Demdem: Another good agricultural initiative from the State govt.

https://www.nairaland.com/1086037/lagos-partners-songhai-develop-agriculture

‘Government alone cannot develop agriculture’
Our Reporter October 8, 2012 2 Comments »



By IME OLA

Lagos State Commissioner for Agriculture and Cooperatives, Prince Gbolahan Lawal has assured farmers in the state of government’s support to increase their productivity.

In an interview with Daily Sun after a tour of some agric projects and farm estates in the state, the commissioner said government will continue to strengthen agricultural production to ensure food security. He also assured Lagosians that government will not allow them to face hunger now and in the future.

“We will continue to see that” food security is ensured and we will reduce malnutrition, he said.

Lawal urged young people to move closer to the agric sector to find a means of livelihood as government is already providing an enabling environment to stimulate the growth of the sector.

He also spoke of plans to create an agric park to boost food production in the state.



Agric estates

We have land constraints in Lagos. In the input policy of the ministry, we have land policy, which comprises land reforms, land tenure and land quality improvement policy.

In the land policy, we have already earmarked certain areas of the state for agricultural purposes. There are some areas for industrial and real estate purposes. The agrarian areas are in Lagos East and Lagos West and some parts of Lagos Central. Lagos East starts from Ibeju Lekki to Epe, Ikorodu and some parts of Kosofe. For Lagos East, we have farm settlements in Epe Araga farm settlement, Imota farm settlement, Ikorodu farm settlements. The idea is if we have farm settlements in a cluster, we are going to benefit a lot. We have extension services, financial services and value addition services concentrated in those areas. For instance at Araga, we have a feed mill for the poultry estate. In the fish estate at Odonguyan, we have smoking kilns for processing and a feed mill.

In Lagos West, which comprises, Badagry, Ojo, Amuwo Odofin, we have areas earmarked for agricultural purposes. We have vegetable farmers around Ojo-Iba axis. Over 100,000 families are coconut farmers in Badagry.

So it is very difficult for us to have farms in the cities.

What we are trying to promote is home stead farming. You can have a fishpond in a collapsible tank at the back of your house. We are also promoting African farmers kits to plant tomatoes and vegetables.

Government, is also providing technical services, that is why we have the feed mills and processing centres for farmers in the estates.

Rice factory at Imota

Lagos consumes over 500,000 tons of rice annually and Nigeria spends N1bn per day to import rice. Lagos has the capacity to produce rice because of the low land that we have. Rice can be grown in low and up land areas in the state. We started with 20 hectares of land. We are now on 360 hectares and the total production capacity is 600 tons, if we are looking at 2.2 tons per hectare of product yield.

In the Rice for Job programme for the rice farmers, after production, they take it to the rice mill at Imota which has 20,000 metric tons capacity annually. The mill is a South Korean model. We have started production and you know it is a gradual process. And as we are expanding our production line, we will also scale up our processing and jobs will also be created on production, processing, distribution, even to the market. So the entire value chain is involved.

The Federal Government plans to totally ban rice importation. Before now, we have made our own plans in Lagos State because we understand where we have competitive and comparative advantage. Aside from that, we are also talking to our neighbouring states for more rice farms; we produce the rice and move the paddy to our mills. We also have cottage mills for Ofada and the rest. Government has already spent a lot of money on this. If we want to talk about the cost, it is not just going to be the cost of the mill alone, you will also talk about the infrastructure, access roads, industrial borehole, power and other things. You have to add everything together to arrive at the total amount.

To encourage more farmers to plant rice, we are giving them incentives and support. All their produce, we buy back from them and add value to it, process bag and sell it in the open market. The rice value chain is also included in the commercial Agriculture Development Project (ADP) that Lagos State is collaborating with the World Bank.

World Bank will not come to Lagos to assist rice farmers if they know that we do not have the potential to grow rice. This N150m dollars project started in 2010 and five states are involved, Lagos, Enugu, Kaduna, Kano and Cross River.

FG’s Agric transformation agenda and Lagos State

The Federal Government has its agenda and in Lagos, we also have our agenda. Food security features prominently in the 10-point agenda of this administration. We already have our plans, we have the land, we have the people. And we are collaborating with the Federal Government to ensure food security in the country.

Be that as it may, we also have our own agric policy. And that is for us to produce 25 per cent of what we consume in Lagos and we feel we should be able to do that. Food security is important to us.

[b]We have over 300,000 farming families in Lagos. We still have people in the agrarian areas in Lagos. It is only through agriculture that a lot of jobs can be created. We started the Agriculture Youth Empowerment Programme (Agri-Yes) and the aim is to produce world-class agric entrepreneurs. We have engaged 400 youths so far, but the target is 1,000. We have the Israeli model as well as the Songhai model. Our consultants are the Songhai Regional Centre in Benin Republic and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. We want to catch up with other nations of the world who used agriculture to drive their economic growth. In those nations, agric is highly subsidized by government. We are also focusing on aquaculture and our target is to do 1 million metric tons of fish by 2015. At the moment, we are doing 125,000 metric tons and the consumption in Lagos is over 500,000 metric tons. Nigeria imports 780,000 metric tons of fish yearly, spending a lot of money to import fish, it is not sustainable. Any country that cannot produce its own food is in trouble. If there is any trade policy from the exporting country, the importing state will always suffer. Look at the case of rice, Indonesia at a time was not a rice producing nation,. But when it got to a stage, they banned the importation of rice and today Indonesia is one of the rice producing nations of the world.

