Our farmers need fertilizers now

As Nigeria enters its wet agricultural season which occurs from April through September every year, one of the major challenges confronting farmers this year is access to fertiliser. Fertilisers, a major component of farming input, help the soil increase its fertility, thereby promoting growth and subsequently food availability.

Replacing the old agricultural practice of using manures and compost, fertilisers contain essential nutrients that plants need, such as nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus. And through its application to farmlands, it increases the water-holding capacity and soil fertility.

And because of its primary role in ensuring food availability, it has become a national security issue, especially as the majority of Nigerians are engaged in agriculture. The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) says that 70% of the Nigerian population are farmers. The NBS adds that Nigeria has an arable land area of 34 million hectares: 6.5 million hectares for permanent crops and 28.6 million hectares on meadows and pastures.

Africa, with 18% of the world’s cultivated land area, has only 3% of global fertiliser consumption. While the average world fertiliser consumption is around 93kg per hectare of cultivated land, Africa’s average consumption lags at 20kg/ha, a far cry from the target set in 2015 by African Ministers at the Africa Fertiliser Summit in Abuja.

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The 2006 Abuja Declaration on Fertiliser was designed to significantly scale up fertiliser usage and strengthen fertiliser markets in sub-Saharan Africa, to enable smallholder farmers to increase their production per hectare, which also leads to increased household incomes by addressing some of the constraints.

Nigeria is among the lowest users of fertilisers in the world, with an average rate of 10-13kg/ha, compared with 200kg per hectare which is approved by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO).

FAO estimates that the country requires about 7 million MT of fertiliser annually, and with the current production of 5 million MT by over 33 fertiliser blending plants, this leaves a shortfall of 2 million MT.

The situation was much worse before Nigeria witnessed tremendous investments in the fertiliser industry between 2012 and 2016.

Before December 2016, Nigeria’s stock of blended fertiliser was shipped into the country as fully finished products, even though Urea and Limestone, which constitute roughly two-thirds of the component of each bag, are available locally.

Following the signing of an agreement on December 2, 2016, between the King of Morocco, His Royal Majesty Mohammed VI and President Muhammadu Buhari, in Abuja, an initiative came into being in which the Fertiliser Producers and Suppliers of Nigeria (FEPSAN) and state-owned Moroccan company, OCP, would supply discounted phosphate to Nigeria to help support the domestic blending of NPK Fertiliser starting in 2017.

The Presidential Committee on Fertiliser Initiative (PCFI) was established by President Buhari in his Budget 2017 speech on December 14, 2016, under the chairmanship of Jigawa State governor, Alhaji Mohammed Badaru Abubakar, including the leadership of FEPSAN.

On 23 December 2016, the president approved the Presidential Fertiliser Initiative (PFI) for the local production of one million metric tons of blended NPK fertiliser for the 2017 wet farming season. Those were the overarching inception performance metrics.

But despite its initial successes, it is clear that the PFI has failed to deliver on its mandate as farmers, especially the rural and small-scale farmers struggle to access fertilisers. To make matters worse, the PFI and Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development stopped engagement with fertiliser, leaving states and market forces to determine availability. The federal government was forced to restructure it in 2020 for more transparency, accountability and efficiency.

But farmers are still battling with the twin challenges of poor supply of fertiliser and its high prices. Nigerian farmers need a constant supply of fertiliser to keep impoverished farmlands fertile for agriculture. Farmers are already faced with the effects of flooding and low yield, high cost or poor access to fertiliser is an additional disincentive to farming. This shouldn’t be the case.

Only this weekend, this paper carried a report where farmers were selling their farmlands due to a lack of fertilisers.  This is very unfortunate and something must be done urgently.

The PFI should be replaced with a more viable and sustainable platform for reliable and affordable fertiliser supply. If they had continued in their initial strides, Nigeria would have had no business importing any fertiliser by 2023, as earlier projected.

And for sustainable solutions, the National Fertiliser Quality Control Act 2019 should be operationalised to give enabling environment for the protection of private investments by manufacturers, blenders or distributors as well as other service providers along the fertiliser value chain. It would also help eliminate cases of fertiliser sharp practices in the areas of nutrient deficiencies, adulteration, misleading claims, and lower weight, among others.

The Fertiliser Producer and Supply Association of Nigeria (FEPSAN), the All Farmers Association of Nigeria (AFAN) and other stakeholders should work together along with the federal, state and local governments on ensuring the availability of fertilisers. This is more so as agriculture is on the concurrent list.

Governments should ensure that the problem of availability, accessibility, quality, quantity, timeliness, and price of fertiliser is effectively taken care of. Nigeria should work towards sustainable agricultural policies, especially fertiliser, as the sector is a major employer of labour in the country. A functional agricultural sector will help tackle the nation’s unemployment crisis among other issues.