Daily Independent (Lagos)
31 December 2008
We welcome the news from Delta State that commodity marketing boards hitherto defunct are to be resuscitated. The Delta State Governor, Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan, deserves commendation for this much-needed initiative.
The State Government, he assured, is set to begin mopping up produce glut from farmers in the State for re-sale to the public. It is important to re-state here the Governor's assurance that "the state will not only be self-sufficient in food production, but be in a position to produce enough for the export market."
The position of the Delta State government is a clear reflection that the age of unreason is beginning to recede. Swallowing hook, line and sinker the prescriptions of the Bretton Woods institutions has had a detrimental effect on many facets of our social and economic life.
In the advent of the worldwide economic melt-down, every position is now open to re-thinking. This is very welcome. For as we have seen from the response of the promoters of the Bretton Woods prescription to the current global economic turmoil, the medicine is perhaps too strong for the physician to take.
Those who will have us to believe that there is no space for government in anything are now using the might of government to provide the economic stimulus to revive their own economies.
We have long known that there was no need to scrap the commodity boards in the first place. The action was carried out not as a response to local realities, but as part of the usual concessions routinely demanded by the Bretton Woods institutions. The cost, of course, has been catastrophic. Not surprisingly the physician did not prescribe the same medicine at home. Which is why the European Common Agricultural policy as well as manner of farm support mechanism in the United States has been growing stronger.
They, very sensibly, did not fall into the mantra that price support and monitoring mechanisms should be scrapped.
The Delta State Government, obviously with its strategic planning on course, was absolutely correct to reiterate its total commitment to the re-introduction of the commodity boards whose produce floods the markets, in order to absorb the excess and stabilise prices.
What had been required in the past was the need to retool the commodity marketing boards in the advent of globalisation. It was the uncritical acceptance of every dictation from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank that led to their scrapping. The cost has been terrible. For one there has been no massive upsurge in exports; on the contrary, the quality control mechanism in-built into the commodity boards has been thrown out. The result is that the branding and quality assurance which this mechanism entailed has been lost. We now have exports being underpriced or rejected as a result. What we have also lost include product and market knowledge and continuing development of technical skill is within the domestic economy which could now be leveraged for export promotion.
It is very important to also note that to modernise our agriculture we need a well-worked out system of minimum farm gate price mechanism. This will serve as both stimulus as well as safeguard to increase farm output with the farmer assured of a minimum guaranteed farm gate price. This tried and tested mechanism is in use everywhere apart from those countries which have fallen victim of the Bretton Woods institutions.
To state the obvious, the commodity boards are also an invaluable tool for co-ordinating and strengthening extension services. Without extension services to introduce new farming methods and seedlings, co-ordinate the use of fertilizers, help in securing markets and so forth, it beats the imagination as to how agriculture will be modernised. With low literacy levels all these sorts of services are absolutely vital and indeed essential.
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