Awakened to the realities occasioned by the abandonment of massive agricultural production that was once the country’s economic mainstay, Nigeria is fast making giant strides in agriculture following a new focus on the sector. That focus, which is in line with the drive of the country’s Ministry of Agriculture to re-position the rich but hitherto abandoned sector, has seen the provision of the needed boost for the revival of the sector in an economy that was once dependent on agriculture but which has concentrated on oil since the boom of the 1970s and paid a price as a result. Below, are excerpts of an interview with the coordinating director, Nigerian Agricultural Quarantine Service Dr. Mike Nwaneri, who explained the role of his agency in the country’s new focus on agriculture. Included, are the views of other NAQS’s officials and that of a farmer and exporter who like many farmers, are beneficiaries of the new focus aimed at boosting productivity and earnings from agriculture:
Top and below: Flourishing vegetable farms all good examples of the new push
Minister of Agriculture, Adesina…behind the new focus on agriculture.
Dr Nwaneri, Co-ordinating Director, NAQS speaks:
“The Nigerian Agricultural Quarantine Service (NAQS) has the primary mandate of keeping away from Nigeria exotic pests and diseases of plants, animals and aquatic resources. We are interested in all agricultural products coming into this country to ensure that they do not bring with them the possibility of introducing pests and diseases into Nigeria’s agricultural economy.
We make very huge efforts, like the Honourable Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina is making, to grow agriculture, and to create wealth one pest or disease is sufficient to destroy ten years of labour. So, the prevention of diseases and pests in agriculture becomes a major issue in terms of our goals of achieving food security and creating wealth for farmers.
Agricultural Quarantine focuses on two broad areas: one – safe importation to ensure that whatever we import from outside is safe. It also focuses on import-export trade facilitation. When you ask people to submit their materials destined for export, for inspection, screening and certification, they look at it as a means of delaying their business.
Sometimes they also look at it as a means of introducing bottleneck to their business transaction. On the contrary, what it is, is that, no country in the world wants you to bring into their own domain any pest and diseases from your country into their environment. To that extent, they will do everything possible to ensure that unless an item of agricultural products is properly screened and given the necessary certification that it is pest and disease-free, they will not let it enter.
It is only when you have that kind of certification that you are now sure that you have made the market. To that extent, it is that certificate that actually facilitates your penetration of agricultural market outside your own shores. That is why I say ours is to facilitate. Talking to you about these vegetable exporters we are zeroing in on today, for several years, they have tried to sell their vegetables outside the shores of Nigeria. Each time they have tried, their vegetable was seized and destroyed at their own costs. Sometimes they are re-shipped to Nigeria because the European Union to which they sell the vegetables today were not sure that these items will not cause domestic harm.
When NAQS observed that this was what was going on, they were invited to be formed into cooperatives, into groups of farmers or associations. The idea was resisted by them. They thought they did not need to form a group to do this. The focus of our agency is that you needed to get people together so that they can work in an environment which will subject itself to a measure of supervision by our own scientists.
The idea of supervision is that, from the farm, we do not introduce what will make the vegetables unsafe by way of diseases, wrong use of pesticides, fertiliser or any other materials that can eventually form residues or constitute a food safety problem. You needed a common environment; first of all the environment will be under our observation, to ensure that it is a safe environment to do that kind of farming. Secondly the farmers will be under our guidance to ensure that their cultural practices are right.
“In doing these, we do not stop with what they do on the farms. When the products are ready for harvesting, we are also interested. And we ensure that samples of what they are harvesting are taken to our laboratory first of all, and screened and are clean and given a clean bill of health before they go for packaging. Our own operatives too, located at the NAHCO shed, close to the airport, help them to do the sorting, supervise packaging and help them to move the items into the aircraft.
I have to talk a bit about packaging. Before you can sell abroad, you will need specified standards. The standards go from the quality of product, the quality of the packaging and the quality of the certification. The product quality you can guarantee by the process I have described. Ensuring that we guide them through the process; ensuring that our scientists also guide them through the use of farm inputs, pesticides and chemicals. We ensure we have a quality control by taking it to our laboratory.
After that, there is also certification about packaging. There are specific kinds of packages in which these products will be allowed into the foreign market. We help them to develop those packages and we help them to do the actual packaging so that when it gets to the destination it is not found wanting in that regard.
Globally speaking, certification is done. And in the area of ensuring freedom from pests and diseases, there is the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) that is the global body that regulates issues of pest and diseases of plants globally. Nigeria is a signatory to that convention. The NAQS houses Nigeria’s plant protection organisation designated by the IPPC. The IPPC designates an organisation in every nation that serves as that nation’s protection organisation. For Nigeria, that organisation is the NAQS.
The certificate they recognise globally, of freedom from pests and diseases of plant, coming from Nigeria, is the phytosanitary certificate issued by the NAQS. Sometimes we do not do well in the export market because we don’t seem to understand very well the processes involved. Our people sometimes get confused about who to meet, what they need, where to go and how to do things to be able to meet the requirements of export markets.
For those who are in the vegetable production business who have subjected themselves to the guidance of the NAQS, they are very happy today. From the exporters themselves, we are told they make about $280,000 monthly from the export of leafy vegetables alone. The market is yearning for more out there. A few of these exporters met me in my office in May this year and they are saying they needed more produce from this country.
For a country of the size of Nigeria, what is happening is only a drop in the ocean. I will urge our people to take advantage of this guidance and take advantage of this opportunity which this agency offers to help our people move their products into the foreign market. We are also not only concerned with exotic pests and diseases, we are also concerned with domestic plant pests and diseases.
