Nigeria losing $362.5m annually to the ban on beans export – ActionAid

Azubike Nwokoye, who is the food and agriculture, programme manager for ActionAid Nigeria, has said Nigeria loses about $362.5m yearly in terms of foreign exchange to the ban on the exportation of beans in the last eight years.

Nwokoye stated this in his presentation entitled ‘Opportunities and Challenges for Agroecology and what should be advocacy for different stakeholder’ at a workshop with stakeholders organized by the Heinrich Boll Foundation Abuja in partnership with Action Aid Nigeria, Alliance for Action on Pesticides in Nigeria (AAPN) and the Organic and Agroecology Initiative (ORAIN) which was held in Abuja.

According to Azubuke Nwokoye, “Nigeria loses about $362.5m yearly in terms of foreign exchange to the ban on the exportation of beans in the last eight years”.

He however said, “Agroecology is capable of minimizing future widespread disruptions of our food supplies by pandemics and climate change, by enhancing linkages between small-scale food production and local production”.

Listing the advocacies for different stakeholders, Nwokoye said, “Nigeria needs a national Agroecology strategy to be domiciled in the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security for coordination and scale up of Agroecology programmes in Nigeria.” He urged the need for a national framework for Indigenous plants, seeds, seedlings and livestock for agro biodiversity preservation and promotion.

He also called for a reintroduction of the Growth Enhancement Scheme (GES) and urged for an increased budget to address the input gaps experienced by small-holder farmers, especially women, and young people.

Nwokoye further called on the Federal and State Governments to urgently start the preservation of Nigeria’s Indigenous seeds, seedlings and Livestock for Agrobiodiversity and called on the federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security to begin to develop policies and legislation that ensure that the most toxic pesticides are prohibited.

He listed opportunities in Agroecology to include diversification of livelihoods, increased income of smallholder farmers, food and nutrition security as well as food security among others.

Speaking exclusively to BusinessDay, Donald Ike Nnaufwebu, the program manager for Sustainable Nigeria and also the Co-coordinator of Alliance for Action on Pesticide in Nigeria said organic agriculture could be a solution to the current reality because organic agriculture and agroecology do not need much to grow food.

“We know lots of farms that are doing organic and agroecology here in Abuja, and we have lots of testaments about the yield. We also know a lot of organizations that have been doing a lot of organic farm practices. These are from small communities down to large-scale farmers, and a lot of them are turning in their profits because the market is there, the demand is there, and the whole world is more conscious. A lot of Nigerians are conscious about what we eat right now. So, it’s big business for everyone, and the numbers are thrilling”.

He added, “Planting organic agriculture could be at any scale. A lot of home gardening programs, a lot of school programs, a lot of community farming, a lot of them, you can do them without actually applying a lot of chemicals and pesticides and the rest of them. These methods are there, it’s a question of how do we expand knowledge.

So, we encourage a lot of people to grow something. And to grow these things, you don’t need to spend so much money buying chemicals, you don’t need to spend so much money trying to get people to clear large patterns of land. So, our future and our demography as Nigeria, a lot of smallholder farmers, a lot of subsistence farmers, they are also good. So, while we’re promoting large-scale commercial agriculture and the rest of them, we need to also see the advantages and beauty of subsistence farming and a lot of smallholder farmers doing their own thing.