Director General Dr Sanginga,
Excellencies,
Distinguished Colleagues,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

I would first like to thank Dr Nteranya Sanginga for bringing us together today. These meetings provide an invaluable opportunity to learn from each other, sharing our experiences and ideas.

Being here is a true homecoming for me. As most of you know, I am a Nigerian, born, raised and educated. And while my professional life has taken me to three other continents, my heart remains here, in Nigeria.

The IITA is also a special place for me. It was here that I spent six months as a temporary research technician in 1971 after I finished my undergraduate degree, and also here that I spent ten months as a post-doc in 1976.

And it was IITA, with funding from IFAD where I work today, that posted me to Congo DRC in 1977 as a cassava entomologist. I will come back to the research I did there later, because it is relevant to our discussion today.

Today, our overarching topic is rejuvenation, not just of this institution but of Nigeria itself. For that we must look to the future, when our fate will rest in the hands of the young generation of today.

Nigeria’s population is expected to more than double by 2050. The youth of today will be the businesswomen and men, and the politicians of the future. They must also be the farmers of tomorrow.

Without a vibrant agricultural sector and strong rural economy, I do not see a viable future for Nigeria.

Let me speak bluntly. You cannot eat oil – at least not crude oil. Oil money has not transformed Nigerian agriculture over the last 30 years. It has not fed hungry people or developed rural areas.

Nigeria is a developing country and it will remain a developing country unless Nigerians act to seize the opportunities at hand.

These opportunities are found in agriculture. From 18th century England to 20th century India to Viet Nam today, agriculture has proven that it can drive economic growth. And GDP growth generated by agriculture has been shown to be at least twice as effective in reducing poverty as growth in other sectors.

Today there are unprecedented opportunities in African agriculture. A growing middle class across the continent is driving rapid growth in demand for food, quality food. Foreign multinationals are already taking note of this purchasing power and moving in – Guinness, for example, gets 13 per cent of its net revenues from Africa, and Heineken recently bought two breweries in Ethiopia.

Indeed, as the multinationals have noticed, the outlook for African markets outshines the opportunities in other international markets. Not only raw primary products but also quality, value-added products are in demand, which means new opportunities for the agro-industrial sector.

Is the Nigerian agricultural sector ready to take advantage of these opportunities? Sadly, it is not. But this was not always the case.

Only a few decades ago we were proud of our groundnut pyramids of Kano, of our miles of floating timber for export, of warehouses of cocoa and bales of silky cotton in the north.

But today, petroleum and petroleum products account for around 95 per cent of Nigeria’s revenues. Today, Nigeria imports more food than it produces and food imports are increasing at a rate of around 11 per cent a year.

And while agriculture employs around two-thirds of the workforce, including 90 per cent of the rural population, most Nigerian farmers are poor. This is the result of decades of neglect of agriculture.

This neglect must be reversed.

Unlike many other countries that are oil rich but agriculture poor, Nigeria is blessed with fertile soil. Nigeria has been a food exporter – of major food and cash crops including rice, groundnuts, cassava, cocoa, cotton and palm oil – in the past and can be one again.

I am heartened to see that the current administration is taking steps to put Nigeria back on the road to food self-sufficiency. It has made agriculture a top priority of the Transformation Agenda.

President Goodluck Jonathan has pledged to end rice importation by 2015. And the appointment of Dr Akinwumi Adesina as the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development is another indication that agriculture is being taken seriously.

This gives me confidence that Nigeria will once more feed itself, and that it can be a leader of African countries in contributing to global food security.

There is a direct link between investment in research and the elimination of poverty and hunger. When we consider rejuvenating agriculture for the future of Nigeria, we must first look at research.

As a scientist, I like to base my conclusions on solid evidence, so let me share some data from the International Food Policy Research Institute:

In China, one person was lifted out of poverty for every US$109 spent on agricultural research.

In Uganda, the impact of research was even more dramatic, with one person lifted from poverty for every US$16 spent on research.

A separate report by the CGIAR indicates that US$1 spent on agricultural research produces US$9 worth of added food in developing countries.

We must therefore ask ourselves why our leaders and administrators neglected agricultural research and extension services? What happened to the Moore Plantations, the Umudike research station, the Institute of Agricultural Research Samaru, Zaria and the faculties of agriculture at UI, ABU and Nsukka? What happened to the ADPs?

