Nigeria's battered farmers to get $20 million to aid crop output

By Abraham Achirga and Libby George
BAKIN KOGI/LAGOS, Nigeria, Oct 20 (Reuters) - Mary Daniel, a
slight woman in her 40s, weeds by hand a field dotted with trees
and scraggly sesame plants.
A widow with seven children, she is among the 70% of all
Nigerians employed in agriculture. She has grown sesame, maize
and cassava her whole life, but coronavirus lockdowns forced her
to abandon her three hectares. "We stayed at home, and everything came to a standstill,"
she said, speaking in her village of Bakin Kogi in Nasarawa
state, east of the capital Abuja.
Daniel is now among 65,000 Nigerian farmers who will access
tractors, seeds, fertilizer and finance from a $20.4 million
grant from the Mastercard Foundation aimed at helping
agriculture recover from the COVID-19 pandemic in a way that
will help it to withstand future crises such as climate change.
Under the arrangement, in which the Foundation teamed up
with Alluvial Agriculture, a farming collective, some 200
tractors, 330,000 kilograms of seeds, climate advisories and
digital payment systems will enable farmers like Daniel to help
feed the nation of nearly 200 million people.
"We are bringing farmers together in what we call community
blocks so they can support each other... and to attract a large
pool of finance so they can continue to expand," Alluvial
founder Dimieari Von Kemedi said.
The average Nigerian farm has 1.8 hectares, according to the
U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, but the project will
group them into 500-hectare collectives to create economies of
scale.
Despite years of government attention and millions of
dollars in targeted Central Bank loans, Nigeria's farms have low
yields and less than 1% of farmland is irrigated.
Many work the fields by hand and cannot access fertilizer or
high-quality seeds. Food inflation hit nearly 17% last month
following coronavirus-related disruption and flooding in the
northwest. Bala Musa, another Nasarawa state farmer, said the grant
would keep him afloat after the lockdowns cut his access to
Lagos markets earlier this year: "If not for them we wouldn't
have been able to farm."