Government alone cannot fund agriculture — Dr. Penda

How do you think the dwindling fortunes of the country’s revenue has impacted on food security?You must be aware of the current global issue on the international sales of oil. There are problems and of course, the country’s revenue depends on oil, at least more than 70 percent of its resources rely on oil. As […]

How do you think the dwindling fortunes of the country’s revenue has impacted on food security?
You must be aware of the current global issue on the international sales of oil. There are problems and of course, the country’s revenue depends on oil, at least more than 70 percent of its resources rely on oil. As I speak with you now, the National Assembly has not been able to peg a benchmark for oil prices and therefore, they cannot determine the total volume of the national budget. Disbursement to sectors starts with the national budget, then it goes to the state budget and then you can now look at the level of private involvement in the sectors. For agriculture, definitely the dwindling oil prices will affect the Nigerian agriculture sector because that has also affected the foreign exchange rate as most of the agricultural equipment and chemicals are imported. It therefore means that it has an impact on input prices; you know we buy fertilizers; we buy tractors and agro chemicals outside Nigeria which affects their prices. The domestic prices of these inputs will now rise higher and have impact on the low income farmers making it difficult for them to procure the inputs and expand their farms and even maintain the sizes of their farms.
What danger would this portend for Benue State as the food basket of the nation?
It is already dangerous as you have said because the state depends heavily on agriculture, at least more than 70 percent of Benue population is involved in the sector. So if we have bad operation in the agriculture sector, it will badly affect the people and I really don’t know how we will survive as even the government is not meeting up the challenges in terms of revenue generation. The industries are not acting very well because of the level of power supply and of course the inputs will not be available for the farmers.
This implies that the government should be worried about the sector. But what can the government do?
The government has to be worried. The transformation agenda of President Goodluck Jonathan was aimed at developing agriculture particularly and then reducing food imports because the major food imports had been wheat, rice, fish and sugar. But as the situation was, we tried to reduce food importation by almost 50 percent last year. Can we survive if we now encourage domestic production that is occasioned by high level of input costs? And then the low income of farmers, that means we have to trigger imports as domestic production is not coming. So where do we go from here, the government has to go to business so that our economy has to be driven. Look at the budget now, they are everyday slashing the budgets of sectors, they should not attempt to slash the budget of the agriculture sector, they can do it to any sector but have to give more money to the agric sector and this is the time to support more farmers, to give them more incentives to produce.
How much do you think government is spending on importation of the commodities that you earlier mentioned?
Government is spending over N1 billion on importation of these commodities and the highest of them is wheat which amounts to more than $600 million per year of import. That is why government is thinking of introducing cassava substitution in confectioneries like bread so that it will reduce the import level of wheat. Another one is rice, the total importation barrel of rice in Nigeria is about 3.2 million tones and we consume about six million tons of rice so that the gap between these figures is  what we imported.  This import gap is very high and we have the potential to produce rice.
We have a good labour force, we have land mass of about 80 million and then we have good water bodies that can support irrigation to produce rice twice in a year. However, our varieties are still not high yielding because we are still yielding two tons per hectare while some countries are yielding eight tons per hectare and others even 11 tons per hectare and they produce about three times in a year. China is producing about 150 million tons of rice per year and if that is divided by six that is the number of years, one production in China can feed Nigeria.
How do you react to the abandoning  of FADAMA in the state due to lack of counterpart funding on the side of government and that projects which the state has comparative advantage in are taken to other neighbouring ones?
The most shocking of it all is that there are no extension workers in Benue State. BNARDA was created to take over the aspect of agriculture carried out by extension workers but all of them are aged, retired from service, and most have not been employed. The standard  ratio of extension workers is about one extension workers to about 500 farmers but the ratio in Benue now is about one extension worker to more than 25,000 farmers so can they bridge the gap. Most of them now are old, by next year, more will drop out again and there is no employment. In the FADAMA, there are no staff there because most of them have overstayed in the civil service and have reached their retirement age and no new employment is coming in and the farmers are suffering as new techniques in farming are not transmitted. It is really a serious problem.