We've unleashed revolution in rice production in Nigeria – Dr. Adesina
Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina, the Minister for Agriculture is so passionate about his assignment and this has clearly shown in the way and manner he is going about his assignment. Last week, when he spoke with Business Courage Editor, SEMIU SALAMI in his office in Abuja, Dr. Adesina was so clear about his mission to properly integrate agriculture as real business in Nigeria. He spoke on a lot of issues ranging from how he tackled corruption in the fertilizer procurement and distribution, the rice value chain and others. Excerpt…
Can you tell us what have been your major achievements since you assumed office two years ago?
Well, to be able to tell you that, you need to know exactly what was on ground before I became the minister. Nigeria used to be a global player in palm-oil production accounting for 28 per cent well ahead of Malaysia and Indonesia. We used to account for three per cent supply of shell groundnut globally, well ahead of Argentina and the United States and we were also number one in cotton production, well ahead of Niger republic, Mali and Burkina- Faso. We lost all that and today we are importing crude palm-oil from Malaysia, our famous groundnut pyramids have disappeared. So, we are coming from an era of neglect of agriculture and where poverty was rising all across our rural areas.
So, I came into that environment with a task and a challenge which have been made more complicated by the fact that we have become a net food importing country. Spending $11 billion importing basic food commodities including wheat on which we spend N635 billion yearly and on rice which we spend N356 billion on yearly importation; about N1 billion per day.
Despite all the waters we have, the creeks, and rivers; we are spending N97 billion importing fish and so we came into a situation that was a prodigal economy as far as I am concerned because we are basically using our hard earned foreign exchange to buy food a lot of which we should be growing here.
So, those are the two things that defined for me the things I needed to change when I was appointed by the president.
First and foremost, we must unlock the potentials of agriculture and we are doing that; to do that, we decided to take agriculture out of the development realm and properly situate it as real business.
How do you account for a country that has 84 million hectares of land of which no more that 40 per cent is cultivated? How do you account for a country that has 12 by 73 billion cubic metres of water and importing food?
Secondly, we decided that if we truly see agriculture as business, then, the government has no business running it. Agric should be run by the private sector and we have done that. We have taken government out of producing anything, buying or distributing anything because that is not the job of government. Government's job is to have good policies, incentives, infrastructure, regulation and political will for change; those are the functions of government.
When I became minister, I discovered that fertilizer procurement and distribution was an area with the highest degree of corruption. For 40 years, the government has been buying and selling fertilizer, procuring and distributing seeds and for all the money spent during those 40 years, not more that 11 per cent of farmers in the country were getting those fertilizers and seeds.
People were bringing 50 per cent sand mixed with fertilizers and then sell to government as fertilizers. They would buy grains off the market and sell as seed, remember that the cost of seed is five times the cost of grains, so someone was making five times more money by selling grain as seed to the government. The political heavyweights and bureaucrats were the ones getting it; fertilizers developed hands and legs and walked away from farmers all across the country.
So, we had a situation where the wealthy were getting wealthier and the poor had nothing but misery because they weren't getting the inputs and that was the very corrupt system that I inherited.
When I got here, I said that I did not want to see any seed or fertilizer company come to my office, I insisted that they operate like the FMCG (fast moving consumable goods); go and sell your seeds and fertilizers to farmers, government is not a farmer, so don't come here for contracts. I have not signed a single contract for fertilizer or seed and I will not sign a single one until this job is done.
It took us exactly 90 days to end the corruption of 40 years and the President gave the maximum support and the clear direction I needed to do it.
The fundamental policy reform was that we ended the era of government dominating agriculture, we have now unleashed a new era of private sector driving things. Take a look at our approach in terms of getting inputs to our farmers, if you are in business and you want to reach your customers, you have to know them because if you don't know your customers you are either wasting money or stealing money. The farmers are not faceless and they are not ghosts.
So, I started a programme of registering all the farmers across the country, we made the first ever effort in this country to have a comprehensive data base of genuine farmers. Last year, we did 4.2 million registered farmers. This year, I recruited 11, 000 enumerators all across the country, many of them were graduates, to go to each ward to register farmers and already, we have registered 10 million farmers who all have bar coded identity cards and biometric information.
What that means is that I know my customers and I can reach them directly without anybody to act as an intermediary the same way that you don't need your neighbour to go with you to the bank to collect money from your personal account as long as you have your identity. That is what we have done with fertilizer and seeds today.
Last year, we launched the electronic wallet system through which we are reaching farmers directly with seeds and fertilizer support without anybody in-between. We sent the farmers, 50 per cent government support for the cost of fertilizers through their mobile phones and give all seeds free of charge; maize, rice, cocoa and others 100 per cent free of charge.
How it works is, because we have the identities of these farmers, we send them money which they receive the alerts on their mobile phones and they send that money to their input supplier who is also on the same system. So they verify that the farmers are genuine and then receive the balance from them and deliver the fertilizers to them.
