Author: The Nation

Nigeria earns over $5 million yearly from shea butter exports.The country, however, is targeting about $100 million yearly earnings from the commodity.There are increasing efforts to achieve this through the commodities exchange, DANIEL ESSIET reports.

 

THERE is an increasing demand for shea butter on the European cosmetics market, the Centre for the Promotion of Imports from developing countries(CBI) has said.

The main driver is the demand for natural and organic cosmetics on the European market. It is expected that the demand for shea butter will continue to rise in Europe.

Furthermore, the Global Market Insights Inc report said Shea Butter Market revenue is projected to cross $2.9 billion by 2025.The Middle East and African shea butter market is expected to register 10 per cent from 2019 to 2025, driven by rising dependency on African countries for shea butter exports.

According to Research andMarkets.com’s report, the global shea butter market value is projected to display a robust growth by volume during 2019-2024.

Over the years, the shea butter market has been witnessing considerable growth on the back of increasing demand for chocolate in emerging and developing nations and growing urban population.

Moreover, the rise in the demand for heathy and nutritious food and rising number of high-net-worth individuals has been driving the market of shea butter globally.

Nigeria earns over $5 million yearly from shea butter exports. The country, however, is targeting about $100 million yearly earnings from the commodity.

The Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Minister of State, Dr. Ramatu Aliyu, in a message to a recent Third Technical Meeting of the National Committee on Export Promotion held in Abuja maintained that FCT administration has chosen shea butter and handicraft under the scheme because the commodity has been identified as a high economic impact export product.

According to her, the FCT administration resolved to key into the zero-oil plan with One-State-One Product (OSOP) initiative.

Similarly, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), as part of its implementation of a 10-year Capital Market Master Plan, constituted a Technical Committee on Commodities Trading Ecosystem.

One of the recommendations of the committee was to identify commodities with good supply base in Nigeria for inclusion as a tradable commodity in the Nigeria Commodity Exchanges. Shea nut kernel is one of such commodities.

At a panel session entitled: “Trading shea nuts and shea butter in commodity exchanges in Nigeria: How to make it happen” at the Second Agribusiness Networking (AgNet) Shea Investors Forum  organised by the Nigeria Agribusiness Register in partnership with the National Shea Products Association of Nigeria (NASPAN), the modalities for including shea as a tradable commodity was examined by representatives from the nation’s commodity exchanges.

Representatives of AFEX and the Lagos Commodity & Futures Exchange said trading shea butter would provide benefits, including increasing the focus on quality and sustainability of the product from the production areas.

Also, part of the benefits of listing shea products is that it would provide access to capital from the capital market and provide the needed liquidity to enhance production and trade of the product which will provide economic benefits to rural producers and the rural economy of the producing states.

Following the submissions, NASPAN, the Agribusiness Register, the Commodity Brokers Association of Nigeria, the nation’s commodity exchanges and other stakeholders will be working in the coming months to make shea trading on the nation’s exchanges a reality.

Stakeholders said getting more women into the agricultural value chain is a pre-requisite to fulfilling the vision of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that aims to end poverty and hunger. But they face challenges, DANIEL ESSIET reports.

 

IN Nigeria, female farmers engaged in agriculture and contribute significantly to poverty reduction.

Chief Executive, Ganiyy Vogue Services, Mrs Agboola Folasade Ganiyat, quit her job at Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) to pursue her dream as a farmer who has achieved a sustainable source of livelihood.

A graduate of Zoology from the University of Jos, Plateau State, she started planting cassava in 2015 after the general elections at Osiele in Ogun State on four and half acres and yam and vegetables on three acres.

At the moment, her vegetables are on two acres, one for green vegetables and the other for water melon. She had worked almost single-handedly to achieve the right mix of farming.

The business has become her main source of income. But getting there wasn’t easy. She has had to stay strong and focused. She has worked on various farming projects but the common theme is empowerment.

Anything with the potential to raise revenue, and generate jobs would be on her radar. She is working on processing cassava into various bio-fortified products.To further the cause, she received training in entrepreneurship and good manufacturing and marketing practices.

