Farmers should use seeds developed by our researchers — ARCN boss

How do you assess the activities of research institutes in Nigeria vis-à-vis the claim made by some people like the former minister of transport, Yusuf Suleiman, that farming activities have yet to be developed?I don’t know why the former minister made that statement, but I believe that in the last four years, with the agricultural […]

How do you assess the activities of research institutes in Nigeria vis-à-vis the claim made by some people like the former minister of transport, Yusuf Suleiman, that farming activities have yet to be developed?
I don’t know why the former minister made that statement, but I believe that in the last four years, with the agricultural transformation agenda of this administration, a lot of progress has been achieved in agriculture. If you look at various value chains programmes of the ministry, research and development is a key component. So there are contributions of technologies from the institutions, contributing to the gains witnessed in agriculture today.
Can you explain some of these gains that you are talking about?
If you look at Cocoa Research Institute, about two years ago, there were eight new varieties released which are giving higher yields than the varieties that were available initially. And the key aspect of research is to be able to help farmers by producing technologies that will increase the productivities of their crops and, by doing that, create wealth for them and add value to their lives.
Most of the research institutes are complaining of underfunding which is affecting their ability to develop seed varieties. Do research institutes have problems of funding?
Yes, indeed, there is underfunding. If you look at the funding that is going into the research system, 80% of that funding goes to the payment of salaries and allowances. The research institutes and the colleges have close to 12,000 staff and so a lot of the funding goes into the payment of salaries and allowances. In terms of the balance, you have to talk about overhead and capital expenditures. Effectively, you will find out that little money goes into research. And that is why the council initiated what we called competitive agricultural research grants scheme where seed money was given and competitively, researchers could have access to this fund and it was not just limited to research institutes but also to universities and other research outfits that have the mandate to carry out research in Nigeria. When the minister came in 2011, he noticed this particular gap and said that we need to reform the research system in Nigeria. Honestly speaking, until we do that, we’ll continue to have problems relating to funding and conduct of research. So we are embarking on reforms of the entire research agricultural system in such a way that the researches we do will be more responsive to farmers’ needs. Over the years, we have been conducting what we called supply-driven researches in our laboratories and libraries. We think of the problems the farmers have and embark on researches to solve the farmers‘problems without meeting these farmers. Unless we move to a system whereby there is that linkage between the researchers and the end users, our researches will end up in the shelf and they will not make impact on the ground.
In some countries like South Africa, rice farmers harvest 10 or more tones, per hectare, as against the average of 2.5 tonnes harvested in Nigeria. How do you think that can be achieved here?
I think it will be a little unfair to compare us to South Africa because the South African agriculture is basically private sector driven. If you go there, you will see that they have very large commercial farms and, to them, agriculture is a business. It is only when the minister came in that he started orientating us to think of agriculture as a business. Over the last four years, the private sector is playing an increasingly more role in agriculture than it used to do. So, we will get there. The National Cereal Research institute, Badagi, has been producing seeds that are used by our local farmers. One thing is that you have to use seeds that are produced by our research institutes. Sometimes when you get seeds from outside, they have to be adopted by your own environment before they go out to the farmers. We have excellent researchers and they are producing very good technologies. What has been missing over the years has been that uptake of these technologies by the end users and that is why I talk about the reform.
We know that your council has the mandate to supervise and monitor the research institutes in Nigeria, but does it have the mandate to conduct research, specifically, on any area of agriculture?
We are a research council essentially. We started as an offshoot of a department in the ministry and many of the workers that came to the council were civil servants in those days. So we are just seeing how we can empower them, in terms of getting access to higher degrees, so that in the future they can be competitive.