In 120 days after we launched it, we reached one million farmers and by the end of last year, we have reached 1.5 million farmers who were getting seeds and fertilizers, many of them for the first time.
And so bringing transparency to the system allowed us to do a lot of things and as a ministry, to be accountable for monies we have. And as a minister, I can tell you exactly who got what, when, from where, what was paid and who paid what. That is how I believe government money should be spent.
Our reforms through the electronic wallet system saved the government N25 billion which would have been signed out under the old system of awarding contracts for inputs. This system now allows us to share cost with the Federal Government paying 25 per cent, state government 25 per cent and the farmers pay the balance of 50 per cent.
A country as big as Nigeria has no extension system, the ones we had in the 80s collapsed after the World Bank stopped funding. Right now, we have created a federal department of extension that is developing a comprehensive extension strategy for the country which we are implementing.
Thirdly, if you remember in the past, we used to have marketing boards which helped our farmers find finance and markets to do infrastructure, this has gone extinct by the time I assumed office. The Nigerian farmer looked like someone you put into a rickety boat and pushed out onto the Atlantic Ocean and left on his own, they practically had no support. But now, we are changing that. As I speak to you, we have nearly completed the selection of those that will help us to put in place what we call marketing corporations. They are like marketing boards but they are not run by government. These will be marketing institutions that will help our farmers with market price information, access to grades and standards, markets and infrastructure.
Let's look at the issue of the value chain, particularly with regards to rice production…
(Cuts in) Nigeria, as I said, is running a prodigal consumption pattern in the sense that we are spending billions of Naira everyday importing rice from Thailand and India when we can grow that rice here. If you go to Sokoto or to Kebbi , Kano, Katsina, Niger, Kogi, ofada rice in Ogun State, down to Abakiliki and down to the Niger Delta, we have upland rice, lowland rice, fadama rice, all types of rice that can be grown here, yet we are buying rice. We buy what we can produce, we keep on exporting jobs and creating poverty in our rural areas, destroying incentives for our own growth then we turn around and ask the question why is there poverty.
That is why the President decided that we should have a self-sufficiency food plan, such as the rice transformation strategy to make Nigeria self sufficient in rice by 2015.
There are three things we have to do. First is to produce more paddy rice, second is to be able to mill that rice at an industrial quality grade to ably substitute the rice we are importing and thirdly, we must be able to protect our investors.
So what we did as soon as I started this job was to scout for investors for rice. We brought in Dominion Farms, the largest American rice farm in Kenya. Today, they are investing $40 million on a 30,000 hectare area with the T.Y Danjuma Group in Taraba state.
In 18 months, that rice farm will produce 15 per cent of all the rice we are importing into Nigeria and will be the largest rice farm in Africa. We have also sent 50 young graduates from Taraba state to Kenya to be trained in commercial rice farming.
We distributed last year, 11,000 metric tonnes of high quality rice seeds before the flood and we had produced about 690,000 metric tonnes of rice paddy in the wet season last year before the flood.
We also raised the tariff on brown rice and polished rice because of the need to block corruption. The brown rice attracted five per cent tariff and polished rice had 35 per cent but people were bringing in polished rice disguised as brown rice and make 30 per cent profit before leaving the ports, thereby milking the economy dry. So we had to raise both tariffs to the same level.
We want to protect those that are investing in rice production in the country; we have every natural endowment to be a major exporter of rice. And within 12 months of launching that policy by the President, 14 large scale integrated rice mills sprang up with total capacity of 240,000 metric tonnes.
We have well branded and packaged rice such as Ebony rice from Ebonyi state, Umza rice from Kano, Miba rice from Benue and several other longgrained parboiled rice which beats any rice from India or Thailand. At the least, we should be exporting rice to all of West Africa after we have met our own selfsufficiency requirement.
In November last year, when we started the dry season rice production in Sokoto, Kebbi, Zamfara, Bauchi,Jigawa, Niger, Kano, Kaduna, we have unleashed a revolution in rice in the northern Nigeria. Yet, some people are making noise about getting waivers to bring in more rice. Farmers planted 264,000 hectares of rice in the dry season; we reached 267,000 farmers all by phone getting their fertilizers and seeds support. In just one dry season farming, we had a total production of 1.1mmt of rice while the total demand of the 20 rice mills in the country is 1.2mmt paddy in a year. For the country to be self-sufficient in rice, all the additional rice we need to produce is 3.2mmt of paddy.
Some mischievous people who want us to be perpetually dependent on imported rice are going about lying that they can't find paddy in the country so that they would be allowed to flood this country with imported rice. I am minister of agriculture and not minister of food imports. My mission is to make sure that agriculture works, becomes more productive and efficient.
You have put in so much energy into this Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA), what is the driving force, the motivation?
