Mr. Yemi Akinbamijo assumed office as the Executive Director of the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa, FARA, which has its Secretariat in Accra, Ghana about three weeks ago, though his appointment was endorsed on July 20. The Ondo State, Nigerian-born Animal Research Scientist-cum-Nutritionist was formerly with the African Union Commission in Addis Ababa where he served as the Head of Agriculture and Food Security for seven years. He was also at different times the Director of Inter-African Sanitary Council in Yaoundé, Cameroon; Chief Animal Research Officer of the AU Inter-Africa Bureau for Animal Resources in Nairobi, Kenya. Prior to these, for 20 years, he was engaged in the International Livestock Research Institute in Ethiopia and Kenya and has also served as a visiting scientist to the Centre for Tropical Veterinary Medicine in Edinburgh, Scotland for a number of years.
Akinbamijo, a multi-linguist, fluent in four European languages and five African languages, in this interview with OLUGBENGA SALAMI in Abuja, xrayed the activities of FARA, agric transformation agenda of the federal government, and proffers solution for Nigeria and Africa in general to be food secured. Excerpts:
What is the purpose of your visit to Nigeria, particularly to the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development?
Where are here in Abuja on the invitation of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development to discuss with the Minister of Agriculture, Dr. AKinwunmi Adesina. This is the very first mission that I will be undertaking after my assumption of office, and it is very interesting for me in particular because, I am a Nigerian and I thought it right that I should commence my engagement with the international community from my home country. I am very glad that when I placed the request before the Hon. Minister, he accepted with great enthusiasm that I should come and we were well received by the minister.
I also came as the head of a delegation called FARA de Forum. Now let me make a brief description between the secretariat of FARA and FARA de Forum. The secretariat services the interest of the Forum, and de forum is the agglomeration of all the stakeholders in agricultural research for the continent. So it was a delegation that was composed of a cross-section of stakeholders. In the delegation, I have three of the senior colleagues from FARA, and we have from Nigeria the head of Agricultural Research Council, Professor Abubarkar and we also have two representatives of the Director General of the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture, IITA based in Ibadan, and we also had the Director General of the International Livestock Research Institute, Dr. Jimmy Smith.
Basically as I said, it was my first mission out of office and I wanted to have the minister abreast of my desire to have Nigeria continue to play an important role in the domain for agricultural research development in the continent. Nigeria is a leader on the continent in many fronts, we are playing a leadership role in peace and security, in democracy, in supporting infrastructure across the continent, and in supporting institutional mechanism that are in place by the AU, Nigeria plays a very critical role in the economic life of the continent.
However, from what I am beginning to see over the last couple of years and this is not peculiar to Nigeria, investment in agricultural research has been down. Across the continent today, the key supporter of African research and development have been European and American countries, but we felt that Nigeria should now come to the fore and support the effort of FARA de Forum and the secretariat in its drive to have a food secured Africa.
It should be noted that late President Bingu wa Mutharika during his tenure as the chair of the AU made a pledge which we still try to uphold. He said that he hopes to, unfortunately, he did not live to see it, an Africa where no child will go to bed hungry. And we felt that apart from me being a Nigerian, and I keep having that social will to come back home, my first port of call is solving Nigeria’s food challenge is actually solving 25 per cent of African’s challenge, because the demographic information available to us today says that Nigeria’s population is a quarter of the continent. So whatever we can do to support that programme of the minister and his co-workers in the ministry are putting in place, especially in the context of the Agricultural Transformation Agenda, ATA is equally a deliverable for us in FARA. So it is a win-win scenario for both FARA and the government of Nigeria to actually now step-up our collaborative engagement in the quest of providing research tools for our stakeholders.
What kind of value chain approach are you going adopt?
As mentioned earlier on, am an animal scientist and I have made my mark when it comes to livestock research and livestock integrated systems. I am particularly delight that the minister has chosen to pursue the value chain approach and that is the way to go. If we look at countries that have broken the food insecurity barrier of late (last 30 years), we have countries like Brazil and China; these two countries paid the heavy price of investing in agricultural value chain. Brazil is a model to emulate and if you go to China, it is another scenario where you have demand approach to research from farm to fork which means that you disaggregate every segment of the chain from the farm until it reaches the table.
In other words, if we adopt what I referred to earlier on as demand driven research as opposed to the supply driven research, we look at the table and see what is the demand on the dining table of Nigerians and what will be the demand facing Nigeria 50 years from now. If Nigeria is not to be a food insecure nation by then, preparations has to be on board as from today and what does that mean for us, we are looking at the trend of the daily lives, the evolution in the demography of Nigeria, the migration that we see from the rural to the urban scenarios, the kind of demands people are making which is beginning to appear as if the middle class is increasing and the demand for high protein commodities are on the rise.
Now the question facing us is, can we be able to meet this demand? And if yes, there are a few things we still have to do. Well, it is on record that about 45% of the foods we produce do not get to the table because of post-harvest loss and one of the key issues in the reduction of post-harvest loss is definitely the issue of value addition, processing and transformation of products. When we look at the value chain, there is the issue when you have to deal with the inputs, agro-dealership, fertilizers, seeds, access to credits and enhancing the capacity of the farmers not to do business as usual. Just like Albert Einstein said, if you do the things you always did, you will get the results you always got, and we know it that the result we always got is not the result that will sustain drive.
