‘Provision of long-term credit will attract youths to oil palm farming’

Uchenna osuagu is a young farmer, who has an oil palm plantation. Osuagu in this interview tells JOSEPHINE OKOJIE that youth would only find oil palm farming attractive when they can access long-term agro credit.

What inspired you into farming?

I was a teacher before I ventured into agriculture. I wasn’t really getting satisfaction in monetary terms while teaching so I wanted to try something else and since I had a palm plantation I inherited from my parents and everybody is talking about agriculture now, I decided to go into farming. I have a plantation and I process palm kernels into oil.

Why are youths not finding agriculture attractive and what can the government do to ensure youths take up agric as a profession?

The youth have not seen anything thing on ground that would attract them into agriculture. Farmers in the rural areas engaged in agriculture are very poor because most of them do not get any value addition since the whole primary production is still entangled in poverty with the issue of low productivity and high time spent on farmlands. This makes youth not to take agriculture as a profession even those that study courses on agriculture.

The crude way of farming in the country is another reason why youths do not find agriculture attractive. Government must develop mechanisation and give the youths access to lands with this agriculture becomes attractive for youths. We need innovation to do farming differently from the older generation of farmers who were mostly entangled in poverty.

Government must give assistance to finance and land. A lot of youths want to go into farming but lack the capital to venture into it. The government need to assist the youths with finance to establish and grow their businesses.

Youth need mechanisation, innovative ways to do agriculture, finance, infrastructure and a guaranteed market for their produce.

What is the major challenges oil palm farmer’s experience?

The investment for palm trees is very huge. That is why farmers are not replacing old trees with new hybrid seeds. The government need to provide long term finance for oil palm farmers at single digit interest rate and also for the procurements of processing machines. Smallholder farmers produce 80 percent of the country’s palm oil needs but lost about 50 percent during processing owing to manual methods of processing. But with access to long term finance farmers can purchase mini processing machines for processing. Processing is where the money is but with the crude methods farmers’ livelihoods would not be positively affected. Apart from inadequate access to finance, market access is another major challenge farmers’ face.

The federal government is talking about diversification. How can agriculture play a leading role?

Government must take a desired effort to revolutionised agriculture, without it, the sector cannot earn the much needed foreign exchange for the country through export of agric commodities. If the government just sit down and keep talking without addressing the structural problems, then the sector will not play the leading role.

The government need to dialogue with the private sector to find ways on how to mechanized the rural farmers, how to improve high yield inputs, how to improve fertilizers, how best farmers can harvest, how to guarantee economic value to primary producers, and guaranteed market for agricultural produce. We have been talking about diversification through agriculture for a very long time but nothing to show for it.