Firstly, I considered it a great honour to be asked by the President to come and serve my country. I worked globally for more than 25 years, so I don't come to this as a job, I had a great job, I came to this country with a sense of service and commitment to my own country, I have helped other countries succeed.
When I came here, I knew I wasn't undertaking an easy task but I was going to put in the very best of knowledge and the things I know to turn around agriculture for Nigeria. And so when I took that particular assignment, interestingly, the President didn't know me and I didn't know him and he called that he had heard about what I have done in other countries and asked if I would be willing to come and I replied that it would be the greatest honour.
You see, there is no reason why the millions of farmers in Nigeria should be poor. It is just because the government has not provided the right support. What drives me, I guess is the sense that we must create better opportunities for better lives for millions of our people in the rural areas. But more importantly, I feel that the most important thing is that if you don't feel ashamed about something you will never change it. I feel it is a shameful thing for Nigeria to be a food importing country. We have what it takes for us to be big, so why are we not big?
Am interested in how you were able to subdue the powerful fertilizer cabal that has held the country hostage for long. How did you put things under control and running smoothly?
When it comes to the issue of fertilizers, it is more about opening up opportunities for those that matter and not about protecting the interest of a few. For instance, since the reforms we carried out, investments in the fertilizer sector has sky-rocketed, Notore, the biggest producer of urea has signed an agreement with Mitsubishi Corporation of Japan for a $1.3 billion investment to further expand the plant capacity.
The Dangote Group is also putting up another $3.5 billion urea plant which will be the biggest urea plant in Africa. Indorama of Indonesia is also planning another $1.5 billion investment. Seed companies are exploding. Before the reforms, there were 11 seed companies in the country, today we have 70. The largest seed company in the world, Syngenta, is opening up office in Nigeria this month because they can see from the way we are going that the demand for seed is going to rise and we need a lot of them.
Basically, what we have succeeded in doing is opening up the space, you know the fastest way to get rid of a thief in a room is to turn on the light and that we have done by being transparent about what we do. It's all about making sure that the market works for the millions of the poor and not for the interest of a very small privileged that have held genuine farmers down for too long.
We know that there are some that are not happy with the reforms but then, the President did not appoint me to make them happy; my job is to put smiles on the faces of millions of Nigerian smallholder farmers.
How do you plan to tackle the issue of illiteracy among most of our farmers as a way of getting them to properly understand what your ministry is doing and how do we put these reforms on auto pilot in order to ensure continuity?
Firstly, I don't agree that farmers are not educated because we think that education is based on whether you can speak English. I have found out that they are very smart people, although they may not speak English like you and I do.
When we launched the electronic wallet last year, many people were asking the question how will illiterate farmers use them and that it cannot work but it worked because we developed the electronic wallet system to be delivered in local languages and in pidgin English.
Last year, out of the 4.9 million transactions that were done by farmers via phone to receive their fertilizers and seeds coupons, 2.7 million of it was done in Hausa; 1.2 million was done in pidgin and 867,000 in Yoruba. So these farmers are not illiterate because they know how to use information when it is given in the language they understand.
Right now, we are developing a system called market price information to put market prices on their phones because information is power and it will prevent them from being cheated by middlemen. We are modernizing agriculture for our farmers and attaching basic farm inputs to phones which our farmers are getting, the days of using town criers are over.
When it comes to the issue of sustainability, the most important way to sustain anything is for those that benefit to defend the policy.
Secondly, we have set up what is called the Nigerian Agribusiness Group, because it takes more than a minister to sustain a reform. The group will help to ensure that areas of incentives, challenges of the private sector are addressed in an institutionalized manner.
And finally, it is the role of our legislators at the National Assembly, I have received a lot of support from them especially members of the agriculture committees of both houses, we need legislation that will guard some of these reforms.
We are going to propose some legislation to under guard the reforms we are doing on fertilizer. We have to do things differently because we cannot continue to sustain poverty. Let us look at horticulture; Nigeria is the second largest producer of citrus in the world after China, but where is the orange juice in Nigeria? Nigeria produces 979,000mt of pineapple per year, south Africa is just about 100,000mt, yet they produce and export pineapple juice to Nigeria, Nigeria produces over 150,000mt of mangoes and total production in South Africa is not up to 50,000mt. Look at our mangoes how big they are but where is the mango juice in Nigeria? South Africa sends processed ones here.
Are you not worried that all these things are being impeded by the poor infrastructure we have in Nigeria?
I don't think it is infrastructure, rather it is a wrong attitude of consumption. Today, if you go to any supermarket and pick up any juice, it is concentrated orange juice mixed with water from Nigeria; the only local content is water from Nigeria.
If you go to Kano State, the whole of the Kadawa valley is flooded with tomatoes, we produce 1.5mmt of tomatoes, we are the largest producers of tomatoes in west Africa, 65 per cent of all the tomatoes in West Africa come from Nigeria but they rot away in Kano while Nigeria is the largest importer of tomato paste from China and Italy.
