.0 INTRODUCTION
Agriculture involves in the production of food and fibre. The occupation is predicated on the dominant technological development in the millennium (stone age, industrial revolution, biotechnology, digital technology, …) Hence, the correlation between agricultural development and advancement in technology.
In normal course, government ensures food security “… a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” FAO 2001. “While farmers and ranchers are often focused on the production side of their businesses, they also have to know exactly how they will sell what they produce and how it will get to market…In foodshed markets, this chain of food business facilities and services from the field to consumption is called a Food Value Chain” NGFN 2016.
2.0 SCOPE
The stages of Agriculture development perspectives in Ikorodu division are in three (3) periods:
- The period 1960-1979 reflects the policies of the first civilian government and the intervention of the military ruler-ship and attendant policy changes
- 1979-1999: the next 20 years looks at the policies during the military governorship era, which was predominantly characterized by the privatization of government assets in agriculture production.
iii. 1999-2016: After the Tinubu civilian government came into power, we have seen yet a third major shift in Agro-development policies with emphasis on government investments in facilities, infrastructures and institutions to foster greater private investment in agricultural production.
The data and statistics used in this presentation are source biased and also the inference and conclusions are prejudiced by personal experience. All these are to improve the reliability of the presentation while show casing the experiences of past and present senior officers of Lagos State Ministry of Agriculture.
3.0 1960-1983 (23 YEARS) – SUBSISTENCE TO COMMERCIAL FARMING POLICY DRIVE
During this time in Nigeria’s history, which included the government under Chief Obafemi Awolowo, agricultural policies in Western Nigeria were significantly influenced by the Israeli Moshav model of agricultural system of production predicated on farm settlement developments. The purpose was to bring subsistence farmers into farm settlements as incubation centers, teach them new techniques in farming, and over a period of time when they have grown and learnt the best practices, these farmers were expected to move out and develop their own farmlands outside of the farm settlements. These farm-families then will make room for new farmers to take their place in the settlements and thereby grow the population of learned farmers. This however, did not prove successful for a number of reasons.
The main strategy employed during this period was the establishment of farm settlements as incubation centers to train commercial farmers. Whilst still under the administration of Western Nigeria, prior 1967, the Ikorodu farm settlement was one of the first-generation settlements established in 1962 on 28 ha of land with a capacity for 22 farm families. Other formations established throughout Lagos State during the period include- Ajara farm settlement Ajara, Erekiti Poultry Centre Badagry, Araga Agricultural Institute Epe, Itamaga hatchery Ikorodu, Ijede Poultry Centre Ijede, Livestock Feedmill Agege etc. Also, the Imota farm settlement was established in 1973 on 28 ha of land with a capacity for 14 farm families.
3.1 Administrative structure
After 1967 when Lagos State was created the administration of agricultural activities in the divisions was under the bureaucratic management of the office of Ikorodu Divisional Agricultural & Natural Resources Office (DANRO) which was Headed by a Principal Agricultural Officer who act as representative of the Permanent Secretary. The office coordinated activities of all officers from the various departments posted to the Division. The activities included extension services, food production from government demonstration farms such crops, processing (garri, fufu, oil palm, pork and so on), piggery, poultry (broilers, layers & turkey), rubber harvest, timber etc.
3.2 Other formations under the DANRO’s office included:
- Agriculture mechanisation center. The center was usually headed by a grade level 10 Agriculture Engineer officer and the formation’s job was to provide farm mechanisation hiring and maintenance services.
- Ikorodu Veterinary Centre.
iii. Ikorodu Cooperatives Office.
- Erikodo seedling and multiplication farm.
- Baiyeku Fisheries Extension Services Station.
- Mowo Kekere-Abule Eko-Gberigbe-Bagidan Crop Production Axis 1
vii. Igbogbo-Egunfoye-Igbomogun Crop Production Axis 2
viii. Igbokuta-Ewu Isolo Crop Production Axis 3.
- Forestry Majidun.
In the words of Chief Olatunji Bakare a pioneer Fishery Officer and erstwhile General Manager of Lagos State Fishery Development Board, Bayeku Fisheries Extension Station provided services such as training of fishermen to operate outboard engine, to set net, provided metrological service, helped with supply inputs such as outboard engines, nets, canoes and petrol, taught fishermen how to preserve catch by using plastic containers, ice cubes and other preservation techniques, and provided cold room and deep freezers at the Station. The ice cubes/blocks were produced at Fisheries Victoria Island and supplied to all the fishery jetties along the lagoon, including Oreta, Ibeshe & Bayeku.