Mrs Ganiyat speaks on the opportunity agriculture offers her.  It allows her to forge alliances outside her community.

At the moment, harvesting is going on at her vegetable farm in Mawuko in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital. But she is facing a lot of challenges moving her produce. It was tug-of-war taking her produce to lbereko market last Tuesday for sale.

Her words: “There was no vehicle to convey the items once. A motorcycle that moved thrice between the farm and the market took about 45 minutes to drive one-way trip. It’s not that easy transporting produce to end users from the farm with bad roads and no vehicle.”

For her, life as a farmer is not easy, especially for rural women, whose contributions and successes have only recently begun to receive the attention they deserve.

She noted that women farmers were facing a lot of challenges in agriculture. This is in addition to their roles as wives and mothers.

She said there was a need to support female farmers who were struggling to maintain their livelihood because of climate change, land depletion or a lack of tools and agricultural knowledge.

She said the dream of socio-economic empowerment of Nigerians would not be fully realised without empowering farmers who were living at the nation’s periphery.

According to her, female farmers are strong and resilient, and given the opportunity and adequate support, they could prove to themselves – and to the world – that they could thrive, leading and contributing in ways that benefit not only themselves and their families, but entire communities.

She believes that an investment in women is an investment in the future as it benefits not only the women themselves, but also their families and communities

Not only in Nigeria but across the world, women’s contributions to agriculture are significant.The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimated that if women had the same access to productive resources as men, they could increase yields on their farms by about 30 per cent. This could raise the agricultural output in developing countries by five per cent, which could, in turn, reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 12 to 17 per cent.

Despite their contributions, Ambassador for Food Systems, Thought for Food Foundation, Sarah Fagoyinbo, said women farmers were not adequately equipped to succeed. In fact, the odds are stacked against them.

She said women remain at a disadvantage due to their inability to access land, markets, innovation, farming knowledge, funding, education and training platforms.

She noted that an inclusive approach, all the way from policy to implementation, was essential to bring women working in agriculture into the mainstream and to empower them with direct access to knowledge of improved agricultural practices.

She added: “I am not satisfied with the level of integration of women into the agricultural value chain. But I know there is a room for improvement.

“My recommendations to improve the situation is for the government to replicate what FAO has been doing to support women farmers in any other parts of the world. The first is the improvement of capacities of women farmers in agrifood value chain, through training, special support for market orientated production, value addition. Of course enterprise development, business-to-business networking, financial empowerment.

“Secondly, special institutions should be supported to promote gender sensitive value chain. These include managing gender gaps and making available such services to women in agro food sector. It can be done via advocacy workshops, targeted at policy and decision making groups, mostly find in Ministries of Agriculture.There should be training of trainers targeted at the National Extension Service officers.

“Thirdly, making knowledge and product tools available.”

The Chief Executive, Yoda Express Nigeria Limited, Mrs Yetunde Adamu, canvassed the promotion of gender transformative approaches, saying this not only improves the value chain, but also the well-being of women and their families. However, she observed that the standard approaches to addressing women’s economic empowerment in agriculture were not sufficient, adding that more needs to be done to achieve lasting benefits to improve the quality of life for women and their families.

Mrs Adamu said she was interested in any programme that would integrate more women into the agricultural value chain.

“In Ekiti State, there are more women and young men in farming. If more women are given all the tools needed, we will do more than we are already doing. A lot of women are in garri production. If you give them more materials such as fertiliser, and all that, we will do better. We need people that will be taking the products from us. If I am producing like 10 tonnes of garri, and cassava flex yearly, I need to know somebody that will take them off me, so I can get my money back.

“If I am able to do that, I can pull in more women to do the programme with me. Even if it is planting of sweet potatoes or ground nuts, there are more women that can do that. There is the need to provide more security for women in the farms because a lot of them are being assaulted by strangers and female members. We have issues with access roads to the farms and irrigation during the dry season,” Mrs Adamu said, adding: “It could be a game-changer to bring more women to agriculture.”

For Senior Programme Officer, Justice Development and Peace Commission, Florence Bassey, believes it has become clear on need to rethink all aspects of the food system to favour women.

