Food security: Foundation tasks govt on grassroots farming

Be the Help Foundation, a nongovernmental organisation, has urged government at all levels to strengthen agriculture at grassroots to ensure sustainable food production.

Mr Samuel Kwasari, Chief Executive Officer of the foundation, said grassroots agriculture could be strengthened by ensuring farmers had access to timely and right input and eligibility for women to own land.

Kwasari made the call in Abuja on on Thursday while speaking on the sidelines of the stakeholders meeting on gender-equitable land tenure systems.

The meeting was organised by the Small Scale Women Farmers Organisation in Nigeria (SWOFON) and ActionAid Nigeria (AAN).

“The mistake most of our government are making is that they want to replicate what is happening in dependent food production countries like the Netherlands, US, China  among others in Nigeria.

“Their agricultural practice is either at the level of commercial agriculture or industrial agriculture.

“We cannot do that because Nigeria government especially the Ministry of Agriculture in the past years attempted it but failed,’’ he said.

He said grassroots farmers were capable of bridging the gap in agriculture produce supply in the country.

In his presentation earlier, Kwasari said based on latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) 34.5 million out of 38 million total farmers in the country were smallholder farmers.

His paper was entitled: “Identifying Barriers to Land Ownership by Women and Breaking Them Down’’.

According to him, these smallholder farmers majorly, women, are responsible for producing 94 per cent of our food yet they are not given the needed attention regarding land ownership, access to finance, among others.

“The truth of the matter is that smallholder farmers, mostly women, live on less than one to five dollars per day and have less than half to two hectres of land.

“This makes sustainable food production very difficult, “ he said.

Kwasari listed barriers to land ownership by women to include weak implementation of laws, religion, cultural and customary issues.

Others, he said, were stigma and low representation of women at the decision making level.

NAN / Foluke Ibitomi