By JIMOH BABATUNDE

The present administration has come up with the Agricultural Transformation Agenda  (ATA)  in a bid to make the nation self-sufficient in food production and agriculture a profitable business. But, with the continual drift of the young population from the rural areas to the urban centres in search of white collar jobs and away from the drudgery of manual farm labour, self sufficiency in food production is becoming a herculean task.

Seasonal shortage of food is becoming apparent as a result, despite the fact that many labourers lack the incentive or tools to perform the high quality work needed  to improve productivity. So, feeding the  increasing population cannot be done with the cutlass and hoe  or an agricultural system that relies on human muscles.

In developed countries, mechanisation  has taken over from the use of raw human power as is still the case in Nigeria.

The policy challenges of mechanisation, or lack of it, are of far reaching significance. Agricultural mechanisation, embracing the use of tools, implements, and machines for a wide range of farm operations such as land preparation, planting, harvesting, on-farm processing among others, therefore becomes desirable.

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) reckons that Nigeria is still at the early stage of agricultural mechanisation; even at that, it notes that the mechanisation of power-intensive operations has been slow.

A significantly higher proportion of farming area  is still cultivated by hand tools in Nigeria compared to other developing countries.

Statistics had it that, last year, a  total of 3,012,360 ha of land  was expected to be put under cultivation in    the Nigeria  with a tractor population  of about  40,000 with a tractorisation density of 0.1 hp/ha.  The tractorisation density of the country fell short of the recommended 1.5hp/ha by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

Dr. Ahmed Adekunle, Special Assistant to the Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Adesina Akinwumi, collaborated this by saying that Nigeria has the lowest tractorization in the world.

He said mechanization in the country right now is of the lowest in terms of density and intensity, “So currently what we are putting is like dropping a needle in the ocean, but we have to start from somewhere, even today, if they say they are giving us one million tractors, to mechanize the agriculture of this country right now we need a minimum of about 75,000 tractors. For long, the public sector has  been in control of  tractors with  little contribution from the private sector. Federal and state governments  bought tractors for farmers, but most often they ended up in the government houses as public relations tools for the government.