Olam Nigeria, through its subsidiary wheat milling firm called Crown Flour Mill Limited (CFM), in collaboration with the Lake Chad Research Institute (LCRI), has invested in a development initiative tagged ‘Seeds for the Future’, to improve local wheat production.
The Managing Director of CFM, Ashish Pande, at the Olam Green Land Webinar Series, organized to drive the growth of the wheat value chain, noted that the program is estimated to generate about 200,000 tons of seeds for multiplication and commercialization through the establishment of a wheat trial project in Hadejia, Jigawa State.
The seed genotypes being used in the research work were introduced by the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), Lebanon, with the aim of releasing adaptable seed varieties for smallholder farmers.
Wheat Production Opportunity in Nigeria
The project is a 10-year plan to set up community seed businesses for Nigerian farmers who want to grow more wheat. It is meant to help people in rural areas, especially women, adopt new technologies and make more money.
Pande explained that the initiative will engage at least 10,000 farmers per year as seed multiplicators, who will cultivate about 100,000 hectares of land with the high-yielding seed varieties to generate revenue and returns that will directly impact the lives of the farmers and the cooperatives engaged in the project.
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Also speaking at the webinar was Dr. Amadou Tiadane Sall, a durum wheat expert from the Senegalese Institute for Agricultural Research, who narrated that there was zero wheat produced in Senegal in 2017 and that over 2,000 smallholder wheat farmers now produce wheat through the use of a community-based methodology, such as the one that CFM and LCRI have adopted.
He concluded that remarkable turnaround in the wheat production sector in Senegal, spells possibilities for closing the current gaps between the local wheat production and consumption gaps in Nigeria through peer-to-peer participatory approach of the project.
