By Leonard Okachie
A Professor of Agricultural Economics, Uzochukwu Onyebinama, has called for a census of farmers to provide the basis for their identification, characterisation and consequent inclusion as targets of agricultural interventions.
He made the call on Wednesday while delivering the 63rd Inaugural Lecture at the Michael Okpara University of Agriculture Umudike (MOUAU), Abia, entitled “Tales in Quest of Freedom from Hunger”.
Onyebinama said that the farmers’ census in Nigeria was imperative to ensure that agricultural development objectives were achieved.
The lecturer argued that the current agricultural development policies focused on a large number of rural dwellers who purported to be farmers.
He said that development resulted in limited resources being spread too thinly with minimal impact.
“Farmer identification, characterisation and classification will provide the empirical evidence for the determination of the development needs of the target farmers.
“This will ensure that agricultural development programmes do not adopt a welfare approach which leads to a misapplication of limited resources as is the case with smallholder credit schemes,” he said.
He said that technological change should be engendered through the adoption and use of process technologies, given subsistence orientation in Nigerian agriculture.
Onyebinama contended that the emphasis on agricultural research relative to national needs should be on practices, methods and techniques of production.
He urged the states to assume the responsibility to fund research on process technologies, while the cost of research on product technologies be borne by their manufacturers.
The lecturer advocated a hybrid of formal and non-formal education to improve the technical and managerial competence of the farmer.
According to him, the farmer practicing subsistence agriculture in Nigeria is the entrepreneur, the manager, the task master and the task worker, deficient in technical and managerial competence.
Onyebinama also called for a new land reform that would ensure security of tenure for farmers.
He said that the indigenous land tenure system antecedent to the land use decree(1978) constrained agricultural development by not guaranteeing security of tenure for farmers.
Onyebinama further said: “While freedom from hunger is realistic and attainable, zero hunger or an end to hunger is overambitious and unachievable not just by 2030, but going forward a mirage.”
He recommended that investments in agriculture would not just drive the transformation of food systems but were also critical to the “quest for freedom from hunger”.
In his remark, the Vice-Chancellor of MOUAU, Prof. Maduebibisi Iwe, congratulated Onyebinama, saying “You have come up, declared your knowledge from the scientific point of view and we are happy about it.”
In an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria, Iwe, whose tenure had witnessed a series of inaugural lectures, said that the reason was to give opportunities to a lot of professors coming up.
“We still have a lot of people that should have given their lectures by now, but you cannot create time when there is no time.
“We are doing everything to bridge the gap so that in future there will not be excess again,” he said.
(NAN)