Nigeria is the second largest net importer of rice from Thailand. It is not sustainable. Yes, we believe in collaborations, trade policies, but you must be able to do what you have the ecological support for.[/b] That is why in Lagos we focus on poultry, vegetable aquaculture. We also encourage people to bring their produce to Lagos to add value. We can add value to your citrus, process and market in Lagos. What we need do is fix the rail transportation and once we do that, you can bring in anything from any part of the country and you add value to it.

In Lagos, we are going to have an agric revolution. We have an agro-allied park at Imota. We are talking to some people to come and do dairy, fruit juice processing. So we already have a focus in Lagos and we are targeting food security, job creation and poverty alleviation. We can tackle these challenges through agriculture.

Farm estates for retirees

There is a misconception here. We should not make agric a retirement benefit. In developed countries they start very young to engage in agric business.

We have started executive programmes at our farm service centre in Oko-Oba, Agege, where we train people who want to go into agric ventures when they retire. We are collaborating with all the stakeholders and make no mistake agricultural development should not be left in the hands of the government alone.

We want to provide jobs and alleviate poverty, if we do not address agriculture properly, I don’t think we will get it right. We are not building farm estates for retirees. We are building capacity for all our farmers and supporting them to increase their productivity.

Just recently, we provided fishing inputs to fishermen at Orimedo. These are fishermen who are always in distress sales. We have provided five cooperatives made up of 400 fishing families with fishing boats, outboard engines, fishing nets to the tune of about N4 million. And how do they pay back? It is a support service. The idea is mainstreaming the FADAMA concept.

From Lagos East, we are moving to Lagos West. After the commissioning, we have received so many applications from over 500 cooperatives. This is what we are doing, we are touching the lives of our farmers directly. We did not force the inputs on them, we asked them to tell us their needs, what government could do to support them. The farmers are happy and the government is happy too. The whole idea is to reduce poverty and raise the living standards of our people.

Unsanitary conditions at the Lagos State Abattoir

We are already addressing that. I want us to go back to where we are coming from. At a time, we were using carts to move carcass from the abattoir to the market. Then you would see people carrying carcass on their heads. That has been phased out and we graduated to air-cooling system. Now we have refrigerated vans.

We still have challenges but we have asked the management to key into our new system to provide wholesome meat products to Lagosians.

We have our hygiene officers and veterinary doctors there. We are reconstructing the place. It has a mechanised system but our people have refused to change. On a daily basis, they slaughter about 2,000 cattle there, but since the management does not generate its own energy, that is a challenge.

We are working with private investors to convert the waste at the abattoir into biogas and then use it to power some of the equipment there. We know our challenges there and we are tackling them one by one.

Machinery, research and development

Mechanization is in our input policy. The tractor mechanisation unit is under the Director of Agricultural services. We have mechanical engineers and extension offers. Lagos is doing so much, we have procured a lot of tractors even hand tillers for our vegetable farmers. We have farm hands that are ready to support our farmers. During planting season, we deploy our tractors to the farms of cassava growers for their use at a subsidized rate. We do the same for our rice farmers. We have combined harvesters for them. We provide a whole lot of machinery to support them. Aside from cassava, rice and a bit of maize that we plant, we do not have much arable land that would require too many tractors.

More agric investors in Lagos

Government alone cannot develop agriculture that is why it is creating an enabling environment for investors. If we have investors that can come in for just processing of fish, a lot of jobs will be created. If we have investors to process tomatoes, you know how many jobs we would create. We have a Green House at Araga, the yields are bigger and much more than what you would have in the open field. It is a catalytic project, we have started in Lagos and we have 2,650 hectares of land.

Eko Ile:


Funny how you saw my post detailing farming activities in the area and your own bogus claims and quickly rephrase and edit your post.

aribisala0: You quote me and when I respond accuse me of bogus claims. All "on top" of discusssion about farm? If you cannot be civil avoid me like a plague
Man if you think I want to talk to you or engage in silly juvenile exchanges you and your mother are quite wrong. Both of you can go and burn on a very hot spit for all I care.
You and your epileptic mother in your life NEVER quote me again ! If you do that with others on NL not me.

You come on the Net and YAk some of us actually own REAL investments in these estates baby boy.Have rented supposedly free government tractors etc You think life is just theory and hot air?
Mo te ro pe eyan wa lara e ni mo pon e le ti mo n fun e lesi a se eran ko lasan ikeji aja ni e . ti re ma baje ni

Eko Ile:



Stop playing victim all over the place. Nothing uncivil about labeling your claims bogus. It's bogus if it is ..period.


