It is a crime against humanity that Nigeria is not the world's largest manufacturer of animal feed compounds

Ayo Akinfe

[1] You know, sometimes maybe if we celebrate ourselves and acknowledge how much we can do, it will spur us on to doing greater things. Do you know that Nigeria accounts for about 70% of global yam production with an annual output of about 40m tonnes?

[2 According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the value of the yam Nigeria produces is about $6bn. Unfortunately, however, our farmers are not seeing any of this wealth. As far as I am aware, there is not one yam millionaire in Nigeria

[3] Yam is an important dietary element for Nigerian and West African people. It contributes more than 200 calories per person per day for more than 150m people across West Africa. There will thus always be a demand for it

[4] In Europe and North America, yam is used as an animal feed supplement. It is added to livestock feed compounds. Just imagine how much Nigeria would generate if we were exporting yam to livestock farmers in every European Union country

[5] In Nigeria, our cattle are skinny and bony because we do not have the initiative to feed them compounds. Like the caveman, we still allow our livestock to graze off grass, which is low in nutritional content

[6] One of the reasons behind the current herdsmen crisis in Nigeria is that our cattle are thinking ahead of us. Tired of eating grass, they are going into farms to eat more nutritious foods like yam and maize

[7] Do you know that across Asia, yam is also used in numerous traditional meals? For instance in China, it is used to make Taro paste, a traditional Cantonese cuisine. Also in India, it is a popular accompaniment to rice dishes and fish curry

[8] If our agriculture ministry officials did a tour of Japan, Vietnam, The Philippines and Indonesia, they would find out that there is a market worth at least $10bn for yam products. With the right storage and transportation facilities, we could easy establish a global monopoly

[9] Nigeria should own the world’s only Yam Trading Company that process and distributes the crop worldwide. It should easily match your $50bn we get annually from the sale of crude oil. For some reason we have this mental block that oil and gas is the only way to wealth

[10] Not only should we be producing yam but we should also be manufacturing specialist equipment like a yam harvester, yam peelers, yam grinders, etc. Our economic problems are essentially psychological. We simply do not have enough faith in our ability. If not, yam alone would easily match what we generate from crude oil