By Bimbola Oyesola
As recession bites harder, a labour union has tasked the Federal Government to speed up diversification of the economy.
According to the Chemical and Non-Metallic Senior Staff Association (CANMPSSA), the Federal Government should explore diversification of such sectors as agriculture, tourism, solid minerals, hospitality and others to buffer its foreign exchange earnings.
Its President, Mohammed Abdul Gafar, who stated this Thursday in Ilorin, Kwara State, at the three-day Annual National Management / Industrial Relations Seminar and Entrepreneurship Skills Acquisition, said the economy, which has defied all reasonable economic policies so far proposed, calls for more seriousness on the planned diversification.
“The focus on crude oil as the major source of revenue for the economy has greatly incapacitated all other available sources of revenue in our country and, by implication, has affected our sector with the exchange rate of the Naira to Dollar rising astronomically”, he said.
He reasoned that Nigeria, immensely blessed with skilled personnel, materials and natural resource should not to have been in the present precarious situation, but for lack of foresight of the past leaders.
As a way out, the labour leader said Federal Government should give priority to agriculture which, he said, has been a major source of revenue generation and raw material bases for manufacturing industries.
“Effort should be made to consolidate on massive production of cash crops segment of agricultural sector for exportation of agro-allied products to boost the revenue and increase the GDP of the country”, he stated.
Gafar lamented that the effect of the present economic situation in the country has been devastating on the manufacturing sector of the economy, through the scarcity of foreign exchange, harping that government should march its words on backward integration with action.
He noted that industries in Nigeria have now embarked on various strategies to enable them remain in business, some which are detrimental to to the workers.
The CANMPSSA President said the union as part of its contribution to resolve the problem has as a theme of its seminar, “Strengthening Organisational performance in a depressed economy: chemical and non-metallic products experience”.
He said, “Our challenge is that nobody in government is paying attention to the problem in the manufacturing sector, it is so bad now that we wonder how industries are coping. So as workers we believe that we can work together, create synergy that will stabilise our organisations and increase our productivity.”
Post-harvest: Failure to set up silos costs Nigeria N2.5trn
By Steve Agbota
Despite possessing vast land area, measuring 91,077 square kilometers with about 83 per cent of it available for cultivation, Nigeria still occupies 80th position, among 105 countries, on food affordability, availability and quality on the Global Food Security Index.
This is hardly surprising because, over the ages, Nigeria has been recording monetary losses due to food wastages and rot, currently put at about N2.5 trillion annually. Experts nail the blame for this on the doorstep of the Federal Government which failed to develop mechanism to store food for the future.
Little wonder then that the naton is said to be losing between 60 to 80 per cent of farm produce annually due to lack of storage and agro-processing facilities.
These pose great impediments to developing agricultural value chain. And rather than value chain; what the nation has is chain of losses and huge wastage. The country is also battling with poor management of farm produce – as post-harvest food losses are particularly high – one-third is lost before it reaches the marketplace.
On dwindling agricultural population, it is estimated that by 2020, the farming population will have reduced to 18 per cent from 23.4. Obviously, by then Nigeria will be food insecure and hungry.
Being among the African nations that waste more than one billion tonnes of food annually, the United Nations recently warned that Nigeria is on the brink of severe famine. According to the UN Assistant Secretary-General, Toby Lanzer, Nigeria is already economically struggling. It is in a recession for the first time in more than a decade; inflation is at an 11-year high and oil, which makes up 70 per cent of the government’s revenue, is still suffering from a slump.
Millions more are thought to be starving in Internally Displaced Persons’ (IDPs) camps that are too dangerous for aid agencies to reach.
Lanzer added: “For the country’s north eastern region, however, things are made worse by Islamic militants, Boko Haram, who have disrupted trade and farming in the region and are also hostile to western medicine. If Nigeria doesn’t get help fast, we will see, I think, a famine unlike any we have ever seen anywhere”.
In Africa, Nigeria produces the highest food annually, but half of them spoiled at the farm gate, which left farmers to earn nothing from their hard work. It is unfortunate that government is aware of these problems but does little or nothing to salvage the situation.
It is estimated that Nigeria records huge losses as a result of the herdsmen and Boko Haram activities, which posed a serious danger to food security. Most foods produced in these areas get rotten even before harvest or after harvest.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Benue State is Nigeria’s largest producer of orange. But annually, between 48 and 48.5 per cent of the oranges are lost due to lack of proper market, storage and processors.
Statistics also show that 76.8 per cent of people living in Benue State are either involved in direct farming, or agro-related trading activities. This has informed the reason why orange farmers continue to cry aloud as the fruits of their labour go down the drains due to lack of patronage by major fruit juice processors in the country.
