The Nigeria Agribusiness Group (NABG) has called for the empowerment of small-scale farmers to enable a shift from subsistent farming to more commercial farming by doing agriculture as a business, which will in turn add value to their production.
The Director General of NABG, Jafar Umar, made this call during his interaction with journalists at the Nigeria Integrated Agribusiness Agenda, which was organized by NABG and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and focuses on advocacy for small-scale producers.
Umar noted that the majority of the producers of food consumed in the country are small-scale farmers, who are millions in number, explaining that there is a need for a paradigm shift to move from small-scale capacity to more commercial agriculture.
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“So, the timing is now; in fact, it is overdue; we should have been on that case before now, so we are trying to support that transition from just a farmer to a producer and to business, so we feel that it will go a long way in making our food security agenda more robust,” he said.
Also, the President of the All Farmers Association of Nigeria (AFAN), Arc. Kabir Ibrahim, said if the smallholder farmers know that they are incentivized and that whatever they produce will be off-taken and they will get good value, they will do more.
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Kabir noted that the population of farmers in Nigeria today is more than 70 percent because the country does not have sufficient mechanization. He said that with mechanization in food production, the number of people in the field will contract because machine power will replace human power.
Tajudeen Yayaha, CEO of Extension Africa, pointed out that there is a need to think beyond just small-scale farmers to small-scale businesses that need support services to grow and help companies go in and work with farmers and get the benefits they need.