That is what we are changing. Today, we are working with the Dansa Group, they are putting up a $35 million plant in Kano for tomato paste plant that will process about 2.5mmt of tomato into paste, and they are also going to be putting in $45 million into a pineapple processing facility in Cross-River state.
The Transcorp Group, we work with them and they've put up a $6.5 million facility in Makurdi called Teragro where they are now processing orange juice concentrate. Nigeria should be the largest exporter of juice concentrate in Africa; we have the largest of everything if only we take advantage of the opportunities we have and only the private sector can do that.
What is the level of cooperation between your ministry and the state governments, especially in states where there exist political differences?
You know democracy is a very important thing but when it comes to food, it is the right of every Nigerian and so the only democracy that matters as far as food is concerned, is the democracy of the stomach. We work very closely with every state government and when I became minister, we made a conscious decision to decentralize the ministry in order to reach out to the farmers who are in the states and not in Abuja. Today, we have 36 state offices each one with a state director of agriculture and that has allowed us to work more closely with the states and deploy our programmes in consonance with theirs.
Apart from cassava and rice, what other value chains have received your attention?
We have a cocoa value chain and we are already giving our farmers access to cocoa. Last year, we distributed free of charge, 3.5 million pods of high-yielding cocoa hybrids, which come to about 114 million seedlings of cocoa.
The Cocoa Research Institute of Nigeria (CRIN) released eight new hybrids of cocoa in 2011 which give five times the yield that farmers are getting; it gives 2.5 tonnes per hectare instead of 0.5 tonnes that they were getting before and mature in two and a half years instead of five years. We want them to raise cocoa production again and my own dream is for Nigeria to produce one million metric ton of cocoa because there is no reason why we should not be ahead of Ghana in production.
The other value chain we are working on right now is cotton. Nigeria used to be a major producer of cotton and when I started here, we could not find a single kilogram of high quality cotton in the country. So we brought in the West African Cotton Company and they produced for us 1,500mt of certified cotton seeds which we gave to farmers all across the north free of charge. 35,000 farmers took these seeds and planted them on 70,000 hectares of land and produced about 240,000mt of cotton and we spent about N280 per kilogramme of that seed compared to the N42 spent by farmers on their own poor quality seeds.
In the case of palm-oil which is a major cash crop in the South-east and South-south, last year, we distributed nine million sprouted Tenara high yielding stock, we distributed 1.39 million to 14 companies with estates in Nigeria and the balance we have continued to do this year.
It is shameful that we are importing crude palm-oil from the same country that got seedlings from us in the first place and we are working to reverse the trend instead of reducing the tariff on the imported crude palm-oil as some people wish for.
We are also doing quite a lot on fish. In fact, this year, we started on Growth Enhancement Scheme and we are giving fingerlings free of charge to fish farmers, we are also doing outboard engines, fishing nets for them because we want to produce a lot of fish instead of spending N37 billion importing fish.
We are also into livestock; working on beef because right now, Nigeria moves animals and not beef, so the Fulani kill each other over grazing lands but there will never be enough grazing lands so we have to change from moving animals to moving beef. We have just completed after eight months of very intensive studies, the development of a Halal certified beef industry in Nigeria.
Nigeria is the second largest in the world in terms of pilgrims going to Mecca after Indonesia and when they get there, they eat Halal certified beef coming out of Spain, Argentina and Brazil. So, we are spending our money to eat beef from other countries yet we have 19 million herds of cattle that we cannot turn into beef, just roaming all over the place. Already an investor, Tafida has put up N1 billion to establish a facility just outside Abuja to do 300 herds of cattle per day, 850 sheep and 1,850 goats per day.
What are the incentives to get people especially the youth to buy into farming?
In Nigeria, we have a rapidly aging generation of farmers. The average age of our farmers is between 55-60 years old. What that means is that, we are one generation away from extinction of agriculture and unless we change and get more younger commercial farmers into agriculture, our food security in the future will be threatened.
We will soon launch a Presidential Initiative called Youth Employment in Agriculture Programme, with the goal of getting young graduates and school leavers into agriculture as a business. Our target would be to do 760,000 young commercial farmers in agriculture over a period of five years who will be provided with access to land, technical training, farming skills, finance and business training, working with the state governments across the country. Some of the old farm settlements will be revamped and modernized for them so that they don't have to come to the city.
What are some of the challenges you have encountered in this reformation crusade?
I believe that for Nigeria to be where it needs to be in agriculture, we need to fast track our farmers' access to affordable finance which we are currently doing. We also need to do a lot of work to ensure that we use water better because agriculture is done with land and water. We have all these river basins across the country sitting on a lot of high prime land and not been used for massive food production.
