Hard hit by climate change, farmers in Nigeria’s ‘food basket’ face new foes
On a vast farmland in the eastern part of Nigeria’s Benue State, Aondongu Saaku and the men he had hired for harvest stood staring at the outcome of what he had planted.
Yams not bigger than medium-sized Irish potatoes – the fruits of many months of arduous labour – lay across the expanse, each beside heaps of sand turning sterile after they had long endured arrested growth.
“How can you cultivate 32 hectares of yam farm and you will not even be able to get up to 100 tubers of yam that you will sell,” Mr Saaku told PREMIUM TIMES one evening in February at his Makurdi home.
“All that came out were like seeds, yet we applied fertilisers and weeded the plantation very well.”
Mr Saaku applied inorganic fertiliser to the yams but it made no difference to his output after all.
That the earth gave him back roughly the same size of what he planted in it eight months earlier, whereas yam farmers in other states were seeing significantly bigger yields, is not an ordeal the former civil servant is battling alone.
Battle against nature
Fellow farmers in Adesav, Gwer East Local Government Area of the state, where Mr Saaku grew his yams, are falling on hard times also as the world contends with unprecedented extreme weather conditions that have turned climate change into a megatrend impossible to ignore.
Desertification, the condition whereby a previously fertile land becomes arid after losing its flora and fauna, is set to send the farmers on migration away from their farmland, forcing them into the league of many others on the losing end of global warming.
The world is in the middle of a very profound change, whereby a fast-evolving climate crisis has created an emergency that has made adaptation and mitigation rallying points for stakeholders such as environmentalists, investors and governments in the talk around how best to deal with it.
From food production, energy, meteorology and oceanography to finance, space science, consumer behaviour and even insurance, climate action is driving innovations aimed at helping humans adjust to volatile weather patterns, spot the opportunities they present, address their threats and devise ways to mitigate them.
“Climatic variability, deforestation, extensive cultivation, overgrazing, cultivation of marginal land, bush burning, fuel wood extraction, faulty irrigation system and urbanisation were identified as the major causes of desertification,” Ignatius Audu and Adie Linus, two agricultural economics scholars, observed in their 2018 study on northern Nigeria titled Desertification in Northern Nigeria: Causes and Consequences.
Gwer East has a bad name for burning forest trees for charcoal and clearing rainforests for timber production and arable farming purposes, practices that make its land defenceless against desertification.
The municipality has been spotlighted by Global Forest (GFW) as recording 107 Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) fire alerts between 1 and 29 January alone, even though only high confidence alerts were considered. VIIRS is a sensor designed to collect visible and infrared images and global observations of land, atmosphere, cryosphere and oceans.
“This is unusually high compared to previous years going back to 2012,” says the open-source website, which monitors forests across the world in near real-time.
“The most fires recorded in a year was 2015, with 188,” GFW, a brainchild of the World Resources Institute, observes.
Within the 21 years to 2022, Gwer East lost four hectares of tree cover, equivalent to a one-third reduction in its tree cover and 2.11 kilotons of CO₂e emissions, according to GFW data.
The crisis has drawn the attention of UNDP-led environmental movement Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Network.
The organisation backed 50 forest users in Gwer East and Gboko local government areas this month to start an advocacy that will press for community action against deforestation and land degradation in the state.
Bar chart showing forest-related greenhouse gas emissions in Gwer East LG between 2001 and 2022
In the state, dry season farming – typically spanning October through March – is becoming increasingly challenging. Places once known for moderate soil moisture, which kept agricultural practices going during heatwaves, are seeing deeper drops in water levels amid a rapidly warming climate, unstoppable in driving drought to such a degree that is having grave consequences for farmers’ yields.
It has put the state, reputed to be Nigeria’s food basket on account of its production of major agricultural commodities, in danger of losing the glory.
Cultivation of crops like mango, orange, soybean, rice and sweet potato on a vast commercial scale is central to that reputation.
The state tops in yams production, helping to make Nigeria the world leader in the production of the tuber. The reach of its bumper output knows no bounds, drawing traders from places including Ghana, Cameroon and Niger.
