons of geography, famine or
war cannot cultivate enough for their millions of inhabitants. The market
for farm products is almost unlimited.
With such
generosity of nature, why are over 91 million Nigerians living under
poverty? Since nature has met its promise of rain and land, the only
remaining factor that may be responsible for this failure is the human
input. In evaluating human input, we need to focus not only on the number
of farmers but also on the quality of their input.
Three
things are involved. First, I am ready to concede that my earlier
assertion on the availability of vast arable land is a bit inaccurate.
Though vast arable land exists, it is not accessible to all farmers in the
size they may wish to have. In the Southern part of the country for
example, access to arable land is difficult due to its scarcity,
topography and restrictive tenure system that operates there. Even in the
North where abundant land exists, socio-cultural reasons combined with
growing inadequate security and the desire to enjoy modern facilities such
as education, health and market for produce has in most places
concentrated farmers to a strip of less than 2 kilometres along the main
roads, leaving the hinterland increasingly unattended to. In addition, the
land tenure up here is also restrictive, though to a lesser extent than in
the South. I live in a rural area, and if I look around I can confidently
say that only about half of the population has farms to plant, and only
about 25% of such farmers cultivates up to a hectare.
This leads
us to other limiting factors in addition to land. Even the abundance of
human resource we mentioned earlier is not accurate. Majority of farmers
depend on their labour which cannot cultivate more than half a hectare.
Though farmers have children, such children in many communities hardly
contribute to food production because they are preoccupied with school,
both secular and religious. And those who desire to cultivate more than
half a hectare must depend on expensive labour.
Mentioning
labour brings money into the equation. Majority of farmers would be
struggling to feed their families during the farming season. The money
they can afford to invest in farming is pretty little. Thus, majority of
them will depend on their personal labour. Money, therefore, becomes the
third limiting factor to our food security.
From the
foregoing, if this country wishes to achieve food security, agriculture
must be saved from the inadequate hands of our peasant population which,
as we have seen, is limited by lack of access to land, labour and funds.
Attempts were made to achieve exactly this in the 1970s and 1980s.
However, most of the farmers who attempted large scale farming have
abandoned it. I deplore, for example, the absence today of the beautiful
scene of Ammani Farms which adorned the highway few kilometres away from
Funtua on the way to Sokoto in the 80s.
This is
where technology comes in. Large scale farming must utilize machinery and
modern inputs in every operation. With the proper technology, few farmers
can produce food in millions of tonnes every season. I have seen dairy
farms that produce 12,000 litres of milk each daily with only four people
on their payroll.
Technology
in agriculture requires selection of appropriate crop for the ecological
belt, improved seeds, use of machinery for land preparation, planting,
fertilizer application, spraying herbicide and harvest and processing. The
mistake that our farmers often make is to think that a tractor and its
three basic implements – plough, harrow, and ridger – is all they need for
large scale farming. This thought often leads to failure because,
according to the concept of limiting factors, the pace of a reaction is
determined by the factor that is most scarce. Partial mechanisation is
always doomed because manual labour, which is employed in some of the
operations, is often characterised by inaccuracy, delay, high cost, and
above all, mismanagement.
Let us also
dispel the notion that technology in agriculture is limited to
mechanization. It encompasses all techniques necessary for optimal
production including breeding, crop protection, irrigation, soil
conservation, etc. It also involves the improvement of livestock and the
marketing of their products. As the yield of a hectare can be improved by
using modern techniques, so could the yield of beef and dairy products. A
good breed of cow, for example, can start cycling at the age of nine month
only instead of three to five years that is common among our local breeds.
Likewise, a good breed can yield milk up to 10 to 20 times that of a local
breed. And so on.
