For some who may not know better, the Bank of Agriculture in Nigeria may have been merged to become a unit of the Central Bank of Nigeria. However, this is not the case, at least not formally. In the last four years, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has championed agriculture, perhaps more than even the Ministry of Agriculture and the Bank of Agriculture, which is responsible for extending credit to the sector.
The involvement of the CBN in agriculture may annoy finance and economic experts who expect more monetary policy directions from it. But going by interactions with some farmers, particularly in Kebbi state, Nigeria has not had a better CBN Governor than Godwin Emefiele.
Ask a farmer or finance/economics expert for their assessment of the CBN governor and the response is likely to differ. It is universally accepted that monetary policy is the primary function of the central bank. In Nigeria, however, its foray into agriculture, as much of a misplaced priority as some may view it, and as controversial as its implementation may be, it has changed the fortunes of thousands of erstwhile peasant, lowly farmers. It has transformed the standard of living of many farmers, particularly rice farmers who were interviewed in Kebbi and Ebonyi states. An almost indescribable joy radiates on their faces when they speak of how their lives have changed. The economy may be tough, the price of local rice may be unfavourable for consumers, and even not readily available for purchase, but not for these farmers, who on account of increase in local milling, now have a new story to tell.
Five years ago, an 80kg bag of paddy rice could sell for at best N4000, but as at 2017 at the peak of high prices, the same rice sold for as much as N13,000; more than a three-fold increase. Prices have reduced in recent times; the same bag now sells for about N8000, but still double the price it was before local production became incentivised. More importantly, with the improved seedlings, inputs, and knowledge support being provided under the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme, yield per hectare is also improving gradually.
In 2016, Kebbi declared that it recorded over 40,000 “rice millionaires”, following the previous planting season, a claim that attracted understandable scepticism. “When they say they have 40,000 farmers becoming millionaires, the practicality and empirical proof of what they are claiming is not there,” said Moses Nomeh, Commissioner for Agriculture and Natural Resources, Ebonyi State in an exclusive interview.
However, the arithmetic is quite simple. With the improvement in farm practices through trainings, and provision of farm inputs under the ABP, farmers reported one hectare gave an average yield of 90 bags of rice paddy on optimally performing land. The least was about 75 bags.
Cultivating only one hectare with a bag of paddy rice selling for an average price of N12,000 (at the time) implied returns of between N900,000 to N1,080,000. However, many farmers either cultivated more than one hectare or realised more than the average number of bags, conveniently hitting the million-naira mark after a planting season. It also took five months of hard work, and daily irrigation through petrol-powered water pumps during the dry season to achieve this.
Business became even more lucrative: demand for paddy rice ultimately rose as rice mills sprung up in different parts of the country. Nomeh however, also goes further to acknowledge that farmers are changing their lifestyles, and there are improvements in approach to issues because more money is coming in.
Success starts from the top: ‘Big people’ don’t want to be left out
Judges are often found in courtrooms, adorned in their robes and wigs, as lawyers (regardless of age or level) courteously address while making their case. A farm is a strange place to find ‘your honour’, tilling the soil side-by-side other peasant smallholder farmers. However, for some desirous of earning legitimate extra incomes to sustain their large families, and meet expectations of society, farming is becoming a vocation of choice.
“When I was a magistrate, the salary was too meagre. But when I complemented my work with farming, I found no difficulty in meeting my obligations,” said Abubakar Umar, who until his retirement last year was Chief Magistrate in Kebbi state. He has been a rice farmer for 32 years and also benefited from the CBN intervention programme for rice farmers which started in 2015. “I have made a lot of success, and millions out of rice farming,” he said, repeating the statement gleefully.
A father of nine children in universities, secondary, and primary schools, being able to cater to their education is his greatest pride. He has been able to provide all they require for their education “without any challenge”, as he puts it.
True success is, according to Umar, “if you can give education to your children through what you’re doing.” But educating his children is not all he has been able to achieve, “I purchased a new car and I renovated the house. I am doing well,” he said.
As Umar explained, with the existence of a lot of processing and milling companies, the pricing of paddy rice in the state has increased, enabling them to make more money from their farms. Umar no longer participates in the ABP, not because he is done with rice farming. In fact, he is increasing cultivation significantly. Retired from the bench and with a land holding estimated at 25 hectares, he can face farming fulltime. Umar is looking to expand the size of his rice farm to 100 hectares.