During the Jakande administration, between 1972 and 1976, a new policy was introduced to drive commercial agriculture. The policy was geared towards driving more private participation in the sector and increasing commercialization of farming and move away from just subsistence farming. To aid in this shift, a number of Agriculture Parastatals and Boards were established.
3.3 Some of these included:
- LS Agricultural & Livestock Services Board.
- LS Fisheries Development Board.
iii. LS Agricultural Development Authority. 1983
- LS Agricultural Input Supplies Authority. 1992
- LS Coconut Development Authority. 1996
- LS Agricultural Land Holding Authority. 1987
vii. The policy heralded the privatization of agricultural assets.
In 1977, still under Jakande’s administration, there was a policy that had an unintended effect of Agriculture policy. The School of Agriculture was carved out of the Ikorodu Divisional Agricultural & Natural Resources Station as a department of Lagos State Polytechnic. The action initiated the emasculation of government farms production capacity and dismantling of the DANRO’s Station coordination activities.
3.4 By 1979, when the government decided to bring the permanent headquarters of Lagos State Polytechnic to Ikorodu, all agricultural officers and staff of the Ministry who were resident in the station were asked to vacate without options of alternative government residential accommodation.
This had a transformative implication on the government farm production centers:
- all production centers on the station were asked to handover to the School of Agriculture – who had a different mandate. The mandate of one was on food production, while the other was focussed only on teaching;
- The era snowball into diminished production capacities whilst some lines of production suffered entire shut down.
In summary, this period can be seen as a transition period in Agriculture with the seeding of government production centers to the School of Agriculture. This led to underutilization of trained Ministry personnel, sharp declines in production from government farms, but this was offset in part by the phenomenon rise in commercial production with government support.
4.0 1979-1999 (20 YEARS) – PRIVATIZATION AND LEASING OF GOVERNMENT ASSETS
The period 1979 to 1999 was associated with the privatization of government assets in Agriculture. The privatization of agricultural assets was vigorously pursued. To encourage commercial agriculture, agricultural land and other assets were leased to private farmers, and bank loans were encouraged for funding and scaling their operations. In this instance, Bayeku Fish Cold-room, Itamaga hatchery, Ijede poultry, agricultural crop farms, Erikodo seedling farm, and others, were leased out to farmers.
Because of this, the hitherto government agricultural activities rapidly declined. For example, the Tractor Hiring Unit diminished and became extinct. So also, the Veterinary Office offered skeletal services until it became extinct too.
During this period a large number of private farms sprung up in Ikorodu. Some of the larger scale private farms which came into being at this time included Akinpelu poultry farm, Mashaun farm, Ajose farms Ibeshe, Sowemimo farms Bayeku. The Itamaga hatchery was put under private management, Ogunyemi poultry farm Imota, and so on. The Imota farm settlement poultry enterprise was leased to a foreign partner.
Through it all, there was a good indication of impressive private investment in commercial agricultural production. Many of these private farmers flourished and grew their agro-business impressively, despite the significant infrastructure, supply chain, processing, and funding issues.
Despite this though, the settlers in the hitherto government run Ikorodu farm settlement were allowed to remain in the settlement and they held on.
As mentioned earlier, this period was impressive for private investment in commercial agriculture. Conversely, there was deterioration of infrastructure facilities – transportation such as road, rail, waterways. One would have expected the government to have been able to make investments in infrastructure as they freed themselves from running enterprises and privatizing government establishments. But this was not the case and the agriculture economy suffered because of this. Agricultural produce market structures remained traditional. Preservation and cold storage facilities, which are critical in the value chain for agricultural production, in markets were inefficient, under-developed and inadequate. Food processing and packaging techniques remained unchanged. Food presentation could not leverage on opportunities provided by modern supermarkets. Farm-Supermarket linkage was not promoted.
By 1999 as many as 50% of the Agricultural Boards have closed down and new challenges have emerged. Overall, the privatization efforts can be deemed to have been good for the economy as it marked an improvement in the mechanization of agriculture as the farmers were able to increase their investments and therefore, scale up in agricultural production. The subsistence farmers in the preceding period did not have the capacity to do this.
5.0 1999 -2016 (17 YEARS) – INVESTMENTS IN LARGE SCALE FACILITIES AND FARM ESTATES
The government has attempted to consolidate on the learnings from the past era by increasing its investments in new facilities and institutions to support the practitioners in the agricultural sector. Some of the policy drive has been in the areas of assisting with provision of services, release of more government land and facilities to farmers, facilitation of credit, inputs and extension services.
5.1 To improve capacity the Government built new farm estates, and renovated training institutes. Some of the activities include the following:
- Government acting as catalyst in investing in Rice Processing Mill at Imota, and Cassava Processing Mill at Araga. The latter has been leased to private sector operative.