It was research that generated Quality Protein Maize. It was also research that generated high yielding cassava varieties in West Africa.

And it was the IITA research funded by IFAD, and in which I was involved in the 1970s, that led to the control of the cassava mealy bug through an Africa-wide Biological Control Programme.

As a result of this research programme, at least 20 million lives were saved in the cassava belt of sub-Saharan Africa, at a total cost of US$20 million. In other words, for every dollar spent, one life was saved.

When we say science and technology can generate pro-poor technologies, we mean they can feed the hungry.

Agricultural research successfully drove the first Green Revolution in Asia, and can drive a Green Revolution in Africa, as we work to feed a growing population at a time when climate change is starting to affect agricultural productivity in many countries.

During my tenure as Director General at Africa Rice, NERICA rice was developed. The first progenies were just ready for testing in farmers’ fields when I became Director General of WARDA – as the Africa Rice Centre was called back in 1996.

There are now hundreds of new NERICA varieties being grown throughout Africa.

And, of course, just a few weeks ago the IITA announced the release of two new maize hybrids with high levels of vitamin A. This will be a particular boon to the 30 per cent of Nigerian children below the age of 5 and the 20 per cent of pregnant women who are deficient in this essential vitamin.

The fact that African research is being applied in Africa to benefit African people fills me with pride and hope.

We have many tools at our disposal. Agricultural biotechnologies, including Marker Assisted Selection, Marker Assisted Breeding, tissue culture and embryo rescue techniques offer many benefits. They can boost productivity, improve the tolerance of seeds and plants to drought, temperature stress and pests, and make nutrient use more efficient.

But biotechnology is only a tool. It is not an end in itself. And often, there is huge potential to increase yields using low cost and existing technologies.

Consider that in Africa, only about 6 per cent of total cultivated land is irrigated, compared with 37 per cent in Asia. It is estimated that irrigation alone could increase output by up to 50 per cent in Africa.

In Nigeria, the area of land under cultivation could be increased by as much as 100 per cent. And the scope for increasing irrigation in the country is substantial, given that only 7 per cent of irrigable land is now under irrigation.

Small increases in fertilizer use can also produce dramatic improvements without risk to the environment. Farmers in sub-Saharan Africa use, on average, less than 13 kilogrammes of fertilizer per hectare. Compare that to 73 kilogrammes in the Middle East and North Africa, and 190 kilogrammes in East Asia and the Pacific.

ICRISAT and its partners have shown farmers how to grow more food without exploiting the soil by using a bottle cap to measure out small, affordable amounts of fertilizer.

No one is better placed than African scientists to know the conditions on the ground in Africa and to discover solutions to the challenges.

But in order for our academic work to be world class and competitive, researchers need the right incentives, both financial and material; they must have modern equipment so that they have the tools to do their job, and they must be linked to the global storehouse of knowledge.

And for research to move from the lab to the field, it needs to be supported by strong agricultural advisory services and enabling polices that link research to products and markets. Applications need to benefit the public, particularly our resource-poor smallholders, and private sectors alike. Otherwise our productivity will remain unacceptably low.

To rejuvenate agriculture in Nigeria, we must harness the best pro-poor agricultural research. We must rebuild and strengthen our national research institutions so they too have the capacity to draw from international and global knowledge.

As scientists and researchers, we tend to focus on biological and physical experiences. But in my years of working in development, I have learned that science has the greatest impact when it is combined with an understanding of other dimensions, including context.

To truly improve the conditions of poor rural people, scientists must understand the environment where their discoveries will be used, and the needs of the people who live there.

In other words, if we want our work to be sustainable, we must apply the same rigour of thought to understanding the social dimension of local communities and the ecological dimension of local landscapes as we apply in the laboratory.

We have all seen the aftermath of what happens when development is not sustainable – we have seen the broken tractors, the withered and untended trees, the forsaken hillside terraces.

As I said before, it is not always the most “advanced” technologies that reap the greatest rewards. Let me share some stories with you.

Last year, I visited Zongbega, a village in a drought-prone region of Burkina Faso, where smallholders are using simple rain water harvesting techniques such as planting pits and permeable rock dams, along with crop-livestock integration. They have restored land that was once degraded and have increased their productivity thanks to low-input, yet high-output, pro-poor innovations.

