Image Source: FAO
A defining challenge for the agriculture sector in Nigeria today is to achieve the trade-offs between livelihoods at the macro and micro levels, nutrition, food security and the planet. This challenge is defined by the changing climatic conditions in the context of high dependence on rain-fed agriculture, which is negatively affecting food productivity for a country of about 210 million people, with population growing at 2.5% per annum. The difficulty of achieving these tradeoffs was also heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic and the crisis in Ukraine, as food systems across the country proved to be vulnerable to these shocks. The development of effective policies from the National Adaptation Plan Framework (NAPF) can go a long way in the achievement of these difficult trade-offs.
The Climate Challenge and Impact on Smallholder Farmer Productivity and Food Security
Agriculture policies in Nigeria have historically tried to improve productivity in the sector. This goal of productivity increase is most desirable, given that 72% of the 38 million smallholder farmers in Nigeria who produce 90% of the food in the country, live below the poverty line of $1.9 a day. It is already very difficult to achieve this productivity objective due to, among other reasons, weak support infrastructure, inadequate mechanisation and reliance on rain-fed agriculture. If we add the challenge of changing climate conditions, especially in the last decade or so, achieving productivity growth in the sector seems a lot more remote.
With the 2022 floods having rendered 176,852 hectares of farmlands partially damaged and 392,399 hectares of farmlands totally damaged, there have been significant investment losses in the sector and its attendant negative impact on smallholder farmer productivity. With these smallholder farmers least adaptable to these changing climate conditions, there is a compounding of their already precarious poverty situation.
Beyond smallholder farmer productivity, changing climate conditions also have an impact on food security. There is anywhere between 5–20% of food security decline accompanying every incident of flood or drought and a 1.4% reduction in food calories per year from critical crops. This could drive the food import bill to reach $110 billion by 2025 if the continent’s food systems are not more resilient.
Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) Adaptation Policies
CSA is defined by the FAO as “agriculture that sustainably increases productivity, enhances resilience (adaptation), reduces/removes GHGs (mitigation) where possible, and enhances achievement of national food security and development goals.” Given the objective of CSA to help countries achieve national goals, it needs to be context-specific for the achievement of these country-specific goals.
One way to ensure this local adaptation is to integrate the policy as an essential part of the national development policies and strategies, like the National Development Plan (NDP). While there currently exists in Nigeria a National Adaptation Plan Framework (NAPF), we expect the NAPF to guide the development of new and the improvement of existing climate adaptation policies in the following areas: providing an integrated approach to adaptation that takes into cognizance the role of adaptation in improving socio-economic development, environmental management and community risk resilience; providing a baseline for adaptation activities; identifying knowledge gaps in the ecosystem and building institutional (private, public and social sector) capacity to collaborate on mainstreaming adaptation; and identifying opportunities for financing of adaptation activities.
More specifically, the NAPF needs to give birth to policies that not only correct the climate change market failure but also shape an ecosystem where innovation will drive food systems adaptation. This creates a productivity growth model that depends more on total factor productivity growth and less on resource intensity increase, as the adaptation innovation is expected to ‘do more with less’. The role of policy in stimulating innovation to achieve productivity growth without corresponding resource intensification can be seen in the success story of climate-smart agriculture adaptation of rice production in Vietnam.
The Vietnam CSA Adaptation Success Story and Lessons for Nigeria
About half the world’s population depends on rice for about 20% of their daily calorie intake, which makes it one of the most strategic crops in the global agriculture value chain. This also makes it a huge contributor to climate change, with flooded rice fields contributing about 10% of all human-activity induced methane emission. Rice production is also water intensive, as about 40% of total irrigation water globally is used to grow rice.
With 43.4 million tonnes of rice produced in 2019, Vietnam is the fifth largest producer of rice. About 9 million rice farmers in Vietnam are vulnerable to climate change (declining and unpredictable rainfall, as well as increased salinisation of farmlands from rising sea levels) and rising input costs, making it extremely difficult for these farmers to produce rice even at a subsistence level. The country implemented a sustainable intensification programme involving 1 million farmers in 22 provinces, which saw farmers combine organic and synthetic fertiliser to double their yields and reduce input costs by about 95%. Putting this in specific context, on the average, farmers increased their yields by 9–15%, used 70–75% less seed, 20–25% less nitrogen fertiliser, and 33% less water, boosting their income by between $95 and $260.
Nigeria is Africa’s largest rice producer with 5 million tonnes produced per year and local consumption of 6.7 million tonnes per year. This is a local gap of 1.7 million tonnes per year, not considering export opportunities. Obviously, the social, political, economic and ecological realities of both countries are different. However, the Vietnam experience provides inspiration for Nigeria to explore the opportunities that adaptation policies hold in adapting farming practices to climate conditions but also improving farmer productivity. This is particularly contextual as research shows that increase in temperature and precipitation will cause a reduction in net revenue for dryland rice production, quite like the context for the Vietnam innovation.
Climate Financing, an Adaptation Constraint
One of the challenges with adaptation is the poor financial capacity of especially smallholder farmers to adapt to climate smart practices. We also expect the NAPF to guide the development of climate financing policies, that will support smallholder farmers manage the tradeoffs between short-term investments in climate-smart agriculture adaptation and the medium to long-term benefits. This goes back to the need to locate climate-smart agriculture adaptation in Nigeria’s national development plan, to ensure that there is proper budgetary provision for it.
Nigeria’s enormous agriculture potential and the need for its food systems to become more resilient and adaptable to changing climate conditions is also an opportunity for private and concessional development capital to fund adaptation activities. This is without prejudice to the need for ecosystem partners (research institutes, private organisations, farmer groups, processors, governments at various levels and extension service providers) to collaborate to create bankable solutions that are commercially viable, technically feasible and socially impactful. The need for this is heightened, given that global flow of climate finance capital has been more focused on globally generic mitigation strategies rather than locally relevant adaptation activities.
Political will to Implement Adaptation Policies
Perhaps most importantly, given the peculiar challenges of policy implementation in Nigeria, the NAPF needs to provide adaptation policies that take into cognisance the political ecology of the Nigerian state. Agriculture is a deeply political subject in Nigeria, given the sector’s contribution to GDP and people employed in it. Government subsidies for inorganic/chemical fertilisers are a huge part of the social contract between the government and farmers involved in primary production. There may be a need to re-allocate some of these subsidies to funding adaptation practices, something that will obviously be a hot potato topic that could have serious political implications. Also, any adaptation policy that does not provide a clear role for the sub-national governments may not likely be domesticated by these sub-nationals, frustrating implementation at the local level.
Policy Action to Manage Existential Threats
About 70% of rural productivity in Nigeria is dependent on subsistence smallholder farmers. This makes climate change an existential socio-economic threat to rural communities in Nigeria. This calls for a policy that can deliver a food system that is resilient, efficient and progressive. With a well implemented climate smart agriculture adaptation plan, we could just be delivering a more prosperous future for the 38 million smallholder farmers in Nigeria, and social, economic & environmental resilience for the tens of thousands of farming communities they call home. CSA adaptation policies can help deliver this prosperity for the future. That future starts today.
