Poor farming practices, infrastructure impede increase in agric productivity

Some of the greatest problems confronting agricultural productivity in Nigeria are poor farming practices carried out by farmers and the poor state of infrastructure across the country, experts in this year’s BusinessDay CEO Forum have said.

Developing the agriculture sector entails establishing key infrastructure enablers, creating best farming practices for farmers that will help boost productivity.

“Agriculture’s poor farming practices means it is persistently inefficient in Nigeria,” Christian Wessels, deputy group managing director, TGI Group of Companies Advisor, Bain & Company, said during his paper presentation titled “Growth opportunities in Nigeria’s new normal.”

Nigeria continues to suffer low levels of agricultural productivity due to infrastructural deficit across the country; farmers have to grow only what they can eat or the extra they can carry on their heads to nearby markets.

Many roads are totally impassable after few days of heavy rainfall cutting off some communities completely from being accessed. Even when commuters offer to pay higher fares, many commercial motorists refuse to go to such communities for fear that their vehicles would sink.

“A big challenge to agricultural productivity and food security in Nigeria is the lack of adequate infrastructure to support food production and distribution,” Titus Awokuse, chair of the Department of Applied Economics and Statistics, University of Delaware’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, said.

Despite policy reforms put in place by the Goodluck Jonathan’s administration that have transformed the lives of farm­ers by ending 40 years corrup­tion in the seed and fertiliser sector within 90 days through the Growth Enhancement Scheme (GES), poor farming practices are still being carried out by more than 96 percent of farmers across the country.

According to industry watchers, Nigeria is not currently making use of its arable land and the land it is using is not properly prepared or utilised – fertilisers, equipment and improved seedlings are not being used in sufficient quantities; as a result, yield per acre is very low.

Farmers’ inability to access vital information that is beneficial to them and the ineffective dissemination of information by extension agents cause poor feedbacks between farmers, research institutes and policy makers in the agricultural sector.

Most farmers in Nigeria still lack access to improved seed varieties and modern farming techniques as a result of the inefficiency of extension services agents that are suppose to teach farmers good farming practices.

“I still farm with the farming methods my father taught me before he died, and that was roughly 50 years ago. I really want to use modern technologies but I don’t even know where to get them from and how to operate them. The extension service agent that is supposed to teach us modern technology hardly visits my farm,” Sule Usman, a yam farmer in Wukari, Taraba State, said.

The low rate of Nigerian agriculture productivity is caused by many factors, including low levels of technology and land utilisation.

Agriculture is very important to the economy of Nigeria; for Nigeria to be a power house in food production, it must unlock its huge amount of agricultural potential to be a power house of food that can actually feed itself and also feed the world and earn a lot of income that can take millions of its citizens out of poverty.

Josephine Okojie