In Niger, a water harvesting project in the Illela department is still going, more than 15 years after the funding ended. The project encouraged farmers to improve traditional planting pits and half-moons. The pits are dug before the rains to collect and store rainfall and run-off. The half-moons are semicircular earth embankments that also capture run-off water.

Although the project ended in 1996, in January of this year the farmers were still making pits and half-moons.

The adoption of simple water harvesting techniques forces rainfall and runoff to infiltrate and locally recharges the groundwater. In the village of Batodi, the water level in wells increased by 14 meters between 1994 and 2004, which has led to the creation of 10 vegetable gardens around wells. The increase is unlikely to be the result of rainfall, since 2004 and 2011 were both drought years.

Twenty years ago, the fields around the village of Batodi were completely barren. Today, they have higher on-farm tree densities, which helps to keep the soil fertile and provides fodder for livestock.

This is a fine example of the benefits of community-driven development.

Sometimes, the best way to grow food in an arid climate is to go back to basics, building a rock dam to stabilize soil and collect water runoff, or constructing cisterns to collect rain water.

Earlier on, I spoke about the need to “grow” future generations of farmers. For that to happen we must consider the needs and desires of our young people. When rural communities do not offer attractive economic opportunities, young people are forced to leave their homes to search for work, and their villages start to die. But when they can make a good living at home, their energy and creativity can be channelled into reviving their community….

I would like to pause for a moment to show you a short film that illustrates better than any words how investment in agriculture can benefit young people.

As you can see, creating economic opportunities in rural areas can lead to reverse migration. We have seen this in many of the projects that we finance.

It is unfortunate that we have recently had to suspend our work in the north of Mali where this project is based. But the current situation in Mali underscores the critical need to create steady, reliable and reasonably paid work for young people in rural areas.

Young people with prospects will build the foundations for their future. Young people without prospects have nothing to lose and are more easily swayed by extreme rhetoric.

We need our young people to be the farmers and food processors of tomorrow, not just to feed themselves and their villages, but to grow the food to feed our cities.

Vibrant rural areas can ensure a dynamic flow of economic benefits between rural and urban areas so that nations have balanced and sustained development.

Investing in young rural people is a simple but elegant solution to some of the world’s most pressing problems. It helps eliminate poverty and hunger, curtails migration to cities and abroad, and lays a solid foundation for national, regional and global security.

When rural communities offer young people a range of income-generating opportunities, more will decide to stay in the villages and resist the call of often dead-end futures in the cities, abroad, or in extreme religious or political movements.

We cannot look at issues in isolation. There is no point increasing a farmer’s yield if that farmer does not have storage facilities for surplus production, or a way to get their produce to market, or if there is no demand for what is produced.

As scientists, when we look at how best to support smallholder farmers we must not only improve their ability to grow food, we must strengthen their ability to participate in markets, while also improving the way those markets function.

One of the main reasons Nigerian rice farmers have trouble competing with Asian imports is the high cost of transportation at home, which contributes to the high cost of locally grown rice.

In Nigeria, there are 230 kilometres of paved road per million people, compared with just over one thousand kilometres in India and nearly 21 thousand kilometres of paved road per million people in the United States.

In addition to roads, farmers need processing and storage facilities so that they can safely process and store their produce until they can get it to market, instead of watching it waste on the farm. Cassava, for example, has a water content of 70 per cent, making it vulnerable to spoilage and making it bulky and expensive to transport.

Good processing is clearly essential for fresh cassava. Turning it into animal feed, flour, industrial starch, ethanol and other products increases potential markets for farmers, while also increasing cassava’s shelf life and reducing the cost of transportation.

We must ensure that there is sufficient investment in rural infrastructure, including roads, electrification and storage facilities.

And we must ensure a space and a role for the private sector. Private sector involvement -- ranging from domestic companies to large international companies, and from small and medium enterprises to small famers and their organizations -- is critical in allowing agriculture to contribute to food and nutrition security.

In recent years, IFAD has expanded its partnerships with the private sector from the bottom-up. We see responsible private-sector engagement as an essential element in optimising economic opportunities in rural areas. And we have seen the benefits of working with the private sector in our value-chain approach.

Let me give you some examples that come from IFAD’s work around the world.

When I was in Guatemala I met Pedro Tun, a smallholder farmer and president of a producers’ association. With the backing of an IFAD-supported project they were able to buy irrigation equipment, build a new storage facility and work with private-sector partners to bring their produce to new markets. Today, they sell to some of the biggest retailers in the world, including Wal-Mart.

