The Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security(FMAFS) and National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) on Wednesday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on the development of verifiable database of genuine farmers accros all parts of the nation.
Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Abubakar Kyari, while speaking with newsmen after the signing of the MoU in Abuja, said that the initiative would capture two million farmers within the next three months.
While explaining that after the pilot stage, the registration of farmers would be scaled up to six million in the second phase, and continued until all the farmers in Nigeria are captured in the exercise, Kyari lamented that many Federal Government’s interventions do not get to genuine farmers and agro-dealers due to lack of verifiable database of farmers across the country.
Describing the initiative as “a game-changer,” the minister said it would enable the Federal Government to reach genuine farmers, which would in turn boost food productivity and guarantee food security in the country.
According to Kyari: “What we have just signed with the National Identity Management Commission
(NIMC) is the development of a farmer register.
“We are going to use the platform that NIMC has, that is, the National Identification Number (NIN), the National Identity Card, which will contain all the biometric information of the individual farmer.
“We are going to, first and foremost, identify the farmland of the farmers. So, that is where we are now going to actually register a genuine farmer, who will have only one biometric and one NIN.
“So, we will know actually who we are dealing with, in terms of interventions, who we are going to target, and that is first.
“We will have a primary information and then, the secondary information will give us the location of the farmer, the location of the farmland, the types of crops, the types of soil, the type of farm cultivation, whether it is irrigation or wet, rain-fed irrigation, rain-fed cultivation.”
He added: “So, we know precisely we are going to have a register that seeks to intervene and support a genuine farmer.
“The register will eliminate all kinds of issues that we have had, including portfolio farmers and ghost farmers and so on and so forth.
“So in a sense, this is in line with Mr. President’s Eight-Point Agenda on food security to intervene and support the real farmers, which will now produce more, that will give us a successful and bountiful harvest.”
Kyari further explained that the farmers’ database or register would be domiciled in the ministry, adding that a lot of resources would be saved as a result of the exercise.
Abisoye Coker-Odusote, Director General and Chief Executive Officer of the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), in her response, assured that the Commission would work assiduously to deliver on the exercise.
Coker-Odusote added that the Commission has offices in all the local government areas across the country, adding that the Commission would work with the private sector to register farmers at the community level.
Commenting on the readiness of NIMC, she said: “We have a three-month timeline for the registration of two million farmers.
“NIMC has its own processes for ensuring that we register the farmers because we have to capture their biometric information, which is sensitive data. So we follow the normal process of doing that.
“We have offices in every local government area across the country, and we also have state offices in every state.
“So, we will be utilising all of our resources to be able to ensure that goes to them. So our teams have formed a working group, and they are definitely going to go out to the group to operationalise their plan that has been agreed today, which we have signed.
“So we have, through our partnership with the private sector, we have the front-end partners who are working with NIMC in the community areas.
“So they will be able to reach out to the farmers.
“Our role at NIMC is to make sure that we use the NIN to be able to link the end-to-end life cycle of that farmer beneficiary who would be able to access government services at any point in time under the Ministry of Agriculture and Food and Security.”