- The government engaged in strategic partnership with other State (Kebbi State).
iii. Privatization of abattior and red meat value chain including transportation and meat preservation and processing.
5.2 To further its policy initiatives and promotion of the Agriculture economy in Ikorodu, the Government also established agricultural estates and investments in the division. While the government established these facilities, they leased them to allottees under general terms to encourage production. This system afforded easier access to land, which is a scarce resource, and also the tenure was more secure and safe for the farmers. Some of the agricultural estates established in this period included
- Piggery estate Gberigbe established in 2001. The Gberigbe Pig Estate was established on 40 ha of land. The piggery estate was allocated to 150 farmers. The estate produces up to 10.2 tons of pork daily out of the 91.65 tobs/day in the state.
- Fish farm estate Odogunyan, established in 2003. The estate was fully subscribed and it now produces annually about 6,000 tons of fish which is valued at over N1.5 billion
iii. Oil palm estate Igbogbo established in 2004. This was not successful and never took off.
- Cattle farm and abattoir established in Imota 2005. This was not successful and never took off.
- Erikorodo Poultry Estate was established in 2012 on 100 ha land. It houses the processing center that has a brooder house for broilers, a feedmill, a processing plant for 4,000 birds per hour, a coldroom for 12,000 birds etc. The estate churns out 43.14 tons of poultry meat and about 453,322 crates of egg per annum
- Rice Mill Imota inaugurated in 2013. This was an establishment of a 2.5 ton per hour rice mill that can produce 6,000 metric tons of local rice per annum.
5.3 In addition to the farm estate programmes, the Government also sustained partnership with international organizations like the Word Bank to further intervene in the Agro sector through Fadama Programme. For instance, the Lagos State government created a mandate to increase rice production in the state from 1,000 to 3,000 hectares of land by 2018. Some of other intervention, specifically for Ikorodu division included:
- Fadama programme started as Fadama 1 in 1999 and still operational as Fadama additional financing geared towards rice production.
- Fish processing shed at FFES Odogunyan.
iii. World bank sponsored upgrade of infrastructure in FFES Odogunyan.
- Facilitation of agricultural credit guarantee scheme of CBN and BoI.
- Establishment of Agro-Indusrial Park at Imota 2011.
6.0 CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS & DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITIES
In the last few years, the Lagos State government administrations have focused on (i) Promotion of comparative advantage in agricultural production; and (ii) developing Strategic partnership with other States in Nigeris e.g Kebbi State. The Ikorodu-Epe corridor has developed into the staple crop processing zone for Lagos State. There are still many untapped opportunities to expand the Agricultural markets. The table below show the potential size and scope of retail food sector in Nigeria.
1.0 CHALLENGES
While there has been an increased capacity level in production in Agriculture in Lagos State, also, there has been a growing deficit in the infrastructure development required to support the entire production chain – from produce to processing to distribution to market/sales and the kitchen table. There is still a high incidence of spoilage of farm produce before it gets to the market and at the market. This not only increases the price for the unspoiled food but also discourages farmers and agro producers from producing more. The population explosion in Lagos in general and Ikorodu in particular, further makes the situation even more dire as they appeared the shrinking agricultural land and lower food security.
2.0 CONCLUSION
This presentation is herein concluded having highlighted not only the importance of developing effective Government policies to grow the agricultural sector but also identified that the investment and policy prescriptions which should be applied across the entire value chain in order to generate the desired outcome. Evidently, policies geared towards just one part of the value chain like production, had not been enough. There needed to be some concerted efforts to help develop:
- Massive improvement in the modern market infrastructure towards the creation of facilities that make the buyer-seller transactions more pleasant. Presently, when food gets to the market, they are usually just dumped on the floor and the processing and display is open to flies, germs and unsanitary conditions. There needs to be health facilities, and sanitary standards developed to create modern markets where anyone irrespective of class will be comfortable to participate.
- Creation of effective farm to modern market linkage wherein there would be easy, cost-effective movement of produce from the farm to the market through (a) proper logistics and transport provisions e.g using appropriately designed vehicles to transport specific farm produce, and (b) provision of preservation/cold-room facilities in the markets. If there is proper linkage, this also has the added benefit of enhancing efficiency in the entire food value chain, and food security.
iii. Introduction of Technology to mitigate against the impact of climate change on farms: Agriculture is a big contributor to global warming and pollution due to production of waste like methane and carbon dioxide. The government has to help create awareness around best practices and low level and cheap technology that agro-producers can employ to help minimize their carbon footprint and reduce waste. For example, the deployment of organic digester in food markets to help in recycling agricultural waste to generate electricity, compost, liquid plant nutrients, fertiliser etc.