Concerned by the devastating extreme weather events which have mainly impacted on Agriculture, water resources, environment among other sectors, the Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL) and Nigerian Meterological Agency (NiMet), have entered a strategic partnership that would aid use of meteorological data to boost agricultural output.
NIRSAL envisions that the partnership would lead to the generation and provision of agro-meteorological weather information and other strategic services for supporting finance and investment decisions.
Under this partnership, NIRSAL will pursue strategies to downscale the Seasonal Rainfall Prediction (SRP) components like temperature, onset of rainfall and dry spells, cessation of rainfall to farmers, Aliyu Abdulhameed, Managing Director at NIRSAL said weekend at the MoU signing in Abuja.
The partnership will be an awareness campaign to guide farmers against Pre-Onset Rainfall (false-onset) and recommend risk measures in places that will experience severe dry spells, like Bauchi, Zamfara, Katsina, Kebbi, Borno and Yobe where, for instance, the dry spell is expected to last up to 10 to 21 days.
Abdulhameed also explained that NIRSAL will use platforms like town hall meetings, radio jingles and other channels of mass media to ensure the dissemination of right information to farmers to support activities in the Upstream (farming) Segment of Crop Value Chains.
NIRSAL’s Agro GeoCoops has commenced in earnest across the country and is based on the Agro Commodity Ecological Areas (ACEA) which it has identified and validated by research institutes.
According to Abdulhameed, “This platform presents an organised setting for finance, market and risk management. Agro-meteorological risk policies based on NiMet’s data can be promoted to support the insurance industry in Nigeria.
“With 16,000 Agro GeoCoops, 4 million hectares and 8 million farmers, we believe that sufficient logic is provided for NiMet to align its strategy for siting weather stations in those commodity ecological areas.”
He explained that the partnership will go further to pursuing the development of crop-specific calendars for NIRSAL’s focus commodities to provide precise information on planting, maintenance and harvesting within the ACEAs leveraging NiMet data.
He further noted that Meteorological services have always been available, but the structure required to make the most of them in the Agriculture Sector has been absent.
“Rest assured that vital weather information that come to us from your good selves at NiMet will reach the last inch of the last mile, as we say, and positively impact the upstream segment of the agricultural value chain, impact the lives of the rural poor, and upgrade rural economies,” NIRSAL MD further assured.
For Sani Abubakar Mashi, Director General/CEO, Nimet, the MoU would enhance agricultural operations through provision of agrometeorological information in Nigeria.
He said the partnership had become necessary considering that climate changes have become more obvious in recent times following observed anomalies in occurrence of extreme weather and climate events which have become more frequent and result into hazards such as flooding, droughts, heat waves, increasing temperatures.
He recalled the devastating of floods in 2012, 2017, 2018 & 2019 in Nigeria and globally which mainly impacted on Agriculture, water resources, environment among other sectors and raised concerns. “Any threat to agriculture and environment is a threat to food and nutrition security and life in general.”
He noted that “Projected impact of climate change on agricultural yields alone between 2003 and the 2080s reveals that Nigeria lies between -5 and -15 % expected production level.
“This means a mean reduction in agricultural yields, hence the projection calls for total concern.”
He assured that the NiMet-NIRSAL Partnership is therefore a perfect fit for achieving the primary mandate of promoting climate-smart agriculture in agricultural activities.
“We will provide all the necessary support to NIRSAL to reach as many farmers possible by designing and developing effective strategies for disseminating agrometeorological services to farmers leveraging on the latest technology,” Mashi stated.
“We will also develop site specific cropping calendars in line with NIRSAL’s focus commodities in the agricultural value chain across the country.
Cynthia Egboboh, Abuja
