By Gabriel Ewepu

ABUJA – AMID the commemoration of 2025 World Seed Day, the All Farmers Association, AFAN, yesterday, demanded action to address farmers’ poor access to drought and flood resistant seeds.

In a chat with Vanguard, the National President, AFAN, Arc Kabir Ibrahim, underscored the Day while pointing out that seed remains the catalyst for food production, therefore, farmers need to have access, afford and apply quality seeds to boost food production.

Ibrahim said: “The World Seed Day(WSD) is marked to show the importance of seed to Agricultural Production works wide every 26th Of April.

“In Nigeria it should be ideally used to wake-up our Smallholder farmers to the need for them to use certified seeds instead of grains in order to improve their yield per hectare which has kept the majority of them operating at subsistence level thereby debilitating the attainment of food security despite all the efforts of government in opening several windows of support.

“Nigeria’s Seed System has seen remarkable improvement beginning with the 2019 Seed Act which led to the Collaborative Seed Programme, CSP, the regulation and capacity building of seed companies as well as several policy reinvigoration which together portend better service delivery to our crop farmers.

“Farmers are getting very limited access to quality seeds and especially drought and flood resistant type largely due to low purchasing power therefore improved provision of subsidies on all inputs especially seeds are direly needed.”

Meanwhile, speaking on support by the government for seed companies in the country to produce quality seeds in order to meet farmers’ demands, he said they receive support from the government through the National Agricultural Seed Council, NASC, including some donors agencies.

“The Seed Companies registered under SEDAN enjoy support from NASC to enable them to scale and improve their efficiencies through constant activities of both NASC, donor organizations such GIZ, consultants such as Sahel Consulting and sister organizations such as NABG”, he said.

Speaking on how best to boost seed production, accessibility, affordability and sustainability, he said, “Research findings are being deployed gradually into seed production since the passage of the PVP Act of 2021 and so the farmers are poised to get better support in terms of good seeds from the research system because the researchers now have patent rights and therefore commercially incentivized”, he said.

He (Ibrahim) also suggested that, “The Seed System will be better reinvigorated by having Early Generation Seeds, EGS, readily available for the production of Foundation Seeds, FS, and subsequent production of Certified Seeds, CS.”

However, he called for drastic actions to be taken to ensure perpetrators are dealt with to sanitize the seed industry.

“The proper enforcement of the provisions of the 2019 Seed Act will ensure the complete eradication of fake seeds.

“There are consequences for peddling fake seeds and these consequences must be brought to bear on all perpetrators without exception”, he said.