The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Akinwumi Adesina, is a delight to listen to any day and anywhere. At the recently held African Green Revolution Forum in Arusha, Tanzania, he was at his best again. After his presentation, he granted audience to JIMOH BABATUNDE for interview on the reforms taking place in the sector. Excerpt.

On fertilizer racketing

First and foremost the system we had in place was a terrible system, the system was very corrupt, it was inefficient, and it was not reaching the farmers at all. In fact, we had a situation where 11% of farmers were getting government distributed fertilizers.

So, it was those people distributing fertilizer that were making the money, the political farmer were making the money, some of the companies  were making the money in a perverse way, in the sense that some of them were supplying sands as fertilizers.

Some of them will supply grains as seeds, so the farmers on all sides were being cheated. And people will take the fertilizers that were being subsidized to re sell to the market and in most cases they go to other countries. So, it is a system that I had looked at, I have been looking at the system for many years, did my PHD thesis  looking at that system, looking at how fertilizer were  moving between Nigeria and Niger republic, that was in 1984 when I started working on that.  So, I had seen how our fertilizer policy was helping other nations to grow their agriculture, but we are getting poorer.

As you will agree with me, poverty can not be a national endowment, we can not have a situation where our farmers are getting poorer and other people were making money.

Basically, what we have done is that we made the system transparent, government has no business buying and selling anything, it is not the role of government.

You go to your village, you will find fanta, coca cola, it is not sold by government and it is there when you need it, so why is government doing seed and fertilizers, except people are just making money.

A lot of corruption was going on. It was a very terrible system, so we took the government out completely , the federal government no longer  buy  or distribute fertilizer, the private sector now sell fertilizer directly to farmers and that is the way it should be.

And the role of government has shifted to providing supports to our farmers to be able to buy the seeds and fertilizers supplied by the private sector, that is how we developed the Growth Enhancement Scheme (GES) which provides 50% for seeds and fertilizers.

In fact, for this year, we gave all the seeds out for free, because I found out that our farmers were not aware of the benefit of improved seeds. Only 5 % of Nigerian farmers use improved seeds, so President Jonathan directed that we should go ahead and give those seeds.

This year we spent N800m providing improved seed of cotton in the country. When, I became minister, we could not find seed for cotton, we had to go to Benin republic to go and beg. I said I am not going there, so we set up a partnership with West Africa Cotton Company, they produced 1750 tons foundation seeds for us which we have used this year to plant 75000 hectares of cotton in the north for the first time ever.

The farmers in the north are getting the seeds for free, why is this important? The cost of cotton seeds that farmers had in the north before costs only N42 per kilo and they are bad seeds. The one that the government is giving them costs about N200 per kilo, but we are giving them for free for the first time ever.

We did the same for rice, so we gave rice seed to our farmers for free, for cocoa; we have given out 114 million seeds of high breed cocoa seeds which give four times the current yield for farmers and matures in two years versus four years. We are giving that away for free.

Back to the fertilizer’s question, we launched what is called electronic wallet system. Where the farmers get vouchers to access seeds and fertilizers over the mobile phones. We are the first in Africa, probably in the world to do that. So, we had to do so many things this year.

First, we had to stop the seeds and fertilizers companies from selling to government and start selling to the farmers. Number two; we had to get the banks to lend to the seeds and fertilizers companies, so they can actually have enough to sell. We had to develop the electronic platform that will link the farmers to the agro dealers and to the banks.

We had to have distribution centers where farmers will collect their seeds and fertilizers, all that we had to do and roll out the programs from April when the budget was approved and we did all that. Just imagine all that in five months.

In the last five months, we had developed a biometric data base of farmers, 4.5m farmers and we will continue to grow that. We have also piloted and scale up the electronic wallet and it is working.

In the last five months we have reached about 1million farmers who  have collected their seeds and fertilizers via the electronic wallet. Listen  to what they say.

A lady called Nena said this is the first time I will get seeds and fertilizer without a politician, without a government official. You don’t have to beg anybody; it has clean up that particular system for us.

The other thing that it has done is that it has empowered the farmers significantly.

On allegations that distribution of inputs was politicalfertilizer racketing.

There is no program that you do that will reach 100% of the people and also, it has to do with information.

In the case of the oil palm seedlings, people’s memory sometime is short; it has never happened in Nigeria’s history that the government will give away sprouted nursery to oil plantations. It has never happened.

This year we are giving out nine million spouted nurses of oil palm seedlings, because, Nigeria used to be the largest exporter of palm oil. We were accounting globally for 27% of the export,today , we are importing  palm oil from Malaysia  that got its oil palm seedlings from Nigeria.

When the President asked me to become the Minister of Agriculture, he did not tell me or put it in my job description that I will become Minister of food import. My job is to make Nigeria’s  agriculture grow; to be competitive and take back the market that we have lost and that is why as a government we are focused on the palm oil,  giving those samawa grows. They are tall palm oil seeds and low yielding, we are giving them new seeds to replace those samawa grows.

Secondly, we have over 35,000 hectares that young farmers are doing; we are giving them the oil palm seedlings. We decided to also give oil palm seedlings to the oil palm estates.

Somebody asked why we gave them to private companies; I told him it is an investment, because you can not export the oil palm trees. If I invest in those plantation and we have high yielding varieties, guess what will happento  the crude palm oil is produced in Nigeria.

We signed an MOU with 18 of the oil palm estate. We gave them 1.34million seedlings. The person that said she wanted, she can come to the ministry. I run an open, transparent system.

Anybody that wants to do oil palm plantation that will allow Nigeria to expand the area, expand its density of its plantation and to raise the productivity of its plantation that is my job and it is my job to help that person to help Nigeria.