At the moment the food import bill on this continent is in excess of 40 billion US dollars and we in this continent have the capacity to reduce this bill, this is the money we do not have, so it is incumbent upon us that we do anything we can to reduce this bill and we can. We have the technology, we have the competence and we have the resources. If we have these three and they are judiciously harnessed, I can
It is on record that about 45% of the foods we produce do not get to the table because of post-harvest loss and one of the key issues in the reduction of post-harvest loss is definitely the issue of value addition, processing and transformation of products tell you that the dream of the minister in making Nigeria wheat secured and meeting Nigeria’s demand for wheat will become a thing of the past and definitely be surpassed. We have the technology, resources and competence to do so. So I don’t have any doubts in my mind that this country for once is able to be on the right track, especially within the context and the conversation of the CADEP implementation agenda of which Nigeria again is a signatory. Nigeria is also a signatory to the West African productivity programme and all of these are converging towards addressing the food insecurity especially using the value chain approach.
Now I want to digress a little to my own area of interest in research and as I said, I am a trained animal scientist and holds a PhD in Animal Nutrition from the Wageningen Agricultural University in The Netherlands and I have been in this business for more than 30 years now, when we are looking at the case of Nigeria, let me start by saying that cassava is no longer a food crop, with the kind of technology that is emerging from a segment of FARA, which is the international technology centres, we take the example of IITA where there has been tremendous input in the cassava value chain. What that means for us is that the growing of cassava is becoming a business not just the production of Gari and Akpu and with this business beginning to emerge, we can begin to see that IITA is now beginning to develop technology that can handle 10 tonnes of cassava per day, what that tells me is that we are not just meeting our requirement for cassava, we now know that cassava is being integrated into bread that we eat in Nigeria which was not the case 5-10 years ago.
Plans that are being put into place by the honourable minister of agriculture of Nigeria is laudable and I actually describe it as a trailblazer for the continent and that is why we at FARA will do everything possible to support this whole agricultural transformation agenda so that it can become a model for other countries to follow. I know very well that there are countries within the south-south co-operation, the Africa-South America collaboration, Africa-China collaboration, we are very well informed that within these geo-political contexts, there are lessons to be learnt and if we look at the scenario of Brazil where we have the improper model where within 5-8 years, the country transformed its agriculture from an agrarian to industrial one.
So, this is the kind of thing that Nigeria is beginning to embrace and our vision is to actually see Nigeria succeeding this so that we can showcase the countries as a role model to others. I know that within the CADEP implementation agenda, there is room for agricultural research dissemination and technology transfer; we will be more than willing to support the transfer of technology for Nigeria. Let me say that the agricultural transformation agenda is not only to Nigeria, Ethiopia is also undertaken a reform of its agricultural sector. What I said that if we do what we do always did, we will get the results we always got and the result we always got has not yet translated into keeping Africa food secured, it has not translated into making Nigeria food secured.
Nigeria and Africa in general are still the largest destination of food aid in the world and we want to change this statistics and in changing this statistics, it means Nigeria cannot afford to do business as usual where agriculture is concerned and not to do agri-business as usual is the hallmark and the very centre of what the minister is leading in the agricultural transformational agenda. This new initiative that is now beginning to appear on the continent and let me say this is also in the spirit of the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme, CADEP that has been endorsed by head of states in Maputu since 2003 but within the last couple of years, precisely two years ago, there has been a new initiative in what we describe to as sustaining the CADEP momentum which is actually to see that the agricultural sector is growing at a pace of minimum of 6% per annum.
Now, what the government of Nigeria is doing is tantamount to that and I give all my complement to the honourable minister for taking the boldness to ensure that the productivity of Nigeria’s agricultural sector is now at an all time high, we need to recognize that, we have never as a country attain this position and purposes of putting it firmly on record. We all are a part of it, just a few weeks back, the Food and Agricultural Organization, FAO based in Rome recognized the efforts of Nigeria in its progress towards attaining the first millennium development goal and this not a mean achievement. On the continent today, we can count on our fingertips how many countries have been able to achieve this and this is something Nigeria has done within the past two years.
So, as I mentioned that we are now beginning to see the impacts of the agricultural transformation agenda in the sector, it is beginning to yield the envisaged dividends, we are beginning to see that you can actually quadruple the productivity of many of our commodities if we only adopt the right technology, if we provide the enabling agro-inputs in terms of improved seeds, fertilizer, access to credits and access to know-how. If we are able to do all of these, we will certainly see a totally different agricultural sector in Nigeria.
Sir, your research and the intellectuals within your system, can they actually proffer a solution to the insurmountable problem?
Let me say this; there have always been a perennial challenge in trans-humans. But you have to look and say, what is the driving force for trans-humans? It is cultural, ethical and also an occupation. But what is it that we can do to address this challenge? Climate change is not making it easier but I want to say this categorically; it is not peculiar to Nigeria and there solutions have been put in place to ensure that the management of our natural resources and judiciously harnessed by the different communities, and Nigeria’s case will be different.
I said it earlier on, that the chief annual resource officer for this continent is based in Nairobi, and one of the challenges we face with the Massai and Burani people has been a consistent challenge of where to get food and water resources. By the time we put these communities together and put together the kind of innovative mechanism of managing these resources, we began to see a new way of handling and managing these resources in a way that is reducing the tension and bringing peace. There is now harmonious juxtaposition on both sides and management of their resources.
The life dependent of these communities and those that are crop oriented in many places, there are scenarios where the management of the resources and the people of the community have come together to discuss on how to best manage the resources in a way that conflict will no longer be an issue. I think that we can improve the production further; we can improve the conservation of water resources and many more which we can do with the appropriate policies