Synergos Nigeria says it has decided to facilitate the adoption of Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) to build collaboration and drive change in agricultural value chains in the country.
Mr Victor Adejoh, the Field Manager of Synergos in charge of State Partnership for Agriculture (SPA), said this in Lokoja on Wednesday in an interview with News Agency of Nigeria (NAN).
He said that stakeholders, through the adoption of the FPOs model, would be able to look at how agricultural policies influenced actions and the entire agricultural value chains.
He noted that farmers and farmers’ groups had been facing certain challenges on how to manage production of crops for food, industry and exports, adding that the challenges had led to breach of contracts, among other consequences.
Adejoh identified coordination, capacity of leaders, crop pricing, production quality and quantity, aggregation as well as ageing leaders of groups and market access as some of the key challenges.
According to him, the adoption of the FPOs model will enable smallholder farmers, buyers and processors to connect with producers who can reliably deliver sufficient quantities of produce at the right time.
“The FPOs in this scenario can offer a central point of contact that reduces transaction costs for buyers.
“FPOs may also undertake important intermediary activities such as transportation, storage, quality control and processing,’’ he said.
Adejoh noted that the country’s agricultural sector was besmirched with inconsistency in governance and policy at the state and local government levels, inconsistency in agricultural policy formulation and implementation , as well as corruption and politics.
He said that other challenges included poor rural development strategies, financial exclusion and the grant of agricultural loans to “arm-chair farmers’’ who had not invested in any agricultural project.
Adejoh said that it was against this backdrop that Synergos Nigeria had concluded arrangements to organise the first Annual Smallholder Farmers, Producer Organisations Forum in Abuja.
He added that the forum would facilitate plans to put in place crop production quality and quantity strategies to improve produce pricing, while creating room for better economies of scale. (NAN)