State run enterprise used to be the way to go in Nigeria both at the sate and federal level which hardly translates to good productivity, but we have a situation where things are being done differently to maximize efficiency and productivity and you are here shouting failure all over the place. What you are calling failure is what sensible people call strategy.


Apart from IITA, Lagos state has the most functional Agric institute with professionals from Nigeria and abroad training Agric students and farmers, there's a new college to train farmers, we have Farming service centers all over the state serving as government/Farmers meeting point, there area dedicated agric zones for rice, casava, poultry, pig farming and fisheries.


New approach and strategist is not failure, it's prudence and common sense. The fact that you borrow wheelbarrow from the sate doesn't mean you are entitled to your own facts or know what you are talking about.. ...

berem: ode,so your own IQ is what? How can you compare lagos to brooklyn and manhattan? Oh boy no make me laugh this early morning o!

aribisala0: I am not interested in discussing with you. You believe you are right and others are wrong so continue talking like a radio just keep me out of it.I am not interested in what you think. Your mother might think you are cute to me you are just an obnoxious little runt. I have my views and i do not seek to impose them on you so quite why you feel I must accept yours is a mystery. I say my mind say yours just leave me out of it
So go and amuse your mother whatever it is you two do

Eko Ile: ^^^^^^^ Troll talk.... Not worth my time.

Eko Ile:


Keep quiet and stop crying. This is a public forum, not your forum so every rubbish and lies you put on a public forum is subject to challenge and correction. Stop overblowing your importance and relevance.

This clown is talking about other people's mama when his own parents should have flushed his moronic axss inside shalanga altogether inside condom...

miqos02: @eko ile and aribisala,I think we can argue constructively without resorting to personality clash.

aribisala0:
Cancer will kill your mother.
bastard child.
If you shakara others I know tomorrow when you see ari you won't wait fo bi sa la before you take off. I have always avoided you because you are uncouth.
today your devils have led you to me ,I no send you I no send your fada moda na die go kill dem all.Dem go die like dog!
I only do civil discussions anything else....., make trailer jam your mother

Eko Ile:


lmao... look at this cry baby. shebi na you first introduce mama talk inside topic because you have no respect for your mother...

Anyway, back to sender x 1 billion.

aribisala0: Go and bury your mother oloriburuku if she never die just bury her all the same.

Eko Ile:


Damn!!! You are really hurting cry baby? Back to sender x 1 billion.

aribisala0:
Radio! "you are really hurting" when then?
I say go bury ya mama. omo eran!
Me i know confirm anoda day dem no born ya mama to put her mouth for my matter if she try am i go blind her remaining eye

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

[b]In his days in the university, Adebisi Davids never imagined that he would one day end up as a farmer.



Having studied Physics Electronics at a federal university in the South-West, the 29-year-old man had, even before his graduation, visualized a career as an expert at an engineering firm or as a specialist with one of the several telecommunications outfits in the country.

Well, that dream, for long, was nothing more than an unending nightmare. For years, he perambulated Lagos streets in search of a job. He submitted numerous applications and attended many job interviews. Yet, no job came his way.

Then came an opportunity from the Lagos State Agriculture Youth Empowerment Scheme (Agric-YES), an initiative of the Babatunde Raji Fashola administration. Davids quickly jumped at the prospect and embraced the programme.

Alongside others, he participated in various training programmes in Nigeria and in Israel where he was tutored in egg production, vegetable production and aquaculture.

“I thank God for Governor Fashola and for the Lagos State Agric-YES,” he enthused. “Apart from being gainfully employed now, I’m also doing my own thing and contributing to the development of the economy. At the moment, I make about N100, 000 per month. But I will soon be making much more than that.”

Salami Bolaji, another beneficiary, is no less enthusiastic. A 2008 graduate of Plant Science from the Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye, Ogun State, Bolaji also opted for the Lagos State Agriculture Youth Empowerment Scheme (Agric-YES). Like Davids, he has also received training both at home and abroad. Right now, he conveniently supports his aged parents and siblings just as he’s making plans to get married and start a family.

Davids and Bolaji are just two of the hundreds of young men and women who have benefited from the Lagos State Agriculture Youth Empowerment Scheme. Since it started operations on October 2, 2009, the scheme is believed to have positively altered the destiny of many young men and women who ordinarily would have ended up in the labour market.

On March 21, successful fresh candidates commenced their course at the Agricultural Training Institute, Araga, Epe. The intensive training will last for six months, it was learnt.[/b]

So, why did the state government initiate the scheme? Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture and Co-operatives, Dr. Yakub Olajide Bashorun, said the Fashola administration decided to start the scheme to empower the youths of Lagos in modern agricultural practice.

He said with reports indicating that agriculture would continue to play a major role in poverty reduction in developing countries, it was extremely imperative that a scheme like Agric-YES be established.

Eko Ile:




Damn!!! You are really hurting cry baby? Back to sender x 1 billion.

The Lagos State Government on Tuesday received the commendations of the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Dr Akinwunmi Adesina for using agriculture and food security to mitigate the social security challenges associated with the state's mega city status, just as the Governor, Mr Babatunde Fashola (SAN) declared that Nigeria cannot develop until her people go back to the farms.