Communities and societies round the world share many challenges; the pressures of change and globalization the drive for efficiency and return on investment, the race to gain and retain recognition at the global scene, and making more recent headlines- the global economic crunch, a planet in peril and global food shortage. Facing these and especially the latter, the need for relevant steps towards ensuring food security is more pressing now than ever before; from record high increase in prices of grains, wheat and cassava making news headlines, to the more or less silent but present shortage in supply of animal protein sources like eggs, milk, meat and fish; our global village is indeed facing what officials at the World Food Programme are calling a SLOW TSUNAMI. Enhanced and supported agriculture will undoubtedly be gateway to broad based economic growth and development.
However various youth lead organizations across Nigeria are taking decisive steps to support the global efforts towards ensuring food security in their community, with focus on fish farming, Bee Keeping, Snare & Jathropha. Worthy of mention is the SIFE team of University of Agriculture Makurdi-Nigeria, where the young undergraduate students know too well that the fish sub-sector in their area is not properly organized & depends more on COLLECTION rather than PRODUCTION. As such, obnoxious practices are often used thereby posing the danger of over fishing or even extinction. In 2000, there was 260 known species of fish. As at 2004, 12 species were considered threatened (Source: Mins. of Forestry & Water Resources), this is an agricultural divide. To help change this, the SIFE team under a project called FARM-NET (farmers network), is working to change this with the believe that organized fish farming may help reduce harvest pressure on natural stock, with the aim of booting supply to enable us meet the present demand rate, reduce pressure on over-fished waters and eliminate some factors leading to high fish prices and affecting the consumption pattern of fish.
We this understanding, the team went ahead to identify specific challenges fish farmers were experiencing in order to seek solutions that fit onto this market context. They heard a one on one interaction with farmers, with the farmers identifying some of their challenges and they both came up with a two step plan to increase productivity and profitability; these plans are story boarding and knowledge transfer sensitization & skills transfer and development hands on farm training. Through this plans veteran fish farmers and other professionals in the industry with intending farmers came together to share best practices. Issues addressed included those of water quality management, feed formulation and compounding to cut production costs, stocking sizes and the factors which ultimately complete the supply circle by bringing it to the pot of the consumer. It is said seeing it once is worth than a 1000 times hearing it. Young Fish farmers and intending ones came face to face with practical to enable a better appreciation of this trade; on overcoming one of the challenges that hinder young people from going to commercial farming, the issue of credit facility, the SIFE team brought in financial experts to take beneficiary of farm-net initiative through the ABC for loan assessment, and the how-TO for forming an agricultural cooperative.
A follow-up survey of this training done by SIFE team last year, a year after the training, 90% of the farmers demonstrated a 100% practical knowledge acquisition of the necessary skills for better and healthy management of their farms, by cutting cost by 40% by formulating quality feeds as against buying feeds at high cost and are recording an average profit increase of 35%. Encouraged by this result, the SIFE team, says “we were inspired to further propagate this message, and we so in a sensitization campaign for fisher men, urging them to desist the use of obsolete pesticides for fishing in a bid to make safe our water environment, preserve the future of natural fishing and for our children”.
The team was not just thinking of empowering the farmers and encouraging youths to go farming, but the sustainability of the project was also in focus, because if the farmers continue do well long after now, we they have achieved anything, therefore programme beneficiary formed a cooperative society to achieve and meet common goals, access loans & share best practices.
Yours sincerely was part of the UAM SIFE team for 4yrs and was part of the project, so indeed we have learnt that building a better community begins one block at a time.
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