Water melon, pineapple, pawpaw, citrus, banana, guava, mangoes, cashew are the common fruits one sees everywhere on the major highways across the country. Each region of the country produces at least three of these seasonal fruits in commercial quantity.
However, less than one per cent of the fruits produced in the country are processed or exported. The rest are either eaten raw or allowed to rot away! The implication is that farmers reap little from their years of hard labour, while the economy loses millions of dollars that could have been accrued from the export of these fruits and other staple crops.
The Country Director of ADRA Nigeria, Fred Omosebi, who spoke with Daily Sun said that post-harvest losses have to do with the inability of the Federal Government to develop mechanism to store what has been cultivated and harvested from the field.
He added: “You see, when you harvest and you are not able to store and process. It brings about a loss and it is a drain of the national economy because if you are spending a lot and making input into production process and you are not able to get tangible harvest for future use, it is a minus to the economy. As a country, if you do not store what you have produced, that means you are going to look elsewhere to feed yourself.
“That will result to high drain on our resources to get dollars for importation. So it is a drain on our economy and it does not bring about sustainable development. So post-harvest loss is a drain to national economy because you have put money into production process and by the time you are supposed to get the gain and major part of the gain is lost as a result of our inability and inefficiency in processing, we will not be able to meet the need of the populace.”
Speaking on the way forward, he said government should develop the real sector by spending more money on agric and industrial sectors, saying that government should create mechanism to close her doors against importation and develop the industries here.
He said the approach would be able to reduce post-harvest losses because a situation where major part of the economy depends on foreign importation, the nation’s local input and local market would not be developed and Nigeria would continue to have post-harvest losses.
He explained: “Nigeria is wasting a lot on food and unless it is corrected, the country will remain in the shackles of poverty. For us to come out of the shackles and be where we ought to be, we have to close all these leakages and one of them is post harvest loss as a result of failure to develop our processing industry.
“Agriculture should be taken as a business not as a social responsibility of government. We must do it as a business. Private investors must come in and invest in agric. There are people that want to farm, there should be people that are ready to bring money into the farming process and at the end of the day, the youth that are farming and those that are bringing in money will share the money 50/50 or at agreed sharing formula.”
He opined that agriculture in Nigeria should be a private sector-led initiative like what is happening in other countries like Israel. He added that Nigeria would not find a solution until the private sector is allowed to drive the sector.
Senior Partner, OIT Fash Consults, Dr. Rotimi Fashola, said that post-harvest losses means that a country is losing what could have been source of food. For instance, he said if a farmer harvested 100 per cent of his produce and lost 40 per cent to post-harvest handling, the farmer is left with 60 per cent of that product.
According to him, if that product is also going for processing again, there is going to be processing losses, which means they are diminishing and reducing the quantity of what could have been available to the farmer.
He explained that Nigeria lost up to 60 per cent in perishable crops while losing about 40 per cent in other crops like yam.
“In the developed world, post-harvest losses have been reduced considerably with technology. So generally, we need to reduce post-harvest losses as much as we can. But because of the status of the economy and technology that we are not taking advantage of, we still have very heavy post-harvest losses.
“So for food security, it is important that we reduce our post-harvest losses as much as we can, using available technology that helps to reduce post-harvest losses across board. And of course, part of that is to process. If you look at our perishable crops like tomatoes or vegetables for example, we lose so much in handling. Post-harvest losses are very high and that is why the prices at harvest is very low and at another time, there is a heavy scarcity,” he stated.
In order to curb the situation, he said government should bring more technology to the grassroots, saying that there are some technologies which the federal and state governments should introduce to the farmers as storage base. This will go a long way because the farmers are not financially buoyant enough to handle post-harvest losses.
On how farmers can reduce food wastage, FAO said that food and agriculture industry must embrace innovation and farmers’ attitudes to storage should change, so also the long term value of the investment in capital need because the wastage of food is partly due to farmer’s priorities.
Farmer collectives and commercial parties could install larger-capacity storage facilities, which would allow more harvested crops to be stored by an independent party. These larger facilities could be added to existing systems, or they could replace older systems that are in poor condition.
Meanwhile, the Chairman of All Farmers Association of Nigeria (AFAN), Lagos State chapter, Otunba Femi Oke, who spoke to Daily Sun recently, said making provision for storage facilities and good road in the rural area will make farmers sell farm produce on time.
According to FAO’s guide, ‘toolkit’ on reducing the food wastage footprint, joining farmers together in cooperatives or professional associations can help to greatly reduce food losses by increasing their understanding of the market, enabling more efficient planning, enabling economies of scale and improving their ability to market what they produce.
The FAO also advised both the private and public sectors to increase investments to address the shortcomings in food production as doing so would also have additional benefits for food security.