Low agricultural mechanisation limiting farmers’ potential
Low level of agricultural mechanisation has continued to limit the capacity of farmers to expand their cultivation areas, perform timely farming operations and achieve economies of scale in food production, Richard Hargrave, managing director at Dizengoff has said.
For Nigeria to attain the level of food sufficiency, diversify its economy away from oil and reduce dependency on food imports, it has to improve the level of agricultural mechanisation, experts say.
Available statistics show that Nigeria is one of the least mechanised farming countries in the world with the country’s tractor density put at 0.27 hp/ hectare which is far below the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)’s 1.5hp/hectare recommended tractor density.
“It is about time we face up to the facts if we as a nation are serious about producing the food we eat ourselves,” Hargrave said.
“We have all the farmers we need as well, at around 12.3 million, making Nigeria 14th in the world, but,” says Hargrave, “we simply will not properly equip them.”
In Nigeria, a significantly higher proportion of farming area is still cultivated by hand tools. The international Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) reckons that Nigeria is still at the early stage of agricultural mechanisation. But experts acknowledge that mechanisation of power intensive operations have been slow.
When measured in 2003, 12 years ago, Nigeria had only 30,000 tractors. African largest economy is currently adding 1,000 new ones each year, which is still not considered sufficient in replacing the aging, worn out, and broken down ones.
This means on a per capita basis, Nigeria ranks 132nd out of the 188 countries worldwide measured by FAO / United Nations in terms of the number of tractors in the country. Nigeria has fewer tractors than minnow countries like Serbia & Montenegro, with 400,000, Pakistan with 320,000, or Uzbekistan with 170,000 tractors.
“Iceland has many, many more tractors per hectare of cropland than any other nation in the world. They have 37.2 tractors per 1,000 people. We have 0.223. They have almost one tractor for each of their farmers. So that means tiny little Iceland, covered in glaciers and frozen earth, is actually 166 times more mechanised in their farming than Nigeria, the so called ‘giant of Africa,’ Hargrave said.
“The fact is that Nigeria has only one tractor for every 4,100 farmers is ridiculous. Each tractor is farming 1,013 hectares of arable land. We simply are yet to have anything like enough tractors necessary to work our fertile arable lands, and so truly produce enough food we need to survive,” He said.
According to the Ministry of Agriculture, Nigeria needs a minimum of 746, 666 tractors equipped with tillers and other support gadgetry to sufficiently mechanise agriculture going by best practices.
“Rather than waste more than $1 billion a year importing food, why are we not spending this money on tractors? Is it because our banks prefer to lend traders money to import food rather than to farmers to acquire tractors? We have read of all sorts of schemes to help farmers.”
“Nigeria boasts an alphabet soup of Agricultural Funding Schemes – NIRSAL, CACS, ACSS, AGSF – you name it. We have a set of initials for it. But we still don’t actually have the tractors we desperately need, and that is what really matters. It is clear everything done before simply has not, and is not, working” Hargrave adds.
Josephine Okojie