Experts advocate agricultural extension as strategy to address food inflation
By Onome Amuge
Relevant bodies and stakeholders across agricultural value chains in Nigeria have called on the reformation of the country’s extension systems to address the challenges of food productivity and resultant food inflation.
This is just as prices of foodstuffs ceaselessly increase amid poor economic resources and escalating poverty.
The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), in its latest inflation report, noted that the food inflation rate rose to 24.32 per cent in the month January from 23.75 per cent in December. The report also showed that food inflation year-on-year jumped to 24.32 per cent in the month under review, representing a 7.19 per cent increase compared to 17.13 per cent in the corresponding month of January 2022.
The surge was attributed to an increase in the prices of some food items like Oil and Fat, bread and cereals, fish, potatoes, yam & tubers and other food items consumed by the over 200 million populace.
Reacting to the persistent surge in food prices across Nigeria, experts in the agricultural sector opine that the country needs to upscale resilience in food systems in the country through intensified efforts geared at encouraging extension workers to educate farmers, processors and help control market activities.
Speaking at an annual stakeholders review workshop themed: “Building Resilient Food Systems in the Face of Rising Demands”, organised by the country office of Sasakawa Africa Association (SAA), Godwin Atser, Nigeria’s SAA country director, lamented that Nigeria has lost huge opportunities in its agricultural exports drive and agro-economic diversification due to a shortage of extension workers.
Extension work, according to him,has been extremely useful in guiding farmers on how to plant, apply fertilizers, pesticides, storage instructions as well as right procedures of processing food commodities to meet international quality standards.
Atser observed that in most states where SAA are currently operating, it was discovered that there is no recruitment of extension workers and they lack capacity building without any form of motivation.
“The extension system in Nigeria and several other African countries is on a downward spiral.
The fortunes are dwindling and this is because of lack of motivation,” he noted.
Adegbenga Adekoya,principal investigator at the Innovation Lab for Policy Leadership in Agriculture and Food Security ( PiLAF) ,University of Ibadan, described agricultural extension as a veritable tool for working with the grassroot and represent the pathway to reaching rural communities and dwellers.
Adekoya further emphasised that agricultural extension provides the key to achieving food
and nutrition security for the country, adding that it bridges technical and communication gaps between farmers and research while also guiding research to address prevailing problems in agriculture and the value chains.
The professor of agricultural extension asserted that working with farmers will yield the best result when agricultural extension professionals are engaged,because they have the communication skill, understand farmers and their milieu and are experts of the right methods.
“A virile extension system provides the pedestal for healthy growth of the sector,” he said.
Amina Mustapha, from the Center for Dryland Agriculture at the Bayero University, Kano (BUK), pointed out that the provision of quality agricultural extension services in Nigeria is constrained by unfavourable staff-to-farmer extension ratio and the poor link between research and extension-farmers.
The BUK professor of Agriculture Economics and Extension, highlighted factors affecting the delivery of extension services to include;large areas of coverage, lack of implementation of agricultural extension policy, conflicts and insecurity.
“It can be inferred from these difficulties that, over the years, the net result has been the failure of the extension service to reach its intended clientele effectively,” she said.
A report by the African Seed Access Index (TASAI), showed that Nigeria has the lowest ratio of agricultural extension workers to farmers in Africa.
The 2020 report ranked Nigeria at the bottom of the index, alongside Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Uganda and Kenya.
To produce the report, researchers tracked the average number of agricultural households served by an extension officer. Of 95 seed companies surveyed in Nigeria, 25 or 26 per cent employed extension services in 2019, lower than 34 seed companies that said they employed extension services in 2017. The report said a well-functioning agricultural extension service is critical to the successful adoption of improved seed by smallholder farmers.
On its part, the Nigerian government said there were 14,000 extension officers as of 2019, of which 6,000 were in the public sector and the remaining 8,000 were privately employed. It explained that the country’s agricultural extension system has declined over the years as a result of decreased funding, policy changes, reduced man-power and lack of interest of young people in agricultural entrepreneurship.
Frank Satumary Kudla, the director, department of agricultural extension FMARD, noted that factors such as youth unwillingness to embrace agricultural entrepreneurship, the poor capacity of existing extension agents to deliver due to lack or low quality of training, and the poor funding of the subsector has hindered its development.
Kudla, however, disclosed that the agriculture ministry has trained 75,000 extension agents on value chain and methodologies nationwide in collaboration with states’ Agricultural Development Programmes (ADPs).
“This is a great turning point because this programme is one of the first among several recommendations of a special technical committee established by the minister of agriculture to assist the ministry.
“Among other responsibilities is to develop a workable framework and actionable programme for the immediate training of 75,000 extension workers in collaboration with states’ ADPs,” he said.
Giving their recommendations on how best to restore agricultural extension to its expected capacity and performance, the experts stressed on the need to strengthen the extension-farmers link.
Mustapha said Nigeria needs to explore digital agriculture extension services.
With this, she explained that credible and beneficial information can be reached to farmers wherever they are.
“It is through extension deliveries that farmers would be aware of recent technologies in agriculture which they can adopt and improve their output which would in the long run improve food security in Nigeria,” she explained further.
The agriculture stakeholders at the even also expressed grave concern over the extension-farmer ratio of 1:10,000. They urged governments to resuscitate the state Agriculture Development Programmes (ADPs) towards higher functionality.
They also advocated a pluralistic extension model involving private-advisory service providers.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), although farmers already have a lot of knowledge about their environment and their farming system,the extension agents can offer them other knowledge and information which they do not have. The FAO highlighted some other benefits to include; knowledge about the cause of the damage to a particular crop, the general principles of pest control, advice and information to assist farmers in making decisions and generally enable them to take action, information about prices, markets,and the availability of credit and inputs, among others.
“The application of such knowledge often means that the farmer has to acquire new skills of various kinds: for example, technical skills to operate unfamiliar equipment, organizational skills to manage a group project, the skill to assess the economic aspects of technical advice given, or farm management skills for keeping records and allocating the use of farm resources and equipment,” it said.
The FAO advised farmers on the need to form organisations, both to represent their interests and to give them a means for taking collective action, noting that extension, therefore, should be concerned with helping to set up, structure and develop farmers’ organisations.
“This should be a joint venture and any such organization should only be set up in consultation with the farmers,” the organisation said. It added that these organizations will make it easier for extension services to work with local farmers, and will also serve as a channel for disseminating information and knowledge in the future.