That said, prolonged droughts over recent years now make sustainability an urgency for the state, with the crisis further complicated by the huge capital required to irrigate farms to check the threat.
“Droughts, soil erosion, famines, pest attacks, and poor crop yields seriously threaten food security. This has been the case in Benue State,” Comfort Sheidu and Hosea Olayiwola Patrick affirmed in their paper titled Climate Change and Open Grazing impact on Agricultural Production in Benue State, Nigeria.
“Drought periods and poor crop yields due to weather conditions have threatened food security in the region,” the researchers further stated in the article, published in the last June edition of the African Journal of Public Administration and Environmental Studies.
Net forest change in Gwer East LG from 2000 to 2020
Yet, new foes are emerging for dry season farming in the form of high input costs, often a crushing burden for farmers to bear.
Most notable here are the costs of pumping machines for irrigation purposes and of fertilisers. Mr Saaku, who leads the state’s branch of All Farmers Association of Nigeria, counts the former as the single biggest threat to dry season farming in the state.
On the loose for long, Nigeria’s price levels raced to their highest in twenty-eight years last month as consumer inflation grew 31.7 per cent year-on-year, raising the spectre of higher expenses for dry season farmers already confronting headaches like higher fuel and labour costs.
“Farmers find it difficult to acquire pumps and the government has actually not provided them,” Mr Saaku said.
“We don’t have companies that are interested in that programme so that when the farmers produce, they can offtake.”
Even where pumps are available, there is limited water to draw from, with the two major rivers serving the state – River Benue and River Katsina – depleting at a rate that is putting dry season farming in danger of extinction.
The water shortage has placed Fulani nomads seeking water for their cattle in contention with local farmers as water demand surges in the face of record droughts, mounting sustainability pressures on dry season farming practices and, by extension, food security in Nigeria.
In some cases, farmers have had to relinquish their lands as the conflict spirals into bloody clashes.
Commercial Banks’ Loans to the Agriculture Sector
Nigerian banks don’t warm to lending to the agriculture sector, which makes recourse to commercial credit difficult for smallholders seeking loans to purchase basic irrigation machinery.
Agriculture’s share of banks’ loan portfolio touched 6.2 per cent in 2022, its highest level in eight years, showing how little the sector that employs most Nigerians gets in credit support.
When available, commercial credit generally comes at high borrowing costs, which Mr Saaku said are off-putting for him and his peers.
“If you are taking money from the banks, it’s like you are working for the banks, you are not working for yourself. One, they delay you. They don’t give you money as and when due. We are not always interested in taking.”
High fertiliser costs point farmers in the way of ash
On account of the yam harvest disaster, Mr Saaku ditched inorganic fertilisers, and is turning to ash, dung and other organic types to beat the elevated prices of inorganic fertilisers, now a turn-off for several farm owners.
A 50-kilogramme bag of inorganic fertiliser, sold for N5,500 in some places in Nigeria in 2016, climbed to N25,000 last August, according to a PREMIUM TIMES report. It implies a surge of four and a half times within seven years.
Farm workers working on a vegetable plantation in Jos. 19 February 2024.
Farm workers working on a vegetable plantation in Jos. 19 February 2024.
Among organic fertilisers, ash is having its moment in other states beyond Benue in Nigeria’s Middle Belt like neighbouring Plateau State, where Akin Aderounmu runs a bakery owned by his dad in the outskirts of Jos called Bukuru.
The young man sells wood ash from the fire used for bread-making to locals, who use it to enhance soil for agricultural purposes. In the area, he has built a small customer base and cultivated a local school, Bukery Academy, which purchases bagged ash from him for use on its plantation.
One sack of ash goes for N1,000, he said, and buyers’ interest is seeing a rise.
The increased demand for ash for fertilisation and other agricultural purposes is causing users to gravitate towards burning compost from market refuse intending to use the residue on farms thereafter.
Kojo Funa, who grows tomato, purple cabbage and green vegetables on a long, curved strip of arable land with a narrow water channel running through it behind a line of houses at the city centre, sources ash from the bakery manager for use in his farms.
