Dr Adiya Ode is the Country Representative and Political Director of Propcom+, a £95m UK-funded climate-resilient agriculture and forestry programme in Nigeria.
In this interview with NewsNGR’s Nneka ASOGWA, Ode explains why Nigeria continues to lose an estimated 2 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) annually to avoidable post-harvest losses.
She discusses the interventions needed to improve storage, reduce losses and attract more investment into the country’s agricultural value chains. Excerpts…
Nigeria Loses Billions Of Naira In Post-Harvest Crop Losses Yearly. What Practical Measures Can Reduce These Losses, Improve Farmers’ Incomes And Strengthen The Food Supply Chain?
Post-harvest losses are really a challenge to the Nigerian farmer. If you look at that, the challenge is avoidable. That’s the tragedy of the whole thing. Just like you found out, it’s costing Nigeria quite a lot. So, it’s not just the personal cost to the farmer, it’s the cost to the economy.
I’m sure you would have seen that about 2 per cent of Nigeria’s GDP is lost every year as a result of post-harvest losses, and it’s avoidable.
So, you asked what we can do. Let’s look at the sources of the losses. A farmer produces, then he has to evacuate his produce to the market. He gets to the market. The market is an exchange venue, and it doesn’t happen automatically.
Sometimes you are able to exchange, sometimes you have to wait a while before you exchange. So, the farmer has to keep his produce there. Then whoever goes to buy it at the market also has to transport what he has bought from the market to wherever he’s going, to another market, to a processing facility, or to the ports, as it were.
So, at every stage of this chain, there are losses, and there are market failures that have caused those losses.
The farmer produces. How does he evacuate his produce? How does he aggregate his produce? If it’s a farmer farming 0.5 hectares, he probably doesn’t have a car, doesn’t have a vehicle, or doesn’t have a truck. He has to wait and pay for transportation. A lot of times, he’s waiting to sell before he can pay for transportation.
So, evacuation of the produce from the farm is a challenge, and that challenge can be addressed.
One of the things we have been doing is working with aggregators. These are buyers who pull together the produce from many different farmers.
A lot of times, they go to the farm gates, so they are saving the farmer that extra headache of transporting his goods. They also usually have their own transportation vehicles, so they are able to pull this together and promptly evacuate the produce from the farm. That way, the farmer avoids sitting on produce on the farm and having it go to waste.
But even if the aggregator gets the produce together, the roads that he will pass through do not exist. Our rural roads are atrocious. Any vehicle that is put on a rural road, I haven’t done the research, I don’t know if you have, but I don’t think that vehicle can last three years because of the state of the roads and the wear and tear, the suffering it has to go through.
So that is a challenge. If we can invest in our rural roads, and for this I’m speaking to the government, because rural infrastructure is a public good and it’s something that the government should invest in.
I know in the past we used to have DFRRI − Directorates of Food Roads and Rural Infrastructure. We still have an agency that deals with this. If we are really interested in reducing post-harvest losses, we have to address the issue of rural roads so that farmers can evacuate their produce.
We also have the issue of transport infrastructure, like vehicles. Here, I think the private sector can be encouraged to come in and be given incentives to invest in transportation so that produce can be evacuated.
One of the things we have done over the past two years is invest in solar electric vehicles.
We’ve supported some women cooperatives to purchase electric trucks and electric tricycles, which the women run themselves. They drive them and are able to evacuate their produce and other farmers’ produce to the market.
Because the vehicles are not so big, they don’t have to wait for them to fill up, and they’re also able to manage them themselves. It really works, and we’re really proud of them. They’re working in Kano, and I hope that this can be copied and scaled up.
Apart From Transportation And Rural Roads, What Other Factors Contribute To Post-Harvest Losses In The Value Chain?
Something else is, we talk about taxes, we talk about the ease of transportation, we talk about the security of goods in transit. In the past, you had to pass through so many checkpoints and pay all sorts of taxes to be able to pass through, and deal with all sorts of agencies.
I know the tax reform earlier in the year was aimed at harmonising some of these taxes to reduce the onerous burden on transporters, as well as other people. I hope that they would resolve this because every state that you pass through, you have to pay taxes.
Every local government, you pay taxes. There are customs agents, there are all sorts of agencies on the road. Each point is a delay.
When you also think about the fact that they have to do security checks, which I don’t quarrel with, this increases the time spent on the road, leading to the produce deteriorating. The aggregator or the transporter, whoever it is, loses.
You also don’t really have a lot of access to insurance. I’m not even sure there is good transit insurance for agricultural produce. So, that is also a challenge. You come to Kano and you see loads and loads of rotten oranges, for instance. So that’s a loss as well.
The other thing is the cold chain. If we don’t have sufficient access to cold-chain for storage, you come to the market and you see perishable produce just sitting there. Of course, it’s going to go bad.
This also brings me, and I’m glad that you cover health, because it also brings us to what desperate traders do to preserve their produce. It’s impacting you and me. It’s impacting the public. We see so many cases of liver and kidney issues.
But I don’t know the extent to which NAFDAC and other regulatory authorities are supervising or inspecting to see what people are using.
I bought some garden eggs over the weekend from the market and they were really fresh. I was looking forward to eating them, but by the next day, they were black. I wondered, “How did this miracle happen?” But because they were not sprayed again the next morning with whatever chemical had been used to keep them looking fresh. These are some of the problems that we are having.
Again, cold storage, maintaining the cold chain, is absolutely important. When you bring produce to places of exchange, you have to keep it fresh.
You also have produce such as grains that must be preserved. When you see Dawanau Market in Kano, with miles and miles of warehouses, I always wonder what’s going on there. What are the rodents doing there? Because it’s like a rodent heaven.
If we can have good preservation techniques, tools and storage facilities that keep out pests and maintain grains and other produce in good condition, then we will reduce losses. We will also reduce the desperate measures people take to preserve their produce.
Policy is of course is very necessary. I talked about incentivising the private sector to invest. This is important. Implementation of policies and regulations around food safety is a companion to food preservation. You can’t do one without the other.
Processing is also very important. Especially now that Nigeria is coming into its own, we really have to move beyond the sale and export of primary produce. The sooner we can process our harvest, the longer we can preserve it.
