By Bashir Bello

KANO — The African Development Bank programme, Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation, TAAT has clamoured for wheat farming revolution in Nigeria.

The TAAT Programme Coordinator, Dr. Chrys Akem made the call during a 2-day stakeholders meeting in Kano to chart way forward towards making Nigeria self-sufficient in wheat production and also halt importation.

Akem stressed the need for Nigeria to put concerted efforts in place towards making the country self-sufficient in wheat production noting that countries like Ethiopia and Sudan which Nigeria started the struggle with have made headway.

Akem said the stakeholders must revamp the sector in order to meet the requirement of the country for consumption.

According to him, “what we are trying to push today as a wheat revolution here in Nigeria started when we started SARD-SC project in 2014. It is a project that led to the release of three varieties that we are currently promoting. That programme involved research and through it, we screened many wheat varieties from all over the world and we were able to identify the heat-tolerant ones that were released in Nigeria, Ethiopia and Sudan.

“There were three focused countries under the SARD-SC. We had Nigeria, Ethiopia and Sudan. As we all know, Ethiopia has become self-sufficient in wheat production and in the next couple years they would start exporting wheat to neighbouring African countries. Sudan has target that they are trying to meet. The environment may slow down things and may not be moving at the same place with Ethiopia but they are moving. They have set up target to see how they can halt the importation of wheat.

“What target have we set in Nigeria? It is about time to revamp the sector. And add the name of Nigeria to the list. It’s Ethiopia and Sudan now. What is it that we need to get from Ethiopia and Sudan to help us reach the level they have reach, TAAT is ever ready to help to achieve that,” Akem stated.

On her part, the Value Chain Specialist at TAAT Clearinghouse, Dr. Oluwatoyin Adetunji, said the goal of TAAT is to develop a robust seed sector for the provision of adequate quality wheat seed that are accessible and affordable to Nigeria Farmers with the aim of achieving expansion of local wheat production for wheat self-sufficiency and national food security.

“TAAT has provided 11M farmers in 31 countries with #climate-smart seeds, fertilisers and technical support–helping African food production increase by more than 12M metric tonnes

“In Sudan, TAAT financed the provision of 65,000 metric tons of heat tolerant wheat varieties. Sudanese farmers grew on 317,000 hectares, and in just two years, Sudan reduced its wheat import by 50%.

“In Ethiopia, TAAT financed the provision of 61,000 metric tons of seeds of heat-tolerant wheat varieties to farmers in Ethiopia. The farmers cultivated 5,000 hectares of these heat tolerant wheat varieties in 2018, expanded to 167,000 hectares in 2020, and by 2021, they had grown 400,000 hectares,” She said.

Earlier, the Station Head of International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, IITA, Dr. Alpha Kamara said wheat is an important crop as a component of Bread among others and a lot of effort is needed to boost the yield which he said is still very low noting that “it is the only crop where we need to increase the area under production”.