She said women farmers need the right tools to succeed – and that requires the government to re-orient food systems so that female farmers were given opportunities to thrive, and to be fairly rewarded for the work they do.

According to her, women farmers perform most of the big farming jobs, from sowing to harvesting, yet their access to resources is less than their male counterparts.

She noted that the voices of women farmers needed to be heard at the policy and implementation levels if the government is to realise the dream of a progressive Nigeria.

Farmers and food producers have been complaining that many government agaencies are not patronising them enough. Experts say expanding the public procurement system will not only encourage agricultural productivity but also reduce poverty and help to meet the goal of food security, DANIEL ESSIET reports.

 

THE Chief Executive, Thy Consulting Limited, Ismail Abdulazeez, is one farmer whose life has improved, thanks to his discovering of the hidden fortunes in agriculture.

As a child, he had a passion for agriculture, having been involved in subsistence farming with his parents. He developed so much interest in the occupation that he had vowed that he would be a big farmer.

Having suffered several misfortunes, including the loss of his job, Abdulazeez retired to his village Ewupe Ijaniye, Sango Ota, Ogun State. Incidentally, it was at that point that the journey to his dream job of being a big time farmer started to materialise. His success story has proved that young agro entrepreneurs can make it.

For him, government procurement of food is an appropriate policy to foster agricultural development and support small farmers.

Abdulazeez believes a lot of farmers will be successful, if the government supports them through its public procurement programmes. According to him, the approach to sustainable procurement is too limited, as it does not consider farmers and food producers. Therefore, Nigeria needs a public procurement system that will encourage farmers in produce trade and commerce.

An effective market intervention, through a public procurement system, he noted, would help keep prices under check and boost food security.  The Executive Director of Development Dynamics, an Owerri-based non-governmental Organisation (NGO), Dr. Jude Ohanele, described public procurement as a tool for sustainable development if the government decides to increase strategic spending on goods and services to drive agricultural development ambitions.

Ohanele is among food production advocates who see an increase in public food purchasing, having a correlated increase in farmland  by enticing more producers at the  local levels expanding their operations.

He said his organisation, in partnership with Rotary Club, distributed pro-vitamin maize seeds to farmers to improve food security.

Impressed with the impact of the exercise, Ohanele wondered how far such programmes would go on the fortunes of farmers nationwide if the government drives it using the public procurement system.

According to him, integrating agricultural growth in public procurement policy is a good strategy for boosting food production, and the sector requires a relatively well-functioning government system to meet surging national demand for food.

He added that he supports a public food procurement system that aims to provide a market channel to smallholder farmers by removing key barriers to entry.

For farmers to benefit from the system, Ohanele proffered that that public spending must be transparent, traceable and accountable and the authorities seen as useful partners to ensure that procurement remains as competitive as possible.

The Chief Executive, Multimix Academy, Dr. Obiora Madu, said public procurement could be used to serve several development goals, including agricultural and industrial growth.

To favour small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in agriculture, Madu said the government could create more contract requirements that give them preferential access to public procurement markets.

Madu said small businesses in the food industry tapping the public procurement opportunities would provide a springboard for advancements in economic inclusion and market participation.

According to him, Nigeria needs a dynamic procurement policy that links public food procurement to domestic food production that can used to encourage the development of SMEs.

Such strategies, according to him, would spark investments in social and economic developments as well as poverty reduction.

He said a public procurement system that supports agro exporters will help raise incomes for farmers.

Without the government support, he maintained that the business of agriculture was not sustainable. Madu explained that the idea was not that the government had to buy everything. But rather that farmers needed some support to come up to some minimum level of payment.

An expert reacts

A former Dean,  Faculty of Agriculture, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State, Prof  Emmanuel Babafunso Sonaiya‘s research is centered on sustainable smallholder poultry production for poverty alleviation, income generation and community development.

He said a push for expanding the public procurement system would help the country meet its food security goal.