I believe that the river basins should be privatized because when that is done, the private sector would invest money on infrastructure and manage the water and land better. Israel does not have as much water like Nigeria, yet that country is one of the largest producers of food in the world.
When I started, it was quite difficult because people are not used to reforms and changes but I came to this task to ensure that our agriculture works and today I'm so delighted that things have changed.
Can you tell us what have been your major achievements since you assumed office two years ago?
Well, to be able to tell you that, you need to know exactly what was on ground before I became the minister. Nigeria used to be a global player in palm-oil production accounting for 28 per cent well ahead of Malaysia and Indonesia. We used to account for three per cent supply of shell groundnut globally, well ahead of Argentina and the United States and we were also number one in cotton production, well ahead of Niger republic, Mali and Burkina- Faso. We lost all that and today we are importing crude palm-oil from Malaysia, our famous groundnut pyramids have disappeared. So, we are coming from an era of neglect of agriculture and where poverty was rising all across our rural areas.
So, I came into that environment with a task and a challenge which have been made more complicated by the fact that we have become a net food importing country. Spending $11 billion importing basic food commodities including wheat on which we spend N635 billion yearly and on rice which we spend N356 billion on yearly importation; about N1 billion per day.
Despite all the waters we have, the creeks, and rivers; we are spending N97 billion importing fish and so we came into a situation that was a prodigal economy as far as I am concerned because we are basically using our hard earned foreign exchange to buy food a lot of which we should be growing here.
So, those are the two things that defined for me the things I needed to change when I was appointed by the president.
First and foremost, we must unlock the potentials of agriculture and we are doing that; to do that, we decided to take agriculture out of the development realm and properly situate it as real business.
How do you account for a country that has 84 million hectares of land of which no more that 40 per cent is cultivated? How do you account for a country that has 12 by 73 billion cubic metres of water and importing food?
Secondly, we decided that if we truly see agriculture as business, then, the government has no business running it. Agric should be run by the private sector and we have done that. We have taken government out of producing anything, buying or distributing anything because that is not the job of government. Government's job is to have good policies, incentives, infrastructure, regulation and political will for change; those are the functions of government.
When I became minister, I discovered that fertilizer procurement and distribution was an area with the highest degree of corruption. For 40 years, the government has been buying and selling fertilizer, procuring and distributing seeds and for all the money spent during those 40 years, not more that 11 per cent of farmers in the country were getting those fertilizers and seeds.
People were bringing 50 per cent sand mixed with fertilizers and then sell to government as fertilizers. They would buy grains off the market and sell as seed, remember that the cost of seed is five times the cost of grains, so someone was making five times more money by selling grain as seed to the government. The political heavyweights and bureaucrats were the ones getting it; fertilizers developed hands and legs and walked away from farmers all across the country.
So, we had a situation where the wealthy were getting wealthier and the poor had nothing but misery because they weren't getting the inputs and that was the very corrupt system that I inherited.
When I got here, I said that I did not want to see any seed or fertilizer company come to my office, I insisted that they operate like the FMCG (fast moving consumable goods); go and sell your seeds and fertilizers to farmers, government is not a farmer, so don't come here for contracts. I have not signed a single contract for fertilizer or seed and I will not sign a single one until this job is done.
It took us exactly 90 days to end the corruption of 40 years and the President gave the maximum support and the clear direction I needed to do it.
The fundamental policy reform was that we ended the era of government dominating agriculture, we have now unleashed a new era of private sector driving things. Take a look at our approach in terms of getting inputs to our farmers, if you are in business and you want to reach your customers, you have to know them because if you don't know your customers you are either wasting money or stealing money. The farmers are not faceless and they are not ghosts.
So, I started a programme of registering all the farmers across the country, we made the first ever effort in this country to have a comprehensive data base of genuine farmers. Last year, we did 4.2 million registered farmers. This year, I recruited 11, 000 enumerators all across the country, many of them were graduates, to go to each ward to register farmers and already, we have registered 10 million farmers who all have bar coded identity cards and biometric information.
What that means is that I know my customers and I can reach them directly without anybody to act as an intermediary the same way that you don't need your neighbour to go with you to the bank to collect money from your personal account as long as you have your identity. That is what we have done with fertilizer and seeds today.
Last year, we launched the electronic wallet system through which we are reaching farmers directly with seeds and fertilizer support without anybody in-between. We sent the farmers, 50 per cent government support for the cost of fertilizers through their mobile phones and give all seeds free of charge; maize, rice, cocoa and others 100 per cent free of charge.
How it works is, because we have the identities of these farmers, we send them money which they receive the alerts on their mobile phones and they send that money to their input supplier who is also on the same system. So they verify that the farmers are genuine and then receive the balance from them and deliver the fertilizers to them.
In 120 days after we launched it, we reached one million farmers and by the end of last year, we have reached 1.5 million farmers who were getting seeds and fertilizers, many of them for the first time.
