Friday, November 5, 2010

Agriculture and Rural Life


Nigerian governments have always understood the dangers of our being unable to feed ourselves. The farm settlements of the 1950s, Operation Feed the Nation (1976-79), the Green Revolution (1979- 83), River Basin Development Authorities (1979- 83) and Directorate of Food and Rural Infrastructure (1985-93) are only some of the steps taken by governments at various times to ensure that we can feed ourselves adequately and cheaply. Agricultural research stations have been in existence from colonial times in Samaru in Zaria. Moore Plantation in Ibadan, Umudike in Umuahia and elsewhere. From the late ‘90s, mandatory quotas of bank credit were being set aside for agricultural loans. In the Second Republic the CBN directed banks to begin rural banking to extend the benefits of saving and credit to farming communities. Today many new plans are on the table.

But all these paper plans have achieved little or nothing. Massive government funds for agricultural improvements in the past disappeared into the pockets of the rich. Peasant farmers had no collateral to benefit from banking credit. Their businesses were also too small and their imagination too limited for them to approach the banks. Results from research stations did not reach them, as they did not read scientific journals. Meanwhile they lost 20% of their harvest to weevils, mealie bugs and other pests and another 40% to poor storage, poor handling, and poor sales management.

Yet the farmers who produce cassava, yams, beans, rice, millet, guinea com, tomatoes, onions and carrots and the herdsmen who pasture cattles, sheep and goats are the people who feed the nation. They give as much to the national economy as civil servants and teachers. They are entitled to everything we can do to promote their work.

To reform agriculture, attain food security, and revitalise rural life, the All Progressives Grand Alliance will take the following measures.

i. APGA will empower local government councils as the third tier of government to lake responsibility for agricul-ture, primary education, primary health etc.

ii. To re-invigorate rural life, present efforts to improve rural roads, rural water supply, rural electricity and rural banking will be intensified.

iii. Recognition, encouragement and marching grants will be given to community organisations working on community projects.

iv. Local government councils will mobilize carefully structured pools of experts within their services to deal with problems of forestry, sheep and cattle herding, soil maintenance, the upgrading of farm techniques, the distribution of improved seeds, the use of fertilizers and pesticides, farm produce storage and transportation and marketing, and the organisation of cooperatives.

v. In the programme for industrialization, priority should be given to the manufacture of farm equipment since the mechanization of peasant farms cannot take place with imported dollar-denominated equipment.

vi. To give rural life its rightful place in the mainstream of our economic credit must be made available to agriculture. Until an appropriate part of the wealth of the nation is available for food production, our agriculture will remain backward. At the same time the mechanization of farming, the advance to agro-based industries, the produc-tion of genetically modified foods and the use of even low-level technology in our farms will not occur. APGA will ensure that studies which are needed to solve the problems of funding peasant agriculture are undertaken as a matter of national priority.

vii. In local government areas in the deep North where water scarcity is an abiding problem, comprehensive programmes of water management embracing river basins, dams, bore-hole construction, underground water utilization and small-scale irrigation will be undertaken with the support of the federal government for the benefit of farmers, herdsmen and the people as a whole.
It is, however, recognized that rural development is the responsibility of local government councils and that each council appropriately funded and empowered will accept the challenge of meeting its unique needs in its own unique way.

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