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. 

OLUYINKA ALAWODE