High transportation costs are limiting farmers in Lagos from taking their produce to major markets, a farmers’ leader has said.
The Chairperson of Ojo Farmers Community, Mrs Mayriam Ali, disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos.
Ali said many farmers had ready buyers for their produce but lacked affordable means of transporting vegetables from their farms to urban markets.
She said the challenge often forced farmers to rely on middlemen or reduce the quantity of produce they took to market.
“Because of transportation, I have people buying from me at Mile 12 and Mushin, but the major challenge I have is the means of transporting it,” she said.
Ali said she currently had more than 120 beds of shoko and other vegetables available for sale, but transportation constraints were limiting her ability to move the produce to buyers.
According to her, some prospective buyers had contacted her after learning that she had produce available, but the lack of affordable transport remained a major obstacle.
She said providing affordable farm-to-market transportation would enable farmers to sell directly to traders and improve their earnings.
Ali urged the government to provide vans or other suitable vehicles to farming clusters under a leasing arrangement.
Under the proposal, she said farmers would pay for the service while the government retained ownership of the vehicles and monitored their use.
“If we have a van and we are in a cluster, I will know that it is available in the morning and quickly go and pick the produce for them,” she said.
She explained that such an arrangement would reduce the cost of moving individual bags of produce from farms to collection points.
Ali said farmers currently paid different amounts to local transporters depending on the distance between their farms and collection points.
She also recalled how transportation problems affected some of her previous farming projects outside Ojo.
According to her, her group once cultivated watermelon on leased farmland but struggled to transport the harvest to market. Only one of about 10 groups involved in the project succeeded, as some members were unable to monitor their farms regularly or move their produce after harvest.
Ali called on the government to make farm transportation part of its agricultural support programmes, particularly for farming clusters supplying vegetables to urban markets.
She said improved transportation would strengthen the link between farmers and traders, reduce the difficulties of moving fresh produce and encourage farmers to increase production by giving them greater confidence that their harvests could reach buyers on time.