Prof Yemi Osinbajo (SAN), the Vice President of Nigeria yesterday stated that Nigeria is prioritizing technology and innovation investments in agriculture to transform the sector and make it attractive to young people and enhance productivity.
The vice president delivered his remark virtually at the 2021 High-Level Dialogue on Feeding Africa event listed the Green Imperative Project, Economic Sustainability Plan, and National Livestock Transformation Plan among other initiatives as government programs that will transform the agricultural sector.
The program was organized by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and African Development Bank (AfDB) in collaboration with the CGIAR System Organization and Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) with the theme “Feeding Africa: leadership to scale up successful innovations.”
The Vice President said during the lockdowns, “we trained and deployed more than 34,000 young graduates across the country to 8,000 local government wards in 774 local government areas. These young men and women had an app locally developed on electronic devices and smartphones to register farmers digitally and map the GIS coordinates of their farms.
He said, “we have mapped out and registered around 6 million smallholder farmers’ farmlands and currently collecting 200,000 composite soil samples from the farms so they can be analyzed in local soil laboratories to assist in the blending of local fertilizers.”
He stated further that as regards the farmer farm database, we are developing a digital Agriculture Exchange Program (AgExchange) working with MasterCard and Alliance Rabobank in association with local FinTech companies like CropIT, FarmCrowdy, and Infinera which are managed by young Nigerians.
The AgExchange will be a platform for providing different products and services to smallholder farmers like credit-connect, e-subsidies by providing farmers credit scores and linking them to marketplace services, insurance services, financiers, aggregators, and off-takers.
Regard the National Livestock Transformation Plan (NLTP) the Vice president stated that the focus is to transition from a nomadic cattle system of production to a sedentary method of ranching. This involves training on new ways of rearing and producing cattle to tackle the issues of conflict between herders and farmers”
The Vice President explained that “an indigenous technology company has developed a microchip for tracking the cattle and we are working on a pilot project with one of our development partners – the Netherlands government.”
Regarding the Green Imperative Project (GIP), the Vice President said that the €995 million, a 5-year project which is funded by the Import/Export Bank of Brazil (BDES) with support from Deutsche Bank, Islamic Development Bank, and others, will aim at agriculture technology transfer from Brazilian Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), Research and Training Institutes to Nigeria’s entrepreneurs, Research Institutes and businesses.
“The project involves the reactivation of dormant or partially operational privately owned agricultural equipment, assembly plants, establish 632 privately-owned primary production support service centers to sell farm mechanization services to smallholder and commercial farmers to address low productivity issues.
“Part of the plan also is the establishment of 142 privately owned agro-processing service centers which will be to address post-harvest losses, the path to market and supply chain challenges, and train about 100,000 new extension agents to address farmer advisory service delivery challenges with new technology and practice adoption”, he said.