He explains: “Agriculture can be supported by providing input to farmers, either at regulated prices, subsided or free. It can also be supported by the purchase of the produce of farmers, which can be used for strategic grains or food reserves.These two aspects lend themselves very well to a public procurement system. A public procurement system can be used to support farmers with input, seeds, and fertiliser. Services such as tractorisation, and irrigation can be supplied through a public procurement system as a support for farmers. The same thing can be done for livestock farmers, particularly poultry farmers in the procurement of maize, soybeans, vitamins and minerals.”

Under a country-wide procurement system, the government purchases crops from farmers at a pre-set value, known as the minimum support price (MSP).The MSP is designed to guarantee farmers’ incomes and encourage the cultivation of certain crops for dietary and sufficiency reasons, the don said.

Across the world countries have been using public food procurement as a strategy to promote smallholder market participation and strengthen rural livelihoods. Also, the there is  interest among international institutions in using public food purchases to promote the integration of smallholders into markets and strengthen rural livelihoods.

During the outbreak of COVID-19 last year, public procurement was  adopted by many countries to tackle the crisis.

The crisis forced governments to find new, innovative approaches to engage farmers in purchasing food products that were later distributed to citizens. In recent years, studies have shown that international institutions deploying public food procurement initiatives to generate positive synergies between smallholder livelihoods and food security and nutrition.

Sustainable public food procurement in Africa

Participants at the Africa Regional Workshop on Designing and Implementing Sustainable Public Food Procurement for Home Grown School Meals Programmes (HGSF) in November 2019 at the African Union Commission (AUC) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia called on governments to enact legal frameworks and increase national investments to foster sustainable public food procurements for home-grown school feeding initiatives.

Participants were drawn from the Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Education, Public Procurement Authorities, and Ministry of Social Protection in Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon and Nigeria, among others.

In her opening statement, presented by Dr Laila Lokosang, the Adviser of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), AUC Commissioner for Rural Economy and Agriculture, Josefa Leonel Correia Sacko said HGSF was embedded in the African Union Programmes, targeting hunger and malnutrition, local production and human capital investments.

“The African Union Commission considers HGSF as a key component in the implementation of the Continental Education Strategy (2016-2025), which aims at ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all, “ Ms. Sacko said.

Highlighting the collaboration  among FAO, the World Food Programme (WFP) and the AUC in promoting school feeding programmes in Africa, FAO Sub-regional Coordinator for Eastern Africa and Representative to the African Union and United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, David Phiri, noted that the engagement was the sign of the strong commitment these institutions had forged to achieve multiple goals by linking school feeding to smallholder farmers.

“Building the linkage between school feeding programmes and local smallholder farmers is an innovative approach to provide schoolchildren with food that is safe, nutritious and local, opening up an uninterrupted market for local farmers, leading to higher production and productivity. With all its expertise in food security, procurement, logistics, and school feeding, FAO will continue to work with governments and partners to develop national policies and strategies for HGSF programmes,” Phiri assured.

According to WFP, 66 million primary school age children go hungry daily, with 23 million of them in Africa alone.

Also, 75 million school-age children (55 percent of them girls) do not attend school, with over 35 million (47 percent) of them living in sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, the need to reduce hunger while increasing school enrolment in these children is evident, and school feeding programmes have been developed to target these multifaceted problems.

As in many countries, the Schools Feeding Programme prioritises farmers’ participation. Unfortunately, the programme has left them vulnerable to the impacts of massive cuts in funding in recent years.

Experts see the potential for public spending on school feeding providing nutritious meals to school children as well as a source of income for smallholder farmers.

Schools Feeding Programme as a procurement policy

The founder/Chief Executive, JMSF Agribusiness Nigeria, Richard Ogundele, noted that public procurement and trade policies help to scale up their food production.

Ogundele, a former Group Intervention Manager, Department for International Development’s (DFID) Growth and Employment in States (GEMS), believes the Schools Feeding Programme, which a certain percent is produced by local farmers has helped to reduce hunger and create rural jobs.

He said public purchasing from local producers adds value to local markets by integrating small-scale farmers.

The National President, Poultry Association of Nigeria, Ezekiel Ibrahim, believes the school feeding programme can promote agricultural production and improve livelihoods and nutrition.