And so bringing transparency to the system allowed us to do a lot of things and as a ministry, to be accountable for monies we have. And as a minister, I can tell you exactly who got what, when, from where, what was paid and who paid what. That is how I believe government money should be spent.
Our reforms through the electronic wallet system saved the government N25 billion which would have been signed out under the old system of awarding contracts for inputs. This system now allows us to share cost with the Federal Government paying 25 per cent, state government 25 per cent and the farmers pay the balance of 50 per cent.
A country as big as Nigeria has no extension system, the ones we had in the 80s collapsed after the World Bank stopped funding. Right now, we have created a federal department of extension that is developing a comprehensive extension strategy for the country which we are implementing.
Thirdly, if you remember in the past, we used to have marketing boards which helped our farmers find finance and markets to do infrastructure, this has gone extinct by the time I assumed office. The Nigerian farmer looked like someone you put into a rickety boat and pushed out onto the Atlantic Ocean and left on his own, they practically had no support. But now, we are changing that. As I speak to you, we have nearly completed the selection of those that will help us to put in place what we call marketing corporations. They are like marketing boards but they are not run by government. These will be marketing institutions that will help our farmers with market price information, access to grades and standards, markets and infrastructure.
Let's look at the issue of the value chain, particularly with regards to rice production…
(Cuts in) Nigeria, as I said, is running a prodigal consumption pattern in the sense that we are spending billions of Naira everyday importing rice from Thailand and India when we can grow that rice here. If you go to Sokoto or to Kebbi , Kano, Katsina, Niger, Kogi, ofada rice in Ogun State, down to Abakiliki and down to the Niger Delta, we have upland rice, lowland rice, fadama rice, all types of rice that can be grown here, yet we are buying rice. We buy what we can produce, we keep on exporting jobs and creating poverty in our rural areas, destroying incentives for our own growth then we turn around and ask the question why is there poverty.
That is why the President decided that we should have a self-sufficiency food plan, such as the rice transformation strategy to make Nigeria self sufficient in rice by 2015.
There are three things we have to do. First is to produce more paddy rice, second is to be able to mill that rice at an industrial quality grade to ably substitute the rice we are importing and thirdly, we must be able to protect our investors.
So what we did as soon as I started this job was to scout for investors for rice. We brought in Dominion Farms, the largest American rice farm in Kenya. Today, they are investing $40 million on a 30,000 hectare area with the T.Y Danjuma Group in Taraba state.
In 18 months, that rice farm will produce 15 per cent of all the rice we are importing into Nigeria and will be the largest rice farm in Africa. We have also sent 50 young graduates from Taraba state to Kenya to be trained in commercial rice farming.
We distributed last year, 11,000 metric tonnes of high quality rice seeds before the flood and we had produced about 690,000 metric tonnes of rice paddy in the wet season last year before the flood.
We also raised the tariff on brown rice and polished rice because of the need to block corruption. The brown rice attracted five per cent tariff and polished rice had 35 per cent but people were bringing in polished rice disguised as brown rice and make 30 per cent profit before leaving the ports, thereby milking the economy dry. So we had to raise both tariffs to the same level.
We want to protect those that are investing in rice production in the country; we have every natural endowment to be a major exporter of rice. And within 12 months of launching that policy by the President, 14 large scale integrated rice mills sprang up with total capacity of 240,000 metric tonnes.
We have well branded and packaged rice such as Ebony rice from Ebonyi state, Umza rice from Kano, Miba rice from Benue and several other longgrained parboiled rice which beats any rice from India or Thailand. At the least, we should be exporting rice to all of West Africa after we have met our own selfsufficiency requirement.
In November last year, when we started the dry season rice production in Sokoto, Kebbi, Zamfara, Bauchi,Jigawa, Niger, Kano, Kaduna, we have unleashed a revolution in rice in the northern Nigeria. Yet, some people are making noise about getting waivers to bring in more rice. Farmers planted 264,000 hectares of rice in the dry season; we reached 267,000 farmers all by phone getting their fertilizers and seeds support. In just one dry season farming, we had a total production of 1.1mmt of rice while the total demand of the 20 rice mills in the country is 1.2mmt paddy in a year. For the country to be self-sufficient in rice, all the additional rice we need to produce is 3.2mmt of paddy.
Some mischievous people who want us to be perpetually dependent on imported rice are going about lying that they can't find paddy in the country so that they would be allowed to flood this country with imported rice. I am minister of agriculture and not minister of food imports. My mission is to make sure that agriculture works, becomes more productive and efficient.
You have put in so much energy into this Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA), what is the driving force, the motivation?
Firstly, I considered it a great honour to be asked by the President to come and serve my country. I worked globally for more than 25 years, so I don't come to this as a job, I had a great job, I came to this country with a sense of service and commitment to my own country, I have helped other countries succeed.
