I am a great fan of the Growth Enhancement Support (GES) Scheme and especially its originator, the African Development Bank President, Akin Adesina. I have a great conviction though, that for GES to work in Nigeria today, it needs to be considerably different from the GES of Nigeria in 2014.
The GES Scheme was a robust one, but robustness is not enough in a Nigeria (or any place for that matter) with new challenges beyond what it was designed to solve. GES has worked better than any scheme Nigeria has ever had in farm input subsidy and distribution to enhance growth. However, in the face of the current disorder and stress in the agricultural sector, the GES or the e-Wallet system in their original design will not be enough.
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With raging insecurity and the inadequacy of programmes like the Anchor Borrow Programme, a variation of it must be put in place that will not only address seeds and fertilizer distribution challenges but enable us to thrive in the face of new and future challenges beyond within and beyond the input sector. In the words of the revered President Akin Adesina, ‘GES is not perfect’. I understand and agree with this point in a slightly different way from what the former minister might have intended.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his cereberal book “Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder” described a phenomenon in things that benefit from shock and stress. When these things, which in their original nature are fragile, are exposed to disorder or volatility, they grow and thrive. In his observation, there is no word for these things in the English language which would describe the exact opposite of fragile. So, Mr Taleb adequately invented one; Antifragile. Rather than suffer from unpredictable shock and stress, The Antifragile continuously uses volatility to regenerate itself. For the Antifragile, robustness or shock-absorption is not enough. Adaptation is not enough. What matters is benefiting from conflict or uncertainty to improve, and grow.
If we go by this idea, we would understand that things that gain from randomness and shock are dominating the world and things that are hurt by volatility and disorder deteriorate with time. Nigerian agriculture is currently faced with such shock and volatility ranging from manmade problems like insecurity and corruption to natural disasters caused by climate change (which you could argue is also manmade) and I would add our seeming adamancy and disregard for evidence-based solutions. Rather than become crippled by these stressors, any schemes, programmes or policies we deploy should aspire to gain from them and use them to systemically thrive and grow.
This challenge encompasses several agricultural, food and social factors. The fragile and unstable livelihoods of smallholder farmers that are so prone to such personal or even collective risks like drought, flooding, falling agricultural prices or rising food prices, pests, infectious diseases among livestock and recently many forms of terrorism that lead to loss of lives and property must be looked at critically. Millions of Nigerian farmers, and by extension the Nigerian agricultural sector, are currently exposed to an unprecedented level of stress.
It is essential to look at the helpless attitude of Nigerian farmers in the face of disorder. When there is a crisis, they lose everything and are forced to start afresh, after which they find themselves even more vulnerable to other shocks, trapping them in a vicious poverty cycle. Also, increasing occurrences of abnormal or unusual weather conditions attributed to the effects of climate change, along with market instability, already exacerbate risks for millions of these farmers. Coupled with this, farmers in the North East and now the North West are faced by senseless terrorism in the hands of insurgents on one hand and bandits on the other. Beyond the lack of quality seeds and fertilizer, these vulnerabilities are causing food and nutritional crises and negatively affecting our already under-developing states and an already ailing economy. Developing resilience to these shocks is essential. But we must go beyond neutralising the crises in the spirit of antifragility for us to enable smallholder farmers and other agricultural key players to secure their production systems, to increase productivity and to safeguard their sources of income.
I came into agriculture and food systems by my expertise in digital technologies and my passion for agriculture but through this work I have become exposed to the intricacies of agricultural value chains and I have come face-to-face with the human condition in all its complexity. Next week, I will detail technical and logistical improvement recommendations for a better rebirth of the GES Scheme which I think are necessary as the pace of change is.
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