The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Nigeria seeks farming revival to break oil curse Posted: 04 Jul 2013 02:18 AM PDT
The Babban Gona or "Great Farm" project, in northern Kaduna state, is one of a handful where private investment is helping former subsistence farmers like Mustapha make profits for themselves and the companies backing them. When President Goodluck Jonathan was elected two years ago, he pledged reforms that would transform the lives of tens of millions of farmers who live on less than $2 a day despite occupying some of Africa's most fertile land. Oil remains the main source of foreign currency and state revenues, but agriculture is by far the biggest contributor to GDP, making up 40 percent of Africa's second largest economy. With 170 million mouths to feed and a growing food import bill thanks to the disarray in the farming sector, agriculture ministry officials say there's no time to lose. If productivity does not improve Nigeria could face a food crisis within a decade, its current account surplus would be wiped out and the credit worthiness of Africa's second biggest debt issuer would be under threat. "If we did nothing, it would be a disaster," Agriculture Minister Akinwumi Adesina told Reuters in the capital. "We don't eat oil, we don't drink it ... We cannot sustain the amount of money we use to import food," Adesina said, a Nigerian flag hanging behind his office chair. In some cases, the imports substitute for things Nigerians are growing but can't get to market or lack the means to process. The country is the second largest grower of citrus fruit in the world after China and yet it spends $200 million (131 million pounds) a year on imported fruit juice while its own produce rots, Adesina said. It also produces 1.5 million tonnes of tomatoes annually of which 45 percent perish, while consumers spend $360 million on tomato paste imported from countries such as Italy and China. Curing Dutch Disease To succeed, Adesina's reforms will need to reverse the inadvertent damage done to the sector by Africa's earliest and biggest oil and gas boom, which crowded out other commodities. In the 1960s, Nigeria was the biggest exporter of peanuts in the world and had 27 percent of the palm oil trade. It remains one of the world's top cocoa growers, but production and bean quality have declined since their heyday in the 1970s. While an elite allied to a series of military dictatorships grew rich on the spoils of the energy sector, millions of mostly subsistence farmers were given little or no help at all. The result: Nigeria is now the world's second largest importer of rice and the biggest buyer of U.S. wheat, while much of its own fertile land lies fallow. A booming population has sent its food import bill rocketing to around $11 billion a year - equivalent to more than a third of the federal budget. Agriculture also offers the best chance to cut unemployment, which feeds an Islamist insurgency in the north and oil theft in the south. Unemployment is 23 percent and youth unemployment double that, national statistics suggest. "Poverty is the source of a lot of the insecurity problems we have. A hungry man is an angry man," Adesina said. The minister plans to create 3.5 million new jobs in agriculture and boost food production by 20 million tonnes by 2015, the year of the next national election. To achieve this, he wants to boost access to microfinance for farmers and draw in $10 billion of foreign investment into farming and food processing. He has received tentative praise for early successes from foreign diplomats, bankers and aid agencies, but big agro-business projects have yet to take off. Adesina took a corrupt fertiliser subsidy out of politicians' hands and now farmers are texted subsidy vouchers directly to their mobile phones so they can recoup from fertiliser sellers, a policy used in Kenya's farming reforms. Seventy percent of farmers now receive subsidised fertiliser and seeds, compared with 11 percent under the corrupt programme previously run by state governments, Adesina said. Long road ahead? Production of rice, cassava, wheat, sorghum, and corn are rising and cocoa, Nigeria's most important export crop, looks set to go up by more than a third this season. In 2012, agriculture exports rose by 128 billion naira (516 million pounds) and food imports fell by 850 billion, Adesina says. Foreign investors such as food giant Cargill, seed company Syngenta, brewer SABMiller and Africa's richest man Aliko Dangote are planning to build everything from fertiliser plants to food processing factories. Yet rice imports still soak up $7 million a day, while poor infrastructure and policy flip-flopping have in the past seen farming potential wasted. Farmers needs infrastructure to get goods to market -- and rural Nigeria's is as woeful as it gets. Nigerian billionaire Dangote has pledged to spend $35 million on a tomato paste plant in the northern city of Kano and $45 million in Cross River state to process pineapple juice. Adesina says he has received $8 billion in commitments but such promises are often not kept in Nigeria. Cargill and SABMiller told Reuters they are only "considering" investing. "I would estimate that no more than one dollar of investment actually occurs for every $100 of announced commitments," said Fola Fagbule, an Africa-focused investment banker in Lagos. A central bank initiative has issued guarantees on around 25 billion naira of agriculture loans since it began in July last year, lifting lending to the sector to around 4 percent of total loans, from 1.5 percent at end-2009, the bank says. The World Bank is putting in $100 million into agriculture, while British and U.S. aid projects pump in tens of millions. This barely scratches the $10 billion Adesina says the sector needs by 2015. Smallholders say banks still don't lend to them, while the scheme doles out cheap money to big firms. "We've heard it all before and I have never seen