When I came here, I knew I wasn't undertaking an easy task but I was going to put in the very best of knowledge and the things I know to turn around agriculture for Nigeria. And so when I took that particular assignment, interestingly, the President didn't know me and I didn't know him and he called that he had heard about what I have done in other countries and asked if I would be willing to come and I replied that it would be the greatest honour.
You see, there is no reason why the millions of farmers in Nigeria should be poor. It is just because the government has not provided the right support. What drives me, I guess is the sense that we must create better opportunities for better lives for millions of our people in the rural areas. But more importantly, I feel that the most important thing is that if you don't feel ashamed about something you will never change it. I feel it is a shameful thing for Nigeria to be a food importing country. We have what it takes for us to be big, so why are we not big?
Am interested in how you were able to subdue the powerful fertilizer cabal that has held the country hostage for long. How did you put things under control and running smoothly?
When it comes to the issue of fertilizers, it is more about opening up opportunities for those that matter and not about protecting the interest of a few. For instance, since the reforms we carried out, investments in the fertilizer sector has sky-rocketed, Notore, the biggest producer of urea has signed an agreement with Mitsubishi Corporation of Japan for a $1.3 billion investment to further expand the plant capacity.
The Dangote Group is also putting up another $3.5 billion urea plant which will be the biggest urea plant in Africa. Indorama of Indonesia is also planning another $1.5 billion investment. Seed companies are exploding. Before the reforms, there were 11 seed companies in the country, today we have 70. The largest seed company in the world, Syngenta, is opening up office in Nigeria this month because they can see from the way we are going that the demand for seed is going to rise and we need a lot of them.
Basically, what we have succeeded in doing is opening up the space, you know the fastest way to get rid of a thief in a room is to turn on the light and that we have done by being transparent about what we do. It's all about making sure that the market works for the millions of the poor and not for the interest of a very small privileged that have held genuine farmers down for too long.
We know that there are some that are not happy with the reforms but then, the President did not appoint me to make them happy; my job is to put smiles on the faces of millions of Nigerian smallholder farmers.
How do you plan to tackle the issue of illiteracy among most of our farmers as a way of getting them to properly understand what your ministry is doing and how do we put these reforms on auto pilot in order to ensure continuity?
Firstly, I don't agree that farmers are not educated because we think that education is based on whether you can speak English. I have found out that they are very smart people, although they may not speak English like you and I do.
When we launched the electronic wallet last year, many people were asking the question how will illiterate farmers use them and that it cannot work but it worked because we developed the electronic wallet system to be delivered in local languages and in pidgin English.
Last year, out of the 4.9 million transactions that were done by farmers via phone to receive their fertilizers and seeds coupons, 2.7 million of it was done in Hausa; 1.2 million was done in pidgin and 867,000 in Yoruba. So these farmers are not illiterate because they know how to use information when it is given in the language they understand.
Right now, we are developing a system called market price information to put market prices on their phones because information is power and it will prevent them from being cheated by middlemen. We are modernizing agriculture for our farmers and attaching basic farm inputs to phones which our farmers are getting, the days of using town criers are over.
When it comes to the issue of sustainability, the most important way to sustain anything is for those that benefit to defend the policy.
Secondly, we have set up what is called the Nigerian Agribusiness Group, because it takes more than a minister to sustain a reform. The group will help to ensure that areas of incentives, challenges of the private sector are addressed in an institutionalized manner.
And finally, it is the role of our legislators at the National Assembly, I have received a lot of support from them especially members of the agriculture committees of both houses, we need legislation that will guard some of these reforms.
We are going to propose some legislation to under guard the reforms we are doing on fertilizer. We have to do things differently because we cannot continue to sustain poverty. Let us look at horticulture; Nigeria is the second largest producer of citrus in the world after China, but where is the orange juice in Nigeria? Nigeria produces 979,000mt of pineapple per year, south Africa is just about 100,000mt, yet they produce and export pineapple juice to Nigeria, Nigeria produces over 150,000mt of mangoes and total production in South Africa is not up to 50,000mt. Look at our mangoes how big they are but where is the mango juice in Nigeria? South Africa sends processed ones here.
Are you not worried that all these things are being impeded by the poor infrastructure we have in Nigeria?
I don't think it is infrastructure, rather it is a wrong attitude of consumption. Today, if you go to any supermarket and pick up any juice, it is concentrated orange juice mixed with water from Nigeria; the only local content is water from Nigeria.
If you go to Kano State, the whole of the Kadawa valley is flooded with tomatoes, we produce 1.5mmt of tomatoes, we are the largest producers of tomatoes in west Africa, 65 per cent of all the tomatoes in West Africa come from Nigeria but they rot away in Kano while Nigeria is the largest importer of tomato paste from China and Italy.
That is what we are changing. Today, we are working with the Dansa Group, they are putting up a $35 million plant in Kano for tomato paste plant that will process about 2.5mmt of tomato into paste, and they are also going to be putting in $45 million into a pineapple processing facility in Cross-River state.
