Hard hit by climate change, farmers in Nigeria’s ‘food basket’ face new foes

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That the earth gave him back roughly the same size of what he planted in it eight months earlier, whereas yam farmers in other states were seeing significantly bigger yields, is not an ordeal the former civil servant is battling alone.

Gwer East has a bad name for burning forest trees for charcoal and clearing rainforests for timber production and arable farming purposes, practices that make its land defenceless against desertification. It has put the state, reputed to be Nigeria’s food basket on account of its production of major agricultural commodities, in danger of losing the glory.

“Droughts, soil erosion, famines, pest attacks, and poor crop yields seriously threaten food security. This has been the case in Benue State,” Comfort Sheidu and Hosea Olayiwola Patrick affirmed in their paper titled Climate Change and Open Grazing impact on Agricultural Production in Benue State, Nigeria.

“Farmers find it difficult to acquire pumps and the government has actually not provided them,” Mr Saaku said. In some cases, farmers have had to relinquish their lands as the conflict spirals into bloody clashes.Nigerian banks don’t warm to lending to the agriculture sector, which makes recourse to commercial credit difficult for smallholders seeking loans to purchase basic irrigation machinery.

A 50-kilogramme bag of inorganic fertiliser, sold for N5,500 in some places in Nigeria in 2016, climbed to N25,000 last August, according to a PREMIUM TIMESAmong organic fertilisers, ash is having its moment in other states beyond Benue in Nigeria’s Middle Belt like neighbouring Plateau State, where Akin Aderounmu runs a bakery owned by his dad in the outskirts of Jos called Bukuru.

“When the weather is cold, you know Jos is very, very cold, it helps us to charge the soil, to make it warm,” he said. The ash type generated from burnt compost and refuse is used by him as fertiliser. To tackle credit shortage, the state’s smallholders are turning to middlemen, whose core relationship with farmers normally would have revolved around the supply chain role of linking them to markets, where traders buy their produce, then resell to end-users.

Source: Energy Industry News (energyindustrynews.net)

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