Agric revolution in the prison of infrastructural challenges

Post-harvest losses may have reduced in the past one year, but farmers are not comfortable with the state of infrastructure that supports farming activities, OKECHUKWU NNODIM reports

Many farmers and fruit sellers in Nigeria believe that the bulk of the losses they incur, even after harvesting and selling their crops, is caused by the country’s widening infrastructural deficit.

According to some of the farmers, while post-harvest losses had reduced considerably in the last one year, the cost of some agricultural produce increased significantly due to lack of adequate infrastructure and storage facilities.

The All Farmers Association of Nigeria, in an interview with our correspondent, noted that although post-harvest losses had reduced, farmers still had to contend with the challenge of moving their agricultural produce from the hinterland, where they are harvested, to the urban areas where they are sold.

Also fruit sellers interviewed at the Maitama, Kubwa and Wuse markets in the Federal Capital Territory complained of inadequate storage facilities to preserve their fruits and vegetables.

They, however, stated that dealers in fruits, such as pineapples, pear, oranges, water melon and carrots, etc, had devised a means to stay afloat by not acquiring more than they could sell at a given point in time. But the Federal Government, through its Nigeria Agricultural Quarantine Agency, stated that it had been supporting farmers in terms of crop preservation and storage, which helped to reduce post-harvest losses.

The Chairman of the AFAN, Lagos Branch, Femi Oke, told our correspondent that while the closure of Nigeria’s land borders had impacted positively on farming, it was still vital for the government to make the required infrastructure available to further boost production.

Oke said, “Post harvest losses have been very minimal in the past one year.  For instance, many farmers who grow perishable crops, such as tomato and pepper, no longer use baskets to harvest them. They now use plastic items and the likes and this has helped to reduce the post-harvest losses.

“But I must say that transporting these products to where they are sold has posed a serious challenge to farmers. This is the cost of some agricultural produce is on the high side.”

He stressed that government could support farmers by fixing bad roads, which would enable them to increase the volume of production.

According to the AFAN boss, a reduction in post-harvest losses had been observed in livestock farming, despite the myriads challenges facing that sector.

He said, “Our livestock farmers are doing well. I don’t think we recorded a single outbreak of bird flu in 2019. Even if it was recorded in some places, it must have been a very minimal case. Every farmer has been making efforts to curb losses.

At the Maitama Market, a fruit seller named Anselem Onyedi, said the lack of adequate storage and preservation facilities had posed a serious challenge over time.

“What most of us do is that we tell the farmers who supply us fruits to only produce as much as we can sell in order to reduce wastage. This is because it is not that simple to preserve fruits and make them fresh for consumers,”Onyedi said.

“For some of us, better preservation measures and facilities are what we seek, although many of us are funding this privately. However, our suppliers, who are farmers, often complain of the high cost of transportation due to bad roads and they eventually transfer the costs to the commodities.”

For Joel Olorunshola, a young farmer managing an oil palm plantation in Kogi State, the agricultural terrain in Nigeria is really rough and difficult to cope with.

Olorunshola, who also works with the Farm and Infrastructure Foundation, Abuja, a large scale agricultural firm, described the lack of funding to farmers as a serious challenge.

“Post-harvest losses are compounded by bad roads because many roads that lead to farmlands are bad. However, for my kind of agricultural production, accessing fund is one of the biggest challenges we are facing.

“It was difficult for me to access funds and that was why I started doing my farming business bit-by-bit. But after this pilot stage, hopefully I should be able to get some funds.”

Asked whether he made an effort to access loans from commercial banks, Olorunshola replied, “You can’t access the loans. Even the procedure for accessing the Nigerian agricultural lending scheme domiciled in the Central Bank of Nigeria is very cumbersome for a legitimate large scale farmer, not to mention a small scale farmer.

“After completing the process, the collateral and other pre-requisites will convince you that there is no way you can access it. In fact, it is highly not possible for you to get their loans as a young farmer.

“Most of those funds are just lying fallow at the CBN and in other financial institutions. We don’t benefit from it, yet they keep saying that they are giving it out. I have put in efforts and even tried the Bank of Agriculture, but there was no positive result.”

He also stated that the BoA in Kogi State could not fund his venture, despite the fact that he provided title documents for the land he inherited as a collateral.

At the Kubwa market in Abuja, Danjuma Idris, who sells fruits and vegetables, said lack of storage facilities usually cause losses for his business.

“Farmers who supply us vegetables and fruits do not have adequate storage and preservation facilities and this leads to losses. So that is where the government needs to come in so as to substantially curb post-harvest losses,” he said.

Speaking on some of the things which the government was doing to reduce post-harvest losses, the Head, Media, Communications and Strategies, NAQS, Dr. Chigozie Nwodo, noted that aside from the losses, there had been complaints that agricultural products from Nigeria do not meet international standards

He said, “And because of this we decided to go backwards to the fields where the processes, cultivation and others start from, beginning from the tilling of the land, planting, weeding, etc.

“In fact we monitor the whole process across the value chain including the haulage, storage and, of course, post-harvest preservation is also part of it. We try to guide farmers on the steps to be taken in order to maintain those commodities in a way that they will meet international standards.

“So that by the time they are coming to the airports, seaports and land borders where we work, they would have meet up with the required standards and will have less number of rejections. This definitely will drag down post-harvest losses.”

On how much the measures adopted by the NAQS had helped in reducing post-harvest losses, Nwodo stated that it had increased the volume of agricultural exports from Nigeria.

He said, “We do not have a figure at the moment in terms of what this has helped to achieve. But in terms of monitoring of those outreaches, because it comes mostly in form of advocacy and awareness creation, you can estimate it by the increased export of our produce.”

Nwodo insisted that post-harvest losses had reduced significantly because “generally there is a steady increase in the export of Nigerian agricultural commodities.”

He said, “We have also carried out an export certification process in which we break down the processes required for the export and adequate preservation of different commodities in a way that is understandable by the farmers.

“So that they know at every point in time what to do, the kind of pesticides to use, the improved ways to cultivate crops, how to package, store and preserve their produce in order to have little or no rejection for commodities meant for both local consumption and for export.”