Aisha Ali pressed through a tall field of maize. Her turban,
bright flowing dress, soft shawl and careful makeup looked a little out of
place on this farm.
Her farm.
In northern Nigeria, most farmers are uneducated men who
plant and harvest to survive and get little respect from urban folk. Ali grew
up in Kano, the country’s second-largest city, and graduated from college with
a degree in microbiology.
“When I tell people I’m farming, they say, ‘Really? After
graduating?’” she said.
Ali also has a part-time office job to raise extra money,
but her career choice is part of an effort by a local nonprofit to create a new
class of young, educated commercial farmers — and in turn change the image of
farming and eventually boost agricultural production in a country unable to
feed itself.
Nigeria, like much of Africa, imports a great deal of its
food. That has made it particularly vulnerable to economic slumps, including
the current recession caused by a decline in the price of oil, its main source
of income.
With only 40% of the country’s arable land under
cultivation, the obvious solution is to grow more food. Nigerian President
Muhammadu Buhari recently urged citizens to do just that.
“It’s time to go back to the land,” he said. “We must face
the reality that the petroleum we had depended on for so long will no longer
suffice.”
But in Nigeria and across the continent, farming is highly
inefficient. It takes place on small plots, with each family focused on trying
to feed itself, planting and weeding by hand. Production suffers from a
shortage of tractors and fertilizer that results in yields that lag far behind
the global average.
For those farms that do produce a surplus, bad roads make it
difficult to transport crops to market. Better seeds and fertilizers are
pointless if there is no way to sell extra food.
The United Nations says that improving farming techniques
and yields is the only way to achieve its Sustainable Development Goals of
eradicating poverty and hunger by 2030. The good news is that there is wide
room for improvement, with farm productivity in Africa at just 40% of its
potential.
While the U.N. has focused on improving the lot of
subsistence farmers, the program that Ali joined approaches farming as a
commercial venture.
The nonprofit Co-Agri is training 150 college graduates who
live in Kano and had little or no farming experience. Each receives 2½ acres,
an experienced mentor and training in selection of seeds, fertilizers, weed
killers and farm machinery.
“Local farmers are farming for food. They’re not commercial
farmers,” said the group’s research director, Adam Salihu. “So we are trying to
commercialize farming with our graduates. We are introducing them to
mechanization, unlike the local farmers.”
Efforts to mechanize and commercialize farming in Nigeria go
back more than 40 years. Many projects have sunk. State governments cleared
land and brought in seed and fertilizers after 2000, only to see people sell
them, instead of farming.
“If the government cared, and gave us some support, maybe
some of us could have been large-scale farmers by now,” said Ismail Yusuf, a
subsistence farmer here in Yarkawo, south of Kano, who also drives a motorcycle
taxi.
Civil servants, government officials and city businessmen
have shown up at times to start up farms as part-time ventures. They usually
fail.
To some of the local managers they hired, the city investors
were wawa, or fools — easy prey for scams such as overcharging and stealing a
share of the harvest.
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