allAfrica.com: Nigeria: 57 Types, Poor Local Production (Page 1 of 3)

"The National Cereals Research Institute (NCRI) was established in 1898 during the colonial administration of Alfred Maloney. Around 1915, Lord Lugard renamed it the Federal Agricultural Research Station."

How will it strike you to hear that Nigerians eat rice in deficit of two million tonnes yearly in contrast to the quantity they must produce to enable them eat enough of it? This is the fact, according to the National Cereals Research Institute (NCRI), Badegi, Niger state.

The country's oldest and foremost cereals research institute posits that Nigerians need five million tonnes of rice, the current global master of the menu, yearly to eat to qualify as eaters of enough rice according to their current 150 million populations. They now supply themselves only three million tonnes to eat. Formal export is far out of thinking.

It posits that Nigerians now need 1.5 million tonnes of sugar to eat in their various foods and beverages, which is far more than the about 800,000 tonnes used to be produced by the sugar companies in the country when they were operating.

The know-all-about-rice-and-sugar institute conducts its own researches and measures its concrete achievements and breakthroughs over the last one century on the scale of its restructured and refocused mandate, travails and constraints, successive government policies and funding.

The National Cereals Research Institute (NCRI) was established in 1898 during the colonial administration of Alfred Maloney. Around 1915, Lord Lugard renamed it the Federal Agricultural Research Station. By 1945 it metamorphosed into the Federal Department of Agricultural Research. By the enabling Act of 1975 establishing other research institutes, it became the National Cereals Research Institute by which it is known today. It was first located in Ibadan in 1898.

On establishment in 1898, the NCRI's mandate covered all the food and cash crops research in all the protectorates making up the current Nigeria. With the establishment of other research institutes over time, its mandate shrank accordingly. In 1975, when it adopted its present name, it was given the mandate to work on rice, sugarcane, maize and cowpea.

About three years later, there was reorganisation. Consequently, the mandate covered rice, sugarcane, soyabean, Benny seed and farming system research within the Middle-Belt. Of recent, two other minor crops - hungry rice (Accha) and castor were added to its mandate. Now the full mandate of the institute is the genetic improvement of the major crops, which are rice, sugarcane, soya bean, benny seed and the said minor ones, which are hungry rice and castor, apart from the farming system research within the Middle-Belt.

"In the early 1900s when we were working on virtually all crops," says Dr. Emmanuel Imolehin, speaking on the behest of the Executive Director of the institute, Dr. Anthony Adokole Ochigbo, on the over-time shrinking of the institute's mandate to six crops, "with the zoning of the country over time in the area of agricultural researches, the idea became that of having research institutes where the major crops are grown. For example, it is felt that rice is the major crop of this environment and soya bean and benny seed are the major crops of the Middle-Belt. That is what informed the shrinking of our mandate. Take, for example, the hungry rice you are talking about. It is essentially a Middle-Belt crop. So, most of our crops are the ones that are predominantly grown in the Middle-Belt.

According to Dr. Imolehin, "The idea is that you can fashion a research activity to be able to develop varieties and improve on existing ones so that we can have very high-yielding disease and pest-resistant varieties that can be used in these localities and beyond. You can see why our mandate shrank."

Rice as the main staple food of the major population is a crop that grows in virtually all the states of the federation. Niger State, where NCRI is located, is one of the major rice-producing states of the country. So, the institute feels it does not trifle with any opportunity to conduct research for better varieties as the topmost crop on its mandate list. But it takes utmost care to ensure that researches into other mandate crops for the required genetic improvement do not suffer according to its existing capacity and available resources.

The Director of Sugarcane Research of the institute is also a know-all about rice and other mandate crops as well as the researches into their genetic improvements.

"When you talk of genetic improvement of crops, if you take rice and sugarcane as examples, the idea is to come up with a lot of varieties that are much better than the existing ones. Consider, for example, sugarcane, either the chewing cane or the industrial cane. When we come up with these improved varieties, we don't stop there because we know that the varieties can not grow in vacuum. They have to grow in optimum medium. So we develop the technology that ensures that we get the maximum yield out of these varieties," he explained.

One major fact is that the production of an improved variety of any cereal crop is no guarantee for the achievement of the maximum possible yield during harvest. Even if a variety has the genetic potential to produce ten tonnes per hectare, but it is not properly utilised, the land is not properly prepared, the water supply is inadequate and diseases and pests are not managed, the farmer may not even harvest one tonne per hectare.

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