Poor road network hinders market access to farm produce

One of the greatest problems confronting rural farmers and communities in Nigeria is the absence of critical infrastructure such as ‘motorable’ roads. This is hindering market access for farmers in such communities who work assiduously to eke out a living from farming.

Nigeria continues to suffer low levels of agricultural productivity due to infrastructural deficit across the country. Due to the deplorable state of roads, farmers have to grow only what they can eat or the extra they can carry on their heads to nearby markets. Most times, the surplus gets rotten in storage in the villages or during transit as a result of many hours or days spent in transporting the foodstuffs to where they are needed due to bad roads.

A recent visit to Ogun-Osun River Basin Development Authority, Oke-Oban, Ogun State, during the raining season took us more than two hours from Lagos, a journey that was suppose to take less than hour.

Heavy rainfall could have adverse effect on crops by wiping out the entire farmland and getting the farmers discouraged.

Meanwhile, urban dwellers have to spend very large percentage of their income to buy food. This is because the food that gets to the cities are far more expensive than what the poor struggling farmers would have sold them. The high prices of these commodities are blamed on the middlemen, but they are also quick to point out that they incur huge costs transporting the food as a result of bad roads.

The inability of farmers to market their farm produce means lack of adequate income for production inputs and to expand production. As a result, many farmers are still unable to afford consumer goods and meet their immediate cash requirements, educate their children, live in decent houses and afford good healthcare.

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 Economics and Statistics, University of Delaware’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resource.

Despite policy reforms put in place by the Goodluck Jonathan’s administration that have transformed the lives of farmers by ending 40 years of corruption in the seed and fertiliser sector within 90 days through the Growth Enhancement Scheme (GES), farmers’ efforts to escape poverty and lift themselves above subsistence level are still limited by the present poor access to markets, supplies and vital information. Local roads and tracks are often impassable making it difficult, if not impossible, for rural families to access the urban economy.

“The roads are bad; it takes me two to three days to transport my yam produce from Benue (located in middle belt of Nigeria) to Lagos (located in South West). I lost more than 300 tubers of yam on my last trip to Mile 12 Market in Lagos because the trailer got spoilt on the road and my yam produce was stolen since the trailer slept on the road for a night,” according to Godwin Apak, a yam farmer in Benue State.

“There are times our yams get spoilt on the road; the sun will burn part of it even before we get to Lagos. This usually makes me sell cheaper than I was suppose to sell. If the roads were better, the goods will get to the market on time for me to sell without it getting spoilt,” he said further.

This is the challenge most farmers in the rural communities face. Before the produce is transported out of the farm lands to places they can access roads to the market, most of the crops are lost in the process, especially the perishable crops. It also affects their ability to make contribution into the micro credit scheme like ajo and esusu. If this micro scheme is not done, it can affect their contribution to their household income and ability to buy inputs for the next planting season.

According to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), high transport costs arising from the combination of scarce resources and poor road networks in rural Africa make parts of the rural economy only semi-open.

The provision of good road network is a pre-requisite for enabling Nigeria stimulate economic growth and to reach the targets for economic recovery and poverty alleviation by 2020, promoting domestic market activity and market integration, and facilitating and developing access to these markets.

Josephine Okojie