The Transcorp Group, we work with them and they've put up a $6.5 million facility in Makurdi called Teragro where they are now processing orange juice concentrate. Nigeria should be the largest exporter of juice concentrate in Africa; we have the largest of everything if only we take advantage of the opportunities we have and only the private sector can do that.
What is the level of cooperation between your ministry and the state governments, especially in states where there exist political differences?
You know democracy is a very important thing but when it comes to food, it is the right of every Nigerian and so the only democracy that matters as far as food is concerned, is the democracy of the stomach. We work very closely with every state government and when I became minister, we made a conscious decision to decentralize the ministry in order to reach out to the farmers who are in the states and not in Abuja. Today, we have 36 state offices each one with a state director of agriculture and that has allowed us to work more closely with the states and deploy our programmes in consonance with theirs.
Apart from cassava and rice, what other value chains have received your attention?
We have a cocoa value chain and we are already giving our farmers access to cocoa. Last year, we distributed free of charge, 3.5 million pods of high-yielding cocoa hybrids, which come to about 114 million seedlings of cocoa.
The Cocoa Research Institute of Nigeria (CRIN) released eight new hybrids of cocoa in 2011 which give five times the yield that farmers are getting; it gives 2.5 tonnes per hectare instead of 0.5 tonnes that they were getting before and mature in two and a half years instead of five years. We want them to raise cocoa production again and my own dream is for Nigeria to produce one million metric ton of cocoa because there is no reason why we should not be ahead of Ghana in production.
The other value chain we are working on right now is cotton. Nigeria used to be a major producer of cotton and when I started here, we could not find a single kilogram of high quality cotton in the country. So we brought in the West African Cotton Company and they produced for us 1,500mt of certified cotton seeds which we gave to farmers all across the north free of charge. 35,000 farmers took these seeds and planted them on 70,000 hectares of land and produced about 240,000mt of cotton and we spent about N280 per kilogramme of that seed compared to the N42 spent by farmers on their own poor quality seeds.
In the case of palm-oil which is a major cash crop in the South-east and South-south, last year, we distributed nine million sprouted Tenara high yielding stock, we distributed 1.39 million to 14 companies with estates in Nigeria and the balance we have continued to do this year.
It is shameful that we are importing crude palm-oil from the same country that got seedlings from us in the first place and we are working to reverse the trend instead of reducing the tariff on the imported crude palm-oil as some people wish for.
We are also doing quite a lot on fish. In fact, this year, we started on Growth Enhancement Scheme and we are giving fingerlings free of charge to fish farmers, we are also doing outboard engines, fishing nets for them because we want to produce a lot of fish instead of spending N37 billion importing fish.
We are also into livestock; working on beef because right now, Nigeria moves animals and not beef, so the Fulani kill each other over grazing lands but there will never be enough grazing lands so we have to change from moving animals to moving beef. We have just completed after eight months of very intensive studies, the development of a Halal certified beef industry in Nigeria.
Nigeria is the second largest in the world in terms of pilgrims going to Mecca after Indonesia and when they get there, they eat Halal certified beef coming out of Spain, Argentina and Brazil. So, we are spending our money to eat beef from other countries yet we have 19 million herds of cattle that we cannot turn into beef, just roaming all over the place. Already an investor, Tafida has put up N1 billion to establish a facility just outside Abuja to do 300 herds of cattle per day, 850 sheep and 1,850 goats per day.
What are the incentives to get people especially the youth to buy into farming?
In Nigeria, we have a rapidly aging generation of farmers. The average age of our farmers is between 55-60 years old. What that means is that, we are one generation away from extinction of agriculture and unless we change and get more younger commercial farmers into agriculture, our food security in the future will be threatened.
We will soon launch a Presidential Initiative called Youth Employment in Agriculture Programme, with the goal of getting young graduates and school leavers into agriculture as a business. Our target would be to do 760,000 young commercial farmers in agriculture over a period of five years who will be provided with access to land, technical training, farming skills, finance and business training, working with the state governments across the country. Some of the old farm settlements will be revamped and modernized for them so that they don't have to come to the city.
What are some of the challenges you have encountered in this reformation crusade?
I believe that for Nigeria to be where it needs to be in agriculture, we need to fast track our farmers' access to affordable finance which we are currently doing. We also need to do a lot of work to ensure that we use water better because agriculture is done with land and water. We have all these river basins across the country sitting on a lot of high prime land and not been used for massive food production.
I believe that the river basins should be privatized because when that is done, the private sector would invest money on infrastructure and manage the water and land better. Israel does not have as much water like Nigeria, yet that country is one of the largest producers of food in the world.
When I started, it was quite difficult because people are not used to reforms and changes but I came to this task to ensure that our agriculture works and today I'm so delighted that things have changed.
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