In Egypt, an IFAD-supported project on land that was reclaimed from the desert has helped farmers to establish contracts with private exporters. As a result, their incomes have risen. These small farmers are now exporting fresh vegetables and fruits to the United States and Europe – including peanuts to Switzerland and Germany. Heinz has a contract to buy tomatoes for processing from about 300 of the project farms.

Then there’s Elysée Nkundabagenzi of Rwanda. In her community, where people were extremely poor and malnourished, she and her neighbours received small loans, goats and cows, and training in establishing kitchen gardens. She now produces enough vegetables and milk for her family’s needs, with a surplus she can sell at market. Now she can send her children to school and buy health insurance. And she has abandoned her grass hut to build a new house.

There are many other examples, from cocoa farmers in Sao Tomé and Principe who are now supplying chocolate makers such as Kaoka in France and Café Direct in the UK, to an organics project in the Pacific where small farmers are supplying organic virgin coconut oil to the Body Shop in the United Kingdom, allowing more children to attend school and promoting a way of life that incorporates health, ecology, fairness and care. What these stories, along with others I have witnessed demonstrate is the power of market-oriented agriculture to generate incomes and sustainable economic growth.

Rural development transforms the landscape by creating vibrant economies that can contribute to global food security. And more modern, diversified rural economies generate demand for locally produced goods and services, and also spur non-farm employment in services, agro-processing and small-scale manufacturing.

It is essential that we create, here in Nigeria, such vibrant communities and the conditions in which smallholders can succeed.

If a farmer cannot profitably market her surplus, there is no logical reason to produce more than her family can store or consume. There is no motivation to adopt productivity enhancing technologies, particularly external inputs which are costly and, in any event, not likely to be available.

I say “she” because women are often the farmers of the developing world, and here in Nigeria. Unfortunately, women are also usually the most disadvantaged members of rural societies.

Yet it is estimated production on women’s farms could increase by 20 to 30 per cent if women had the same access as men to agricultural resources and inputs. Giving women equal access would reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 100 to 150 million people.

And we know, from a number of studies, when women earn money, they are more likely than men to spend it on food for the family. My experiences in the field in countries such as Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya and Uganda – to name a few – have shown how women-headed households are transforming the rural landscape. These women hold the key to ensuring food and nutrition security.

In addition to improving rural economies, we must change the perception of farming. Why shouldn’t growing the food that feeds the world be as attractive an option to young people as urban careers or jobs in industry? This means affording dignity to all wage-generating work, whether tilling the fields, running the village store or heading a small business.

All of what I have said today may sound like a very long list of things to do, but it boils down to a few remarkably simple actions.

Direct investment in agricultural research and development

• Invest in agricultural research to generate pro-poor technologies;
• Optimize conventional approaches;
• Harness the best of biotechnology;
• Invest in agricultural advisory services or extension services.

Investments in sectors strongly linked to agricultural productivity growth, particularly those that favour the integration of smallholders into markets

• Enact government policies that will create the enabling environment for agricultural investment – from farm to market, from crop to shop;
• Treat smallholder farmers as entrepreneurs and business women and men;
• Empower rural women by giving equal opportunities and access to land, credit, and inputs.

Non-agricultural investment to create rural environments that are attractive for the youth of today who will be the farmers of tomorrow

• Invest in rural infrastructure – roads, electrification, storage;
• Invest in young people.

Today in Nigeria, there has been an important shift in government policy, towards emphasising agricultural transformation from subsistence to agribusiness.

In support of this, IFAD has created a new Value Chain Development programme for rice and cassava to help smallholder producers have better access to markets and higher productivity and incomes. By creating opportunities for women and men in these areas, it will reduce rural unemployment.

The programme will strengthen the existing extension system, ensuring that the link between research and farmers is solid, so that new technology reaches the farmers who need it most. By connecting with farmers, extension also feeds back information to researchers so they can adapt research results to the farmers’ needs.

We at IFAD look forward to working in partnership with IITA and the government and people of Nigeria to not only rejuvenate the agricultural sector, but also Nigeria’s economy and social fabric, so that our nation can stand tall, as a leader in Africa and as a leader in the developing and developed world.

Thank you.

Ibadan, Nigeria
21 August 2012