‘Agric no longer a back-breaking business’

What exactly do you do at the Community of Agricultural Stakeholders of Nigeria?Community of Agricultural Stakeholders of Nigeria (CASON) is an offshoot of the Nigerian economic summit group. It came up because government has decided to take agriculture as a business. If agric is going to be a business, it must take into consideration all […]

What exactly do you do at the Community of Agricultural Stakeholders of Nigeria?
Community of Agricultural Stakeholders of Nigeria (CASON) is an offshoot of the Nigerian economic summit group. It came up because government has decided to take agriculture as a business. If agric is going to be a business, it must take into consideration all parts of the business; it is no longer a project. What we have always been doing is that you just suddenly came up and said Chinese need cassava chips. Then a lot of farmers started planting cassava, when they finish planting, nobody took the cassava from them and they were frustrated. The simple reason why that happened was because the value chain was never considered. The value chain starts from the seed; the right type of seed. How it is planted, what kind of input of fertilizer do you need, what kind of herbicide do you need? How long would you allow it to be there? When should you harvest it? How do you store it or how do you process it? How do you package it? All these are part of the value chain which the farmer who is planting the cassava did not consider.
All these things cannot be done by one person. They must be done in the value chain by various people who specialize in various areas. How do you bring them together under one umbrella- including the banks themselves and the insurance companies? That is how CASON came on board. CASON is made up of all these people and anybody who is into agriculture. So if you come up with a problem within CASON, somebody will help you solve it.
How do farmers get to be part of this organisation, because many of them are probably not aware of it?
We are aware of that. That is the reason why we keep publicizing and telling people our address; to get in touch with us. We are not charging them anything. What we are trying to do is to bring agriculture into what we call serious business. It is geared more towards our youth, who are the solution of our agriculture because they are the future. Many of the farmers today that have kept this country going – and may God bless them, our uncles and so on – they are in their sixties; they no longer have the energy; they don’t have the capacity to absorb the new technology that the whole world is now presenting to agriculture. So we are looking for youth who will be coming in and we are trying to create that kind of environment.
Marketing is a key issue in agriculture. Is CASON also creating marketing channels for agricultural produce?
Yes. We urge all farmers to get in touch with us and we connect them to a number of people who will be willing to buy their produce.
Don’t you think that CASON should decentralize its activities so that farmers can register anywhere they are?
The kind of business we’re in today is no longer physical because the world is changing. You do it online, you do it by phone. The world has changed. The issue of centralization does not arise any more.
Farmers in the southern part of Nigeria may be more educated than their northern counterparts; how do you intent to handle this issue as far as your online activity is concerned?
Most farmers anywhere in Nigeria have access to telephone and they use it very effectively. They may be unable to speak the Queen’s English, but they can speak Hausa, Fulfulde, Igbo, Yoruba and many other languages. To me, they are educated. You send messages to them, for example where to get fertilizer; you can tell them this is the time to grow their crops through their cellphones. They don’t need to keep coming out; they have enough problems dealing with the land. Don’t give them more problems going to chase information; information should come chasing them.
What is the major challenge of this agro community at the moment?
The biggest challenge we have now is funding – to be able to get this whole thing out. But we are doing our best. A number of people and members are helping out; we have some major people who have hundreds of farmers around them through which this information can be disseminated.
How many members do you have?
As at now, I will say those who have gotten in touch with us through our website, internet and so on is about 400,000 from all over the country.
Is there any programme you are developing to assist the youth who have the energy to drive some of the agriculture policies, and attract them to agriculture?
We have a big programme that we’ve done but are still going to do. The first thing we did was that we got our big members – I for instance I brought out 20-30 young people every third week of the month, to mentor them and talk to them about agriculture generally. Telling them agriculture does not necessarily mean farming. Farming is just one aspect of agriculture. Once you tell them that kind of story they become interested because not all of them will want to work under the sun. You can sit down in your own private house to do a lot of work on agriculture; and they were so excited.
First of all, you have to stop frightening them. In the past, agriculture and poverty were one and the same thing; agriculture was a back-breaking business. It does not have to be so any more. The world has changed.
We give them examples of agro activity that you can do in the comfort of your room.
For example, you can provide information in terms of weather, put it together, gather it electronically, go to the cooperatives and say I intent to sell to you ideas when rain is going to fall. Rather than wasting their money planting crops that rain will not meet, they will rather pay you for that. Another is going into market information. As at today, one of the biggest problems farmers have is the inability to find buyers for their produce. But there is nothing that is produced in Nigeria that you don’t have buyers for. It is just that the buyer does not know the seller, the seller does not know the buyer. You can do that very easily. You can hire tractor and go from farm to farm tilling their soil. There is a lot more you can do in agriculture.