Why farmers must transit from rain-fed to brain-fed agriculture
There has been very heated debates on whether Africa particularly Nigeria can feed itself. While food importers and their supporters argue in favour of importation, bringing in issues of smuggling that usually follows a food import ban and losses in revenue to the government as a result, domestic producers of such foods maintain such bans are the best options.
Domestic manufacturers of processed foods using agro-based materials such as palm oil, have also been urging the government to allow importation of these raw materials at minimal duty rates to reduce their production costs since they are the employers of labour, helping the government reduce unemployment. They maintain that such commodities are not produced in sufficient quantities in the country, so apart from high prices, they claim they also have difficulty getting sufficient quantities and quality of these commodities.
But industry watchers complain that many of these manufacturers import so much more of these agro materials than they need for their production processes and then push the rest into the market for household consumption and crash the prices such that Nigeria farmers are unable to compete on price and thereby farming of such commodities become unprofitable. The farmers are thereby discouraged and this disincentive could affect investors’ confidence in local production.
The bottom-line in all these arguments according to industry watchers is that Nigeria and indeed the whole of Sub-saharan Africa do not produce enough food for its own sustenance due to heavy dependence on rain-fed agriculture which is now marred by climate change. This climate change phenomenon whether it is low or high rainfall is making agricultural practices unpredictable because rains no longer start or end at the expected time. Nigeria and indeed the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa now direly need to go into brain-fed agriculture.
Richard Hargrave, managing director, Dizengoff, says, “One of the things you have in Africa is almost too much of rains and when a plant gets too much water, it drowns and the roots don’t get developed, it does not become strong enough to pass water through the plant.” Speaking further, Hargrave says Brain-fed agriculture means ‘modern technologies on how to deliver the right amount of quality water, fertilizer and other inputs at the right time and the right place to a plant. He explains, “Every time a child is sick, if you keep putting medicine in him, he would become weak, if you want to nurture your child to fight infection, you have to make him strong – that is exactly what you have to do with a plant – you have to feed and water the plant in a very controlled way that it would become strong and the water has to be clean. The Greenhouse stops too much rain by providing an enclosed environment.” To use this Greenhouse technology, irrigation facilities has to be in place.
Even where farmers cannot yet afford greenhouses, they can still utilise irrigation to ensure that when rains do not fall as at when due, they have backup to water their plants.
According to Nick Moon, co-founder; managing director, KickStart International, “There are lots of opportunities in agriculture to turn the African continent from food-deficit to food-surplus, but all sensible commentators agree that it is smallholder agriculture particularly that deserves attention if we are to achieve this goal.”
Moon urges better seeds, fertilizers, market information, roads, post harvest storage, local value adding, more facilitative regulations, access to credit. He adds, “All these are cited as important responses and necessary to the ‘green revolution’. But one fact stands out starkly: only four percent (or six percent according to some) of African agriculture is irrigated. This means that 96percent is rain fed.”
He then explains, “Rain-fed means feast-famine, glut-shortage production cycles which are out of whack with demand which is constant (and indeed rising). Increasing the productivity of rain fed agriculture will compound the existing problem of 30percent – 40percent waste, by placing additional strain/demand on already inadequate infrastructures. Nowhere else in the agriculture world does anyone depend so heavily on rain-fed production.”
Moon adds, “At KickStart, we have developed an irrigation technology that:
•Costs less than $400 per irrigated hectare (versus $5,000 – $10,000 for conventional irrigation schemes).
* Is as conservative of water (arguably even more conservative) than micro-drip – and is less expensive per hectare and much easier to set up and use.
*Only uses surface or shallow groundwater (e.g. from hand-dug wells), which is renewed/recharged every rainy season.
* Is already used by over 90,000 rural families – who have invested in the technology themselves without any assistance from anyone.
The technology has transformed from subsistence to profitable commercial agriculture as a result; increased productivity and incomes by typically 300percent to 1200percent; provided new employment to over 120,000 people in rural areas; generated over $90 million per year into local economies and can be used by between 15-20 million families in SSA (i.e. ~10percent of the SSA population) because they live in places where the pump can physically work and where it makes economic sense to do so.
We need brain-fed but not rain-fed agriculture to turn around the smallholder sector in Africa and transform rural people from ‘liabilities’ on national books of account, in permanent need of charity and relief welfare, to ‘assets’ who are using their skills and knowledge to add value and create wealth. It is not rocket science to do so. Just a question of looking critically at our agricultural systems and processes, and identifying where the tightest bottleneck is and removing this first, before going on to address secondary and tertiary bottlenecks.
OLUMAKINDE ONI