The Nigerian seeds section is posed to take a giant leap as AGRA and stakeholders in the sector agree to take steps to improve the sector, JOHN OBA report.
Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) has commenced the process of rejuvenating the seed sector as it has rally the stakeholders to proffer solution to the problem of farmers non acceptance of improved seed.
Speaking at the recent programmes for the BMGF-USAID-AGRA stakeholders workshop in Abuja, AGRA Nigeria County Director, Dr. Kehinde Makinde, said the organisation has enmarked the sum of $30 million in the next five years to support the seed sector across the value chain.
Makinde explained that AGRA has provided $50 million to different stakeholders across the entire value chain in Africa since 2006 and would still be spending another $30 million over the next 5 years from 2017 to 2021 to support value chain actors, governments, and private sectors.
“In the area of support, we have new strategy, we are spending about 30million US Dollars over the next 5 years from 2017 to 2021 on supporting value chain actors, governments, private sectors.
“So what we are doing in AGRA is working to ensure that the seeds system is able to deliver value to small holders farmers that include them laying hands on improved seeds. And that process starts with early generation seeds. The early generation seeds we are talking about here are the breeder seeds and the foundation seeds that the seed company needs to produce to certify the seed needs of farmers.”
He said the workshop is to ensure that farmers are able to increase productivity. “And to increase productivity, they need access to new technology, and improved seeds is an important element of that.
“So what we are doing today here is to work with partners to ensure that stakeholders in the seeds business are able to have the right resources opportunities that they need to produce high quality early generation seeds that that is foundation seeds and breeder seeds which will help the seed companies to be able produce the certified seeds that the farmers needs.
“It is a whole process of ensuring that we do have quality seeds moving from the breeder seeds where start the process right through to the seeds companies and then to smallholder farmers. In short, is to ensure that farmers has access to good quality seeds in sufficient quantities that they need to plant their farms and increase their productivities,” he explained.
He stated further that AGRA provides supports at different levels, saying one of such support is to work with stakeholders on how to produce good quality seeds.
“That is not enough, we work with them to provide them funding support. There are critical bottle necks that challenges the seed sector. First it can be very difficult for a start up seeds companies. So we provides funding support to assist them in getting started well. we also provides technical supports that is like in areas of preproduction research or sometimes they do want to do may be hybrid seeds, production and all they really don’t know meaning the know how is not there.
“So we have support relating to consultants that can meet and work with them through the process and ensuring that they are better able to understand the process as you know several of them has not been trained in the process and we also have an institute that trains the staff of seed companies which is seed enterprise management institute in Nairobi. Several of Nigeria seed companies have bee part of that process,” he said.
Also, AGRA head of Seed System Development, Dr. George Bigirwa, said Nigeria seeds companies capacity to produce seed is still very low as they are still producing less than 5000 metric tons.
“So there is still need to increase that number but if any with existing seed companies, their production levels are still low because most of them are still producing less than 5000 metric tons. If we get about 20 seed companies, each producing 20,000 metric tons that is quite substantial and it will go a long way annually.
“There has been that problem of shortage of early generation seeds so we are coming to meet here to come up with some strategies of ensuring that we put a system in a place, so that there is enough early generation seeds and produce enough certified seeds for farmers.
“One point of concern is that the number of farmers using improved seeds is very low so there is need really to strengthen the seed system in the country so that the amount of seed farmers used is the substantial and number of farmers using improved seeds get also raised up. If the do that, farmers would be able to have increase yields, because right now, the yield are still very low and the reason been is that most farmers are using home save seeds which is given them low yields.
“Our intention is to ensure that farmers take up improved varieties so that they can have enough yields and better returns in terms of food security and the income that will come with it,” he said.
On research, he said the mandate of research Institute is to develop new varieties which are well adapted to ecosystem. “Varieties which are resisted to diseases, tolerant to pesticide and the other stresses. They developed those varieties, because their main role in seed system is to produce initial stock what we normally called breeder seed or early generation seeds. Thereafter, they are suppose to handover that role to private seed companies,” he stated.
One of the stakeholder, Mr Stephen Yakubu Attah, commended the organisation, saying since it coming into the country, AGRA has facilitated the production of improved seeds to Nigerian farmers.
“The first is that it has tried to enlightened most of our specialist. I have many of my staff who has been trained in abroad, in university of Nairobi under the program call the SEMIS. And these are all the specialist in various areas in the seeds sector.
“We came on board to provide quality planting materials for our farmers. you know most of our farmers are small holder farmers, so our intention was to avail them quality seeds that can increase their productivity without additional land or inputs.
“They have also been involved in trying to expose us in marketing strategies and have even supported us financially to ensure that we put those practices they expect us to learn which we have learned from them put into practice in other to sell our products.
“They are actually encouraging people who will develop more technologies in terms of varieties that we can identify, show our interest pick from the shelves and commercialise. Basically, in nutshell, those are the major areas that AGRA has helped. Besides that, we have regional meetings, country meetings, once a while to review situation on ground with the hope of trying to look at the areas of improvement and they also sometime they avail us experts who suggest to us ways of improving what we are doing both as company and as country,.
“They have also embarked on training of high calibre staffs. You know our products are based on breeding programmes because it is the breed, the technology that come from the breeders that will take off the shell and commercialise. If there are no technology from the breeders, we have nothing to commercialise because we are company that just increase in quantity that many people can have,” he explained
On challenges facing the sector, he said finance and lack of marketing, saying banks have been reluctant in giving loans to seeds companies while farmers are yet to understand the importance of improve seeds.
“Once you finance them, they will be able to have capabilities buy. You know our farmers are small holder farmers most of them lives from hand to mouth. If you are doing any business, if you are selling anything on table, you need financing and when there is no financing, you know there is a big limitation. Those are the major two things that we see. Market which is related to not having or not available financing from banks or whichever source. And we ourselves as companies finance so as to ensure we can expand our scope,” he said.
