CADP seeks alternative energy supply for farmers, agro processors

Due to the erratic electricity supply from the national grid, the World Bank Assisted Commercial Agriculture Development Project (CADP) has begun exploring alternative energy sources for regular electricity supply to farms, and agro-processing sites.

This was announced at the ongoing eighth World Bank/Federal Government of Nigeria supervision mission of CADP that kicked off in Lagos a few days ago.

Olajide Bashorun, permanent secretary, Lagos State Ministry of Agriculture and Co-operatives, urged the stakeholders to generate and share ideas towards actualising the project’s objective, saying “I want to particularly task the restructuring team to be objective and work diligently.”

He noted that the state government had been very supportive of the implementation of the project by prompt release of the counterpart fund from inception till date as well as deployment of dedicated and resourceful staff to the project.

Each of the participating state in the project is expected to provide counterpart funding to this project, which is funded by the World Bank with guarantee by the Federal Government of Nigeria. The five-year project, which commenced in 2009, is aimed at strengthening agricultural production systems in each of the participating state and facilitating access to inputs, credit and market for targeted value chains and small and medium commercial farmers. The participating states are Lagos, Enugu, Cross River, Kaduna and Kano.

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Lucas Akapa, the task team leader of this World Bank Assisted project, explained that the supervision mission, which is held regularly, comprised two components – supervision and restructuring, so the project could perform better. “The project has been at a moderate satisfactory level for some time, so we want to make it perform better. When it was designed, we envisaged that we were going to bring in the energy component because we cannot have agricultural development without energy component but with electricity supply from the national grid, it has been difficult to connect farms to electricity. So, we are looking at alternative electricity sources such as hydro in states where this is possible, and from wastes such as use of palm kernel in Cross River, use of rice husks in Kano. We do not know yet for certain whether these would be successful, but we need to examine them and find out,” he explained.

Amin Babandi, the national project co-ordinator of CADP, divided the stakeholders into groups to examine implementation progress for each of the participating states, and different aspects of the restructuring exercise. He urged them to do things right, as the project had just one more year to go and there were still funds lying idle that must be deployed for productive purposes.

Kehinde Ogunyinka, the Lagos State project co-ordinator, said the “project is aimed at ensuring that small and medium scale farmers and other investors in each of the participating state along the specified value chains have the needed support to expand their production. In Lagos, farmers and all other businesses involved in aquaculture, chicken and rice production can access the support, which is in grants as well as infrastructure support and market facilitation.”