“Some scientists from the NAQS and International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Ibadan are currently in Ogun State where we jointly diagnosed the infection of plantain and banana, called banana bunchy top disease, caused by a virus. They are mounting, today, farmers field schools there. The farmers in all the affected areas are being educated on how to recognise diseases, what actions to take and where they can get help. This is a core function of quarantine.
If you look at that word, quarantine, it is talking about restriction. And when a disease occurs, what is usually done is to cordon off an area. That is what quarantine is all about. For the banana bunchy top disease outbreak, they are going to be told that you don’t move suckers from areas where you have established infections to other areas. We have to contain the disease where it is. We quarantine it and restrict it to that area, and then stamp it out.
They are going to be told that a knife you use to cut a plant that is already diseased, unless you pass it through fire, you cannot use it to go and cut a healthy banana plant. Otherwise you have transferred the infection from infected plants to a healthy one. This disease is so insidious that in countries where it has come and is neglected, it tends to wipe out the population of banana and plantains. And, because it is viral, it is not amenable to treatment. But there are standard control measures for it.
We are going to hold it back in one place to ensure it does not go to anywhere else. We will do that by restricting the planting materials, restricting access to food from such areas, and then finally destroying the affected plants, applying the necessary disinfection and chemicals to wipe out the virus in such areas. And continued surveillance: even after control measures, you have to be wide awake to ensure that there is no resurgence, and use all the scientific resources at our disposal.
Once they have a guarantee of a good market and very good returns on their investment, we will be there to organise them and make them know what they need. The government has facilities to do NIRSAL, the fund is sitting there with the CBN. We have our operations in every international airports and all the land borders. Phytosanitary certificates accompany the exports to certify that all that has been done on the field is actually carried out.”
Head of NAQS at NAHCO international airport shed, Obaje John Abah:
“Late June, 2013, there was a message from the United Kingdom, that they wanted to ban Nigerian products entering into their country without proper scanning. Based on that, examination bay was constructed to meet the deadline. Samples are taken and tested on the computerised machine to ensure that they are free from metals, drugs, hemps or other plants and hard drugs.”
Dr. Dayo Folorunso, NAQS scientist
“At LASU gate (Lagos State University) gate farm, on a weekly basis, we review spraying. We are here to monitor spraying by the farmers in line with international standards. Seven days after that, we come here to witness the harvest of the same vegetables. We have farms for Soko (Celosia spp), green (Amaranthus spp), water leaf (Talinum triangulare), Ugu, fluted pumpkin (Telfaria occidentalis), bitter leaf (amagdalina). These are the major ones we have on weekly basis. We don’t allow Basil because of notorious pests associated with it. After the harvest, we get to a stage called screening.
About 500 cartons of each of the vegetable species twice weekly of 200 metric tons are harvested and bought by exporters. There are ten of them. We have some accredited exporters. The farmers sell to these exporters. They bring these farmers to us, we interview them to ensure that they meet the international standards. We have the farmers already accredited by us. There are so many farmers but not all of them are accredited. We have so many locations: Itele (Ogun State), Lagos State Polytechnic, Ikorodu, AIT Station, Alagbado, in Sango area of Ogun State, Command area in Ipaja and Volkswagen area of Lagos.”
“On the average, we have five farmers per location. We have been working with the farmers for about 10 years ago. In the past, there have been various interceptions, but in the last seven years, we have been able to bring the farmers together so that we can eliminate interception cases which we have been having in European countries. Some deficiencies noticed before now: Initial stages of spraying: the sprayers were not calibrated. We have taught them how to calibrate. They were very wasteful in the past. We have taught them the quantity to use per area. They did not know the standards to use before.
Some vegetable farmers that have not been accredited are operating outside our supervision. (These could be risky for the consumers for reasons of pesticide residues). The tracking and tracing of exports are done with addresses on boxes. If there is any problem, they have to trace it. As far as vegetable production is concerned, the IPPC contact persons in other countries have not reported any interception.”
Nnamdi Onukwuba, public affairs officer for NAQS:
“We are doing a lot of advocacy now to try to tell the world in respect of where we are, in respect of where we are as vegetable producers, that there is a standard global practice expected, for vegetables, that there is a limit for chemical residue acceptable in the international markets. The advocacy element is to teach them that what they are doing is good but we need to bring them under control if they want to meet the standard if they must meet export acceptance. The fact that they have sprayed vegetables does not mean they meet the standards. The acceptable level of every kind of chemical product varies with products.
We are urging the vegetable producers to come on board to learn the basic practices of how to produce for the international markets. There are standards and practices you have to meet before the products are accepted outside. There is huge potential in foreign exchange. The $280,000 is not just what Nigeria should be earning from foreign sales of vegetables. For the international market, you don’t have to bring everybody on board. You have to have pest risk analysis and set up pest-free areas. Everybody should know the standards. The onus is to avoid putting defective products on the tables of Nigerians. We are also concentrating on avoiding what will bring bad name to Nigeria in the export market.”
Abdullahi Abubakar, farmer and first exporter certified by the NAQS:
Farmer/Licenced exporter.
“The NAQS taught us how to put manure, fertiliser, how to harvest. They advise us on when to harvest. Before NAQS came, we were just doing it anyhow, selling to whoever came. They came to us and taught us how to clean the vegetables, etc. Some don’t have customers abroad. So, they don’t see the need to conform to NAQS. I have customers at Dublin, England, South Africa,
Twice every week, I export more than 100,000 cartons (soko, green leaf, waterleaf, bitterleaf and Ugu). I sell about N500 per carton. I carry the vegetables to the airport from the farms. My work is to take the vegetable to the airport, give the agent and give my bank account. One problem we have is that we do not have enough land where to continue to farm vegetables.”
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