During a visit to Birnin Kebbi, Mohammed Suleiman Ambursa, a judge of the Kebbi state high court for 21 years, walked through his rice farm content with how the crops were developing. He farms only three crops; rice, millet, and beans. Even though he had been into rice farming before the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme (ABP) took off in 2015, its emergence has made farming more profitable, for him and other farmers, as findings revealed.
“Before the ABP, we would cultivate rice, but didn’t have buyers,” said Ambursa. “The price was so low before.”
Now with the introduction of ABP, Ambursa, beaming with excitement, said, “you can see that we now have so many rice processing companies, and they are interested in buying from farmers. So because of this, the value of rice has drastically increased.”
Over a thousand kilometres away in Abakaliki, Lawrence Adum, a US trained lecturer of mathematics at the Ebonyi State University, also proudly shows off his rice farm. Adum graduated with a first class degree in the same institution he now lectures. Afterwards he went on a scholarship for his postgraduate studies at the University of Ohio, US. Cultivating across four different parcels of land, where he rotates the crops annually, Adum says he currently produces up to 300 metric tonnes of rice every year.
He ventured into agriculture not just because of his passion for it, but also because of the fragile economy. “One cannot rely on monthly pay to survive, and I realized by going into agriculture and investing in it, it will give more than government pay at the end of the year,” he said. For him, the annual pay from engaging in farming is actually more than his salary as a civil servant.
“Even my duplex in the village, the money I used to build it did not come from my paid employment, but from the farm,” Adum said. “My children attend some of the best schools in the country, and I pay their school fees from this farm”. For him, rice farming has been more profitable than he could ever imagine, and there is no going back. All courtesy of the booming rice market due to a rapid rise in demand ensuring farmers no longer have to struggle to sell their produce.
Joseph Ununu was chairman of the Abakaliki Rice Mill Owners Industrial Association when this reporter first visited the state in 2016. This year, he was elected as a member of the Ebonyi State House of Assembly.
The elective position “does not stop me from doing agriculture,” he said, “because as far as rice cultivation has promoted me, I’m telling you I’m going to go more digital in it.”
Ununu inherited rice farming from his parents, and cultivates 29.8 hectares of land, which he plans to optimise through the use of technology.
The political office is not all that changed between the last visit to Abakaliki and the recent one. Few metres away from the Abakaliki rice mill cluster, along Ogoja road, Ununu’s new house adorns the beginning of a street, with its bright colourfully tiled walls. “This my little compound was achieved through rice cultivation,” Ununu said, trying to be modest. Without being a government official or holding any (political) position, “I thank God today through agriculture, he pushed me and carried me to another level,” he added.
For these men, and thousands of others, life has been quite good to them. Rice farming has become very profitable. Many of the new rice farmers, proudly tilling the fields are successful professionals including lawyers, accountants, as well as elected and appointed political office holders, who increasingly see rice farming as a way to legitimately earn extra income. In many cases, this extra income is becoming the major source of revenue. While most of these ‘bigger farmers’ have not been direct beneficiaries of disbursements from the ABP, they have benefited nonetheless, perhaps even more. For these new farmers, growing rice has never been more profitable as the scores of rice mills springing up in different parts of the country, mean their produce remain in high demand.
Traditional peasants have new stories to tell
On the flipside, for the smallholder farmers who have been the direct beneficiaries of the ABP, it has been a story of rising from poverty. A radical economic improvement many never would have imagined.
Yakubu Suleiman, popularly known as ‘Jariri’, in the Far Fajya area of Argungu, Kebbi state has been a rice farmer for 25 years. A father of nine children; six males and three females, he previously cultivated half a hectare, which has now increased to 1.5 hectare following the launch of the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme.
The programme according to Suleiman, equipped him with knowledge of best practices in farm management, ensured he got supply of improved seed varieties, taught him how to optimally transplant, and input administration on the farm.
“Personally, I have achieved a lot,” said Suleiman, who added one wife after the boom in his farm productivity. “Before, I could not come up with money to even pay my children’s school fees. We were only farming just to feed ourselves.” But now, farming has become a business, the methods being taught under the ABP are put to use in getting more yields apart from what was previously realised, he explained.
“I am now building a house, and bought a new vehicle. That long Kasea,” Suleiman said, describing his “new vehicle”, which as it turns out, is a motorcycle. Yet, the excitement on his face as he described his achievement was contagious. During transplanting he brings his six male children to the farm, gets them to work alongside his labourers; it is his own way of ensuring they develop a firm interest in agriculture.
