Agriculture For The World Through Standards

MANKIND initially lived in nature’s paradise. Rich, tasty and refreshing fruits and vegetables and excellent meat in form of animals covered the whole earth. When they were hungry, all they needed do was pluck and gather the fruits and herbs or catch and kill as many animals as they could eat. As their numbers increased, the availability of ready-to-pluck or ripe for slaughter decreased and they learnt to hunt their game. With more population increase, even hunting could no longer provide the needed food. So they learnt to sustain the generation of required plants and animals; to replenish the earth’s creative stock. This is called farming or agriculture.

Countries differ in their agricultural potentials. It’s almost a miracle that some countries are food secure or exporters of food. But the material principle is that where their land was largely arid desert, they had the determination to make it fertile and that led them to the technology for achieving it. Israel is an example of that. It’s notable that many of the countries that made great progress in agriculture also made great progress in manufacturing and vice versa. South Africa is an industrialized country, exporting machinery, weapons, chemicals and diamond. Yet, she has continued to pay good attention to agriculture despite the fact that just 12-13 percent of her land is arable. She is so careful to keep commercial farming – the source of much of productivity going strong that she has hesitated to give in to the desperate cry of black farmers for the government to take away some land from the white farmers and give to the black farmers. What’s the result? She is not only self-sufficient in food, but is a net exporter of food.

By all accounts, Nigeria’s agricultural potentials are very enviable. In spite of desert encroachment, as much as 70 percent of Nigeria’s land is arable. This land yielded harvests that made the country the world’s largest producer of palm oil and the world’s second largest producer of cocoa. This was before the petro-naira flow of the 1970s to the 1990s lured her away from agriculture. Even today Nigeria produces the most cassava in the world. Income from agriculture made Nigeria one of the richest and fastest developing countries. With her neglect of agriculture, Nigeria has become West Africa’s largest importer of tomato paste, and her yearly import of sugar, rice and fish has reached eleven billion dollars. Unfortunately, crude oil revenue dwindles to a trickle and 70% of Nigerians go without good food.

For sure, fertilizer from Government now gets to the real farmers. This is said to have added several tons to the quantity of food produced in Nigeria. Agricultural export has also shown signs of recovery but the much-needed export is fraught with difficulties arising from non-compliance of products to standards. According to the Standard Organization of Nigeria (SON) director general, Dr. Joseph Ikem Odumodu, “due to Nigeria produce arriving foreign destinations without test reports from accredited labs, our exporters are surcharged 10 % of the value of their goods to pay foreign testing laboratories. In the event of the lab finding the goods substandard, the goods are shipped back to Nigeria at the exporter’s expense”.

“What is wrong with the exporter’s goods might be just an error of measurement;” the SON boss explains, “the buyer finding that what the exporter calls 50,000 kg of cocoa is less than that. That happens when the measuring instrument used by the exporter is not well-calibrated or has drifted from accuracy. Unfortunately, the buyer starts seeing the exporter as dishonest or risky. As the advertisement says, the world buys from those whose measurements are accurate. That’s why we are building testing and metrology laboratories to accreditation.”

From the rundown laboratories his administration inherited, Dr. Odumodu has refurbished the SON Food Technology Laboratories and got it accredited. The scope of the competence of this lab extends from biological testing to chemical testing. Any agricultural product that this lab certifies within its area of competence can be successfully exported without further testing.

The ARSO President’s Forum held in Abuja Nigeria from June 22 to 24, 2015 has given credence to the fact that Nigeria’s national standards body is a willing and able partner in the advancement of Nigeria’s agriculture to major export revenue earner especially now that petro-income has reduced to a trickle. Hosted by SON on behalf of the African Union’s apex standardisation body ARSO, it featured the Africa Standardisation Day Seminar themed The Role of Standards in Promoting Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security in Africa. The seminar, led by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) Representative in Nigeria, Dr Louise Setshwaelo, produced clear direction for Africa agriculture and it’s no different from the direction SON has been pointing and walking.

• Chimeziri Franklin is a strategic communication professional.