I am not
unaware that employment of modern technology has its attendant problems,
and they could be many. I have listed six below. First, it requires money,
about 10 million to acquire a complete set of machinery for cereals
production, for example. But this may not be a problem to the category of
farmers we are talking about, those who will plant 100 hectares and above,
and who often have millions as disposable income. If thirty of them in
each state of the federation will dedicate 10 million naira to acquire and
hire out the machinery to less capable farmers, that alone can change the
scope of our food production. If they fail, governments can come to the
aid practising farmers by issuing them soft loans to acquire such
machinery. Let every state government, for example, issue soft loans of
N10million to 30 farmers annually and assuming that each administration
lasts eight years, such a government would empowered 240 farmers with
machines that will improve food production to unimaginable heights. I will
not encourage the past practise of government owning the machines, for
they easily become subjects of gross abuse.
There is
also a problem with extension services, the spread of modern techniques
from universities, agricultural institutes and agricultural development
authorities to farmers. These are the only avenues for the farmer to
acquire modern techniques but which in recent years government has funded
inadequately. As I drive from Bauchi to Sokoto, I often lament the
dilapidated sites of formerly World Bank funded Agricultural Development
Projects at Nabordo, Soba, Funtua and Gusau, which have become abandoned,
along with the entire infrastructures that included dams, offices, stores,
houses, mills, etc. These sites attest to the fact that our state
governments are not interested in agriculture. On the contrary, today,
with little funding, the ‘Sasakawa 2000’ project has made
tremendous impact in states it intervened. Through it, even farmers in my
village have put into practice important agronomic concepts like optimal
leaf area index, fertilizer rates, etc.
The third
problem is that machines, as computers do to offices, leave many workers
idle. Herbicides, for example, are correctly called kato huta today
in Hausaland because they are increasingly limiting the use of manual
labour. A single tractor may do the job of 500 labourers. There is the
fear that many youths will become idle. This point featured in my debate
with a then socialist lecturer colleague on mechanised farming way back in
1984. My answer here is that there is room for both manual and mechanised
inputs in our approach to expanded agricultural production. While manual
labour will still find a place in subsistence farming, machines can serve
the need of farmers who have large farms and whose output is required to
cater for the wide shortfall in food production in Nigeria and its
neighbouring countries. Otherwise, I cannot see how a large scale farmer
can gather 500 labourers at a time in any community in this country. The
labourers are simply not there, and were he to find them, the cost of
managing them will cause him enough headaches to abandon farming entirely.
The fourth
problem with mechanised farming is attention. Our ‘big men’ often take
farming casually. They want to be politicians, businessmen and large scale
farmers at the same time. Impossible. Farming is a full time job; it
requires maximum concentration. The footprint of the farmer, they say, is
the best manure for his crop. Without the continuous presence of the owner
on the farm, it becomes subject to mismanagement. Most of the failure of
previous attempts to mechanised farming can be attributed to this. If such
people had limited their ambitions, farming would have yielded enough
resources to minister the luxury and comfort they pursue through other
means.
The fifth
is the cost and availability of inputs of which fertilizer is most
notorious. Governments need to find a way of making it available on time
and directly to farmers. Right now it is acquired late and distributed
late, with a large part of it given out as gifts to ‘important
personalities.’ To go round this problem, I will not advise any farmer to
rely on government supply of this important input. Instead, he must buy
during the dry season all the fertiliser he needs for the coming season,
then reserve whatever the government allocates to him for the next season.
If he is lucky to get enough in any season from the government, he does
not need to buy from the market the following season.
Finally,
the market. I agree that sometimes prices of certain commodities could be
very bad for a farmer, especially if he is under pressure from his
financiers. However, in the past ten years, governments might have taken
measures to protect the local market and there is an increasing demand for
Nigerian commodities in the West African market, especially from our
immediate neighbours. Nevertheless, where glut is imminent there is the
need for government intervention to reserve the excess for a rainy day. So, though land tenure, labour and scarce funding have conspired to hinder the realisation of food security for our country and its neighbours, technology is here to save us. As discussed above, there is the need for private entrepreneurs and governments to employ the various techniques of modern agriculture. And there are enough Nigerians to do this without inviting foreigners from Southern Africa. |