Agriculture, no doubt, has contributed immensely to the growth of Nigeria’s GDP. About seventy per cent of the population engages in agricultural production, which is carried out mostly at subsistent level in rural areas. Again, agricultural raw materials constitute an integral part of the industrial base of any country.

In Nigeria in general and Anambra state in particular, agriculture drives food security by achieving self sufficiency in vegetables, rice, cassava and others. With Governor Willie Obiano’s adoption of agriculture as number one in his development pillar, Anambra state quickly moved up the ladder to become an exporter of vegetables, rice and cassava among other farm produce. Since then, Anambra has made remarkable achievements in the agricultural sector in terms of employment generation, food security, and poverty reduction.

To achieve all these, Governor Obiano, in 2014, attracted the Federal Government/International Fund for Agricultural Development, FG/IFAD Value Chain Development Programme for special intervention on rice and cassava as well as the development of their value chains. The initiative brought to lime light tremendous economic potentials of rice and cassava as food and industrial raw materials.

The intervention programme, which is complementing other existing agricultural intervention programmes of the governor, became disbursement effective in 2015 with so many success stories across Rice and Cassava value chains. At first, FG/IFAD VCDP started with five local government areas of Anambra East and West, Ayamelum, Awka North and Orumba North before Ogbaru, Ihiala and Orumba South council areas were added.

To achieve its mandate of fighting poverty among rural farmers and making them to embrace farming as a business, the State coordination office of FG/IFAD VCDP swung into action with aggressive sensitization and capacity building of farmers in the benefiting council areas of the state to bring them at par with their counterparts in the global farming business. Best agronomic practices in rice and cassava farming were bequeathed to them.

The state FG/IFAD VCDP equally sponsored many rice and cassava farmers from various benefiting council areas on six months advanced incapacity training at the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture, IITA Ibadan for seed rice production, while their cassava counterparts went to National Roots Crops Research Institute, Umudike for cassava stem multiplication.

To drive home the knowledge they garnered, step it down for ripple effect and for standardization, a seed and soil testing laboratory worth over twenty-seven million naira was established by Governor Obi at the State Agricultural Development Programme office in Awka,  where farmers can test the efficacy of their seeds to boost yield.

Ten female farmers were also sponsored to IITA Ibadan on the use of vitamin A” cassava root to produce different recipes. The strategy of value addition on agricultural produce provides ample opportunity for revenue generation, employment generation and effective post harvest management. The ten women, on graduation, were empowered with start-up pack equipment to alleviate poverty.  They are now self-reliant and job creators.

For sustainability among the beneficiaries, the FG/IFAD VCDP organized up scaling of Gender Action Learning System (GALS), aimed at exposing the farmers to soul-mate vision, vision journey, gender balance stream and multi-lane highway. It also developed about fifteen business models to train and assist the youths to become self-reliant.

They did not stop at building the farmers’ capacity and exposing them to the best agronomic practices in rice and cassava farming but also built and upgraded their mills and processing centres with modern facilities and timely distribution of improved farm inputs and agro-chemicals.

These programmes of the government are commendable. However, to ensure value addition to the vast agricultural resources in the state, there is need to establish agricultural raw materials processing clusters. There is also an emerging need for the establishment of compulsory Equity Fund where beneficiaries will be mandated to save a certain percentage of their profit for procurement and servicing of the existing facilities before the end of any intervention for sustainability. If all these are done in a sustainable manner and supported vigorously, Anambra state can further achieve self sufficiency in food and raw material production in key agricultural sectors.

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