Nigeria Promises More But Invests Less Into Food Production—Oxfam

Tayo Olanipekun

Nigerian government investments in both agriculture and climate change adaptation are less in comparison to the promises made and the country must make small holder farmers the focus of its economic transformation to be able to overturn malnutrition and move  toward food security, Oxfam has said.

The international nongovernmental organisation also said public funding is usually skewed toward larger scale projects and research at the expense of the support farmers need.

In its Policy Brief Paper made public in Abuja on Tuesday, Oxfam noted that “fine words do not produce food” and the support small holder farmers need to be able to key into the economic transformation and commercialisation in Nigeria are “straightforward.”

It listed fertilizer, access to market and climate adaptation as vital resources onto which government must escalate investment but decried the fact that between 2010 and 2015, Nigeria only invested 1.9 per cent of its national budget in agriculture, which was 0.1 per cent proportion of the nation’s GDP for the period.

“In line with its commitment to the Maputo Declaration, the Nigeria government should increase spending in the agricultural sector to at least 10 per cent of its national budget.

“The government should redirect investments to align with the needs of small holder farmers, especially women farmers who face additional constraints in assessing agricultural inputs and extension services. Farmers need support to ameliorate the cost of fertilizer, machinery, water pumps and other resources,” the global humanitarian organisation noted in its recommendations.

It added that public-private programs that have demonstrated success in enhancing food production and access to market should be improved upon to support small holder farmers.

While explaining that Nigeria was named in 2015 as the world’s fourth vulnerable country to climate change, the report said the country lost $16.9bn in damages following the 2012 flood and that climate change could decrease Nigeria’s economic productivity by up to 11 per cent in 2020.

Small holder farmers, which form over 80 per cent of the farming population, need government support to be able to understand which climate change adaptation will help, it emphasised

A case in point is Adamawa and Kebbi states where the report stated 40 per cent of farmers are not adapting their farming practices to weather extremes, with another 70 per cent relying on prayers and rituals as solutions, leading to reduction in output and losses of crops.

Oxfam, however, identified lack of sufficient institutional framework as the reason Nigeria has not benefited enough from multilateral climate funding.

The Climate Change Department of the Ministry of Environment was established to approve funding, the ministry itself handles mitigation issues and its Agric counterpart takes care of adaptation, “but climate change is generally not well integrated across all ministry policies, for example, transportation and housing,” said Oxfam.

It lamented that Nigeria has the combined population  of Niger,Tanzania,Mozambique,Zambia,Mali and Uganda, yet these countries have collectively received 47 times the amount Nigeria got in adaptation finance as of May 2017.

Notably, the country received a total of $15m of climate change adaptation funding from multilateral institutions for the time period. This is as the amount the nation requires per annum through 2030 is $10bn, according to the Ministry of Environment.

Meanwhile, a similar report was presented in Accra, Ghana, on Tuesday, by the African Centre for Economic Transformation during the African Finance Ministers meeting, the Guardian of UK reported.

The experts agreed governments must increase the rights of female farmers and embrace modern technology, such as drones and satellites, and change land tenure systems, if the agricultural sector is going to be transformed to meet the needs of the continent’s population.

“If we can introduce a set of reforms and programmes of support and make farming a paying business, then hopefully we can get some younger, educated people into farming and create a new class of medium-scale, modern African farmers,” said Yaw Ansu, the Chief Economist at Acet and the lead author of the report.