By Salisu Na’inna Dambatta
Sir: President Muhammadu Buhari has laudably approved the establishment of one Integrated Farm Estate (IFE) in each of the 109 senatorial districts in the country. The IFE is the equivalent of the defunct farm settlements initiated in the late 1950s during the colonial era and completed by the three regional governments early in the 1960s.
The directive by the president to the Nigerian Agricultural Land Development Authority (NALDA) to establish the farm estate is yet another bold move by the APC-led administration to enhance our national food security and nutrition.
NALDA) which has the mandate of establishing the estates nationwide has already established the first one in Katsina State. The model farm estate in Sujudu has a school, a clinic and 120 units of one-bedroom houses to accommodate farm households that are permanently resident and working on the farm estate. This implies that larger IFEs will have more housing units, bigger clinics and schools with more classrooms to cater for the children of farm workers, extension services providers and marketers, among others.
Although some commentators may rate the farm estate in Sujudu village in Daura Emirate, Katsina State, as relatively small at 100 acres, it is, nevertheless significant as a model of the concept in practice. It is segmented into different portions for varied agricultural activities: a corner is devoted to crop production while another part for livestock with equipment for processing and the packaging of end products like beef and mutton, milk, fish and poultry products. Thus, the small 100-acre IFE in Sujudu has presented a picture of how the full-scale, 1,000 hectares or larger version of the IFE should be.
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Indeed, by the time the IFEs of 1,000 hectares or larger are established, each would have a capacity to engage a population which can be equivalent to that of a medium-sized town in all-season crop production. In this regard, it may be useful for NALDA to set some hectares aside in each of the 109 IFEs to plant trees or horticultural crops for fruits like citrus, guava, pineapple, banana, date palm, mangoes, pawpaw and vegetables that can improve fruits intakes among Nigerians.
The IFEs can surely contribute to reducing the rate and extent of malnutrition in Nigeria which UNICEF said is caused by many underlying factors including, “poverty, inadequate food production, inadequate food intake, ignorance and uneven distribution of food, poor food preservation techniques, improper preparation of foods, food restrictions and taboos, and poor sanitation.”
If NALDA achieves its ambitions of implementing the 109 IFEs project and its goal “to attract, encourage and empower 1000 farmers from each of the 774 LGAs in Nigeria annually, cutting across the entire agricultural value chain”, it would have written its name boldly in gold.
- Salisu Na’inna Dambatta,
<rabotati002@gmail.com>
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