To help build recovery and resilience to the impact of natural disasters and conflicts, senior special assistant to the President on agriculture, office of the Vice President, Andrew Kwasari has advocated for the provision of more insurance coverage for smallholder holders farmers in Nigeria as a way to mitigate their vulnerability to shocks.
Kwasari, who spoke as a quest during a high-level visit by officials of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations in Abuja, lamented that only one percent of Nigerian farmers are covered in the agricultural insurance scheme which he said was grossly inadequate to meet their needs in terms of respond to disasters.
He stressed the need to develop policies and offerings that can suit the smallholder farmers.
He said, “We are speaking about smallholder farmers, the people that invest their lives their livelihood, year in year out they do this, they are exposed to risks that is exposed to the hazards so, the exposure will definitely come the risks will always come but are there any mitigation? How are they covered? So to be specific, what is any guarantee or insurance offered to smallholder farmers?, there is not and don’t think in this country 1 per cent of the smallholder farmers have regular insurance against their productivity year in year out.
“So this vulnerability is not for lack of institutional arrangements. We have Nigerian Agricultural Insurance Corporation. It’s a big corporation. We have private insurance but we need to find the way to really develop these policies and offerings, so that it can suit the smallholder farmers and data has to be available but above all, honestly, we really need to deal with the weaknesses of our systems. Government have a lot of interventions meant to support smallholder farmers, but really if we take stocks, how many of the smallholder farmers benefit from this huge investment and spent?”
“Sometimes government investments come too late or they’re deliberately delayed or they are not timed. So this leaves our small holder farmers exposed and they never gave up. Next year they will still go out and today farmers and their farms are being submerged by floods and it will come again in 2023.
“Is there anything being done pragmatically to even help them? There are even ways to cut down these risks, like teaching farmers to even reclaim the land after the floods recede and plant some crops that can do within the period using the materials that has been left behind by the float, but nothing has been done to support them,” he added.