it get better," says Alhaji, a farmer wrestling with two scrawny long-horned cows dragging a rusty plough through a field. "I have 15 children and ... we barely get enough food to feed ourselves," he said. Bearing fruit? A few success stories nonetheless give cause for optimism. Farmer Mustapha says he made $1,350 per hectare from his harvest after paying back private firm Doreo Partners, which runs the Babban Gona project, compared to previous years where he might earn $200 per hectare. "Now I want to grow my farm, I have so much space I never used. Now I will send my children to school," he said, while behind him mostly unused farmland stretched to the horizon. Doreo is working with 600 farmers. It has ambitious plans to boost this to 500,000 by 2020, and 5 million by 2030. "I know it sounds ambitious but it's been done elsewhere and Nigeria has so much easy-to-reach potential," said Kola Masha, the company's head. Masha is attempting to emulate giant food cooperatives like CHS in the U.S. or India's dairy franchise Amul, who make huge profits while helping millions of smallholder farmers. He gives farmers high-quality fertiliser, seeds, equipment and expertise on credit to massively increase their yields, while negotiating with firms like Nestle to buy the produce at higher prices than the farmers could get themselves. Farmers working with Masha, he said, are using 40 times more fertiliser than neighbours who could never afford that amount. "It's early days but I'm more optimistic than I've ever been," he said. - Reuters, July 4, 2013. |
| Scientists create human liver from stem cells Posted: 03 Jul 2013 08:38 PM PDT Scientists have for the first time created a functional human liver from stem cells derived from skin and blood and say their success points to a future where much-needed livers and other transplant organs could be made in a laboratory. While it may take another 10 years before lab-grown livers could be used to treat patients, the Japanese scientists say they now have important proof of concept that paves the way for more ambitious organ-growing experiments. "The promise of an off-the-shelf liver seems much closer than one could hope even a year ago," said Dusko Illic, a stem cell expert at King's College London who was not directly involved in the research but praised its success. He said however that while the technique looks "very promising" and represents a huge step forward, "there is much unknown and it will take years before it could be applied in regenerative medicine." Researchers around the world have been studying stem cells from various sources for more than a decade, hoping to capitalise on their ability to transform into a wide variety of other kinds of cell to treat a range of health conditions. There are two main forms of stem cells - embryonic stem cells, which are harvested from embryos, and reprogrammed "induced pluripotent stem cells" (iPS cells), often taken from skin or blood. Countries across the world have a critical shortage of donor organs for treating patients with liver, kidney, heart and other organ failure. Scientists are keenly aware of the need to find other ways of obtaining organs for transplant. The Japanese team, based at the Yokohama City University Graduate School of Medicine in Japan, used iPS cells to make three different cell types that would normally combine in the natural formation of a human liver in a developing embryo - hepatic endoderm cells, mesenchymal stem cells and endothelial cells - and mixed them together to see if they would grow. They found the cells did grow and began to form three-dimensional structures called "liver buds" - a collection of liver cells with the potential to develop into a full organ. When they transplanted them into mice, the researchers found the human liver buds matured, the human blood vessels connected to the mouse host's blood vessels and they began to perform many of the functions of mature human liver cells. "To our knowledge, this is the first report demonstrating the generation of a functional human organ from pluripotent stem cells," the researchers wrote in the journal Nature. Malcolm Allison, a stem cell expert at Queen Mary University of London, who was not involved in the research, said the study's results offered "the distinct possibility of being able to create mini livers from the skin cells of a patient dying of liver failure" and transplant them to boost the failing organ. Takanori Takebe, who led the study, told a teleconference he was so encouraged by the success of this work that he plans similar research on other organs such as the pancreas and lungs. A team of American researchers said in April they had created a rat kidney in a lab that was able to function like a natural one, but their method used a "scaffold" structure from a kidney to build a new organ. And in May last year, British researchers said they had turned skin cells into beating heart tissue that might one day be able to be used to treat heart failure. That livers and other organs may one day be made from iPS cells is an "exciting" prospect, said Matthew Smalley of Cardiff University's European Cancer Stem Cell Research Institute. "(This) study holds out real promise for a viable alternative approach to human organ transplants," he said. Chris Mason, a regenerative medicine expert at University College London said the greatest impact of iPS cell-liver buds might be in their use in improving drug development. "Presently to study the metabolism and toxicology of potential new drugs, human cadaveric liver cells are used, " he said. "Unfortunately these are only available in very limited quantities". The suggestion from this new study is that mice transplanted with human iPS cell-liver buds might be used to test new drugs to see how the human liver would cope with them and whether they might have side-effects such as liver toxicity. - Reuters, July 4, 2013. |
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