ActionAid has tasked the federal and state governments with ensuring massive investment in agricultural processing, storage facilities, transportation and market access.
Azubike Nwokoye, Food and Agriculture Program Coordinator, ActionAid Nigeria, made the call in an interview with the Nigerian News Agency in Abuja on Monday.
Nwokoye frowned at the estimated N3.5 billion annual post-harvest losses in the country and said investments in those areas would help mitigate such a big challenge.
Referring to the organization’s biennial review (BR) report, Nwokoye said that Nigeria achieved significant improvement in the second BR report relative to the 2017 scoring cent.
He said that areas of commitments where Nigeria was not on track included: improving the investment treasury in agriculture, ending hunger by 2025, halving poverty through agriculture, improving resilience to climate variability.
BR aims to strengthen national institutional capacity for agricultural data generation and knowledge management.
Supports better evidence-based planning, implementation, monitoring, evaluation, and learning.
The report also established the basis and pathways to trigger continental and national actions, programs to collectively drive agricultural transformation in Africa.
Azubike said ActionAid Nigeria had trained women smallholder farmers, activists, youth movements, partners and other CSOs on the use of the Non-State Actors (NSA) Biennial Value-Added Review Toolkit (VABKIT).
He said it was to add value to the country performance report template in the BR report.
“ActionAid has helped them generate state-level data on women smallholder farmers related to the BR indicators in all 36 states and the FCT.
“The data would feed into Nigeria’s report in the third BR exercise on the implementation of the Continental Africa Agriculture Program (CAADP).”
She explained that the data or information reflected the lived realities of smallholder farmers in Nigeria to add value in the country performance reporting template.
“Current data collected through the VABKIT shows that smallholder women farmers across the country currently have only 18% access to processing facilities, 16.6% access to storage facilities, and 13.5% of access to buyers/access to markets.
“In addition, 9.6 percent have access to transportation for agricultural products and 42.3 percent have access to training. In the Extension Services, farmers have access to only 5.26 percent of the agricultural demonstrations.
“On agricultural credit, they have access to less than 23 percent of existing lines of credit, and only 4.77 percent have access to agricultural insurance, about 59 percent of them have access to land and 29 .77 percent have control.
“Only 11.23 percent participate in discussions about land governance.
“While the government is striving to improve public-private partnership (PPP) arrangements in the agricultural sector, access by small women farmers is below 27 percent to such schemes across the country.
“If less than 20 per cent of smallholder women farmers have access to processing and storage facilities in Nigeria, it means that post-harvest losses estimated at N3.5 billion per year will continually increase.
“This is a true reflection that we are not really investing to reduce these post-harvest losses that are costing Nigeria a lot as a country,” he said.
He suggested that to meet the 2014 Malabo Declaration Commitment, the three levels of government should allocate 10 percent of their annual budgets to the agricultural sector.
Nwokoye said such a commitment was necessary to support a minimum growth rate of six percent for the sector.
“Such investments should focus on strategic areas of extension services, access to credit, women and youth in agriculture, technologies and appropriate inputs to save labor.
“Other areas are post-harvest loss reduction, support to processing facilities, storage facilities, training, market access, Climate Resilient Sustainable Agriculture (CRSA)/Agroecology, research and development. development, monitoring and evaluation, as well as coordination”.
-NAN