Vegetable farmer Kojo Funa picks tomatoes during harvest on his farm in Jos. 19 February 2024.
Vegetable farmer Kojo Funa picks tomatoes during harvest on his farm in Jos. 19 February 2024.
Primarily, he uses the wood ash from the bakery as a pesticide and, at times, as a fungicide – instead of synthetic pesticides, which are unaffordable.
Because wood ash is potassium-rich, meaning it is helpful in speeding up root growth and enhancing drought resistance, Mr Funa also uses it to “increase the fruit size” of his crops.
“When the weather is cold, you know Jos is very, very cold, it helps us to charge the soil, to make it warm,” he said. The ash type generated from burnt compost and refuse is used by him as fertiliser.
According to him, micro-credit and loans from commercial banks as well as agricultural development banks are never accessible to farmers.
“Everything the farmer is doing hundred per cent is solely on the neck of the farmer. Everything lies on you. Look for capital, run the farm,” he stated.
“When government provides fertiliser, you don’t get it when you are farming. It’s after the farming season the fertiliser comes in. They sell to marketers, and marketers sell to us now at expensive prices.”
To tackle credit shortage, the state’s smallholders are turning to middlemen, whose core relationship with farmers normally would have revolved around the supply chain role of linking them to markets, where traders buy their produce, then resell to end-users.
Middlemen, locally called Di lali, provide soft loans to farmers, and many look up to them for the lifeline they direly require to bear the elevated running costs of dry season farming. That has been crucial in keeping the seasonal farming practice going, Mr Funa told PREMIUM TIMES in February.
Plateau State produces the most potatoes in the country, is the biggest producer of exotic fruits (strawberry, apple, grape, jack fruit) and has the biggest output for fonio, carrot, cabbage, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, radish, and beetroot, which are produced all year round.
Vegetable farmer works on his cabbage and tomato farm in Jos. 19 February 2024.
Vegetable farmer works on his cabbage and tomato farm in Jos. 19 February 2024.
Mr Funa noted that farmers don’t prioritise preservation anymore because of generally high expenses.
“They even harvest their tomatoes unripe. So, farmers are just cutting costs. It is better for me to sell now that it’s expensive than for me to waste chemicals, buy fuel, do all sorts. At the end of the day, it all amounts to little,” he said.
“At a farm that you are supposed to get like 10 baskets (of tomato), if you try your best, you will get four now.”
Worsening drought drives yam farmers away to swamps
In Ukum Local Government Area of Benue State, whose flagship town Zaki Biam hosts the world’s largest yam market, farmers are deserting lands hit by dry spells and are venturing into deep swamps to cultivate their crops, Japheth Ishenge, the secretary of the market’s yam shade owners and yam sellers group, told PREMIUM TIMES.
Japheth Ishenge, yam farmer and secretary of Zaki Biam Yam Shade Owners and Yam Sellers Association. 22 February 2024
Japheth Ishenge, yam farmer and secretary of Zaki Biam Yam Shade Owners and Yam Sellers Association. 22 February 2024
“Our people need a lot. Had it been we are doing dry season farming (optimally), we would be more than the food basket of the nation, we would be having yams non-stop throughout the year,” said the middle-aged man, adding that interventions have been limited.
“But our government did not do that to support our people locally in our villages. We don’t have that support to do dry season farming.”
Mr Ishenge said water pumps are widely unavailable for farmers to irrigate yams during the season. He said if irrigation equipment were accessible, new yams could be available in market stalls as early as April and May.
Access to water for irrigation farming in the state has been declining for years, leading farmers in 2017 to request the dredging of River Benue and River Katsina-Ala, the two major rivers serving the state but which for long have been at the mercy of rapid evaporation fuelled by climate change.
“The effect of global warming and climate change, is becoming clear by the day, with the abundant sharp sand taking over large portion of the big River Benue,” Abraham Agber, the chairman of Gboko Local Government, said while addressing the farmers.
“The implication on dry season farming, a long-standing tradition in Benue State, is a threat to increasing food production nationwide and curbing food crisis across the country.”
Support for this report was provided by the Centre for Journalism, Innovation and Development (CJID)
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