THE Federal Government should stop ridiculing Nigeria globally by celebrating belated discovery of schemes other countries are pondering their effectiveness. The latest mockery is planned provision of mobile phones to 10 million farmers.Farmers in Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda have been using mobile phones – with limited successes – to improve crops, livestock, marketing, and share information, for more than four years. In Lesotho, rural farmers outside Maseru, the capital, have used phones in the past seven years to run their farmers’ cooperatives, and address health matters, cutting costs of traversing long, mountainous distances. A South African farmer attaches them to his sheep to check rustling.

Phones for rural farmers have access to current commodities prices, farm inputs, practices, insurance, and links to international commodity buyers. Insurance companies, commodity dealers and ICT companies develop and deploy the phones, not governments.

Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development,  Dr.  Akinwumi  Adeshina  is mystifying   the issue. In denying reports that the Federal Government would spend N60 billion on the project, he refused to disclose the cost – a real cause for worry. What is he hiding?  Phones alone would not improve agriculture, anywhere, least of all, in Nigeria. Unknown to Adeshina, many rural farmers have them.

Besides poor seedlings and storage facilities, the biggest challenge Nigerian farmers face is evacuation of products to markets. Transportation systems barely exist in rural Nigeria and are definitely not planned with farmers in mind. Our farmers are already producing more than we can store or transport to markets.

The Ministry’s backwardness is evident in promoting a scheme the United Nations’ Food & Agriculture Organisation, FAO, noted its limitations in a March 2009 study.

FAO listed them as, “the relatively high costs of handsets, limited network coverage and quality of service, limited capacities of rural people to use mobile devices, and the functional limitations of the basic handsets/software available in developing countries, rapidly evolving technologies, and increasing diversity of makes/models of handsets in use.”
According to Adeshina, “In today’s world, the most powerful tool is a mobile phone.

I want the entire rural space of Nigeria and farmers to be included in the advantages of the mobile phone revolution.” Has he read the FAO report? How would this scheme tackle Nigerian issues?  Our farmers need cooperatives to lower their costs. They need buyers for their products. If we improve rural infrastructure, farmers would gain higher efficiencies in their operations. We would not have to worry about charging their phone batteries, an unresolved issue in countries with better electricity supplies than Nigeria.

Mobile phones can assist organised farmers to improve operations, as is the case in the countries we mentioned.