Abubakar Hamza, a 42-year-old new rice farmer has only been farming for one year. He joined the ABP because he saw other farmers benefit from it, and their improved lifestyles. Hamza, who was for 10 years an electronics retailer, decided to give farming a chance.
“Rice farming has been more profitable than the ten years I sold electronics in the market,” said Hamza who has only done two rice harvests (both wet and dry season) just a year after he swapped his shop for a farm. During the last year dry season, he cultivated one hectare and harvested 95 bags of paddy rice. This year, he has doubled it. He plans to stay in rice production for the near future and does not intend to return to his electronics business, he says in Hausa.
Flawed policy, but the end may justify the means
Yusuf Gabe Argungu, head of rice farmers in Argungu local government, has been into rice farming for 32 years. He started when he was 25 years old after graduating from the Federal Polytechnic, Birnin Kebbi with a HND in banking and finance and later, a post-graduate diploma in accountancy from Usman Danfodio University, Sokoto.
As he explained, before the introduction of the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme, most farmers (in Kebbi) were producing between 40 and 60 bags of rice per hectare. However, since 2015, through trainings, seeds and other inputs provided under the ABP, farmers now get an average of 80 bags per hectare. This, for him, is a major difference in what has been observed before and after introduction of the programme.
The population of farmers in Argungu for instance has also increased, according to him, from about 336 clusters pre-2015 to 640 clusters. Each cluster has between 25 and 30 members, and using an average of 27.5, there would be around 9,240 rice farmers before 2015, and following the introduction of ABP; 17,600 farmers in Argungu alone.
“Previously, many of our farmers could not afford to buy cars or get money to marry since they had meagre to no income,” said Argungu, illustrating how the increase of farm output has affected individual lives of farmers.
But now, “those who had uncompleted houses have gone to complete it, many now have wives, buy cars, solve all our problems of school fees for our children, pay NEPA bill, and even water bill.
“If you see our farmers now, they are rich, because we consider rice as a business,” he said.
Nasir Khalif introduces himself as a politician and also a rice farmer. Standing beside his new Toyota Corolla, Khalif says he has benefitted from the ABP every year since 2015. He now cultivates about four hectares of land. Before the ABP was introduced, his sole profession was being a “politician”, but now, “with the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme, I have something (concrete) to do,” Khalif said. “Before the ABP, I was not a farmer, and I had never been to a farm,” he added.
Speaking of the gains he has made in the last four years of farming rice, he said “with this rice farming, I built my house,” adding he will probably stop only when he is old and “cannot even move.”
Mohammed Sahabi Augie, chairman, Rice Farmers Association of Nigeria (RIFAN), Kebbi state chapter, reinforced the main driver of the profitable rice business is the reduction of difficulties farmers encounter to sell in the market. In the past, “we were only producing then selling at a loss, because there was no arranged marketing system like we now have under the Anchor Borrowers’ Program,” he said.
Augie is by no means a peasant farmer, but when this reporter last visited Kebbi in 2017, he was driving a 1998/2000 Honda Hennessy car. By 2019, a Toyota Camry, 2007 model had been added to his gradually growing fleet of cars.
“I am happy you observed that,” he said, laughing when asked if the new car is one of the dividends of the growing rice business.
Not just him, but reinforcing some of Argungu’s earlier views, in different communities, some families living in mud houses are now able to use cement and good roof. Some are buying domestic animals such as cattle to keep for their economic upliftment, and some are buying vehicles; either actual cars or motorcycles.
More young people can afford to go to school, and hence there is less insecurity because many of them are now going to the farm to produce rice, Augie explained. As he analysed, if you are able to produce 50 bags of rice, you become a semi-millionaire. There are many youths below 30 years of age producing 100 bags of rice or more and with such volumes, easily cross the million naira mark in revenue. “That is why we actually have the security and a little improvement in our standard of living in Kebbi state,” he said.
Data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) actually supports this claim. The NBS in its 2017 report, “Crime Statistics: Reported Offences by Type and State”, stated that Kebbi has the lowest percentage share of total cases reported in Nigeria, with 205, which is 0.2 per cent of all cases reported throughout the country.
“We have only seen previous CBN governors on the screens, other lofty areas and (fancy) destinations but never coming to the fields to actually have direct interactions with farmers,” said a delighted Augie. For him “Emefiele is different”.
However, a nagging question remains: should the CBN governor be decking boots and touring farms? Till an answer is found, for now, tens of thousands of rice farmers across Nigeria continue to reap bountiful harvests, and find a viable market to thrive, courtesy of what may have seemed like a misplaced priority at the beginning; the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme.
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