Sorghum In West Africa

Nigeria is the largest producer of sorghum in West Africa accounting for about 71% of the total regional sorghum output. Sorghum is the 3rd cereal in terms of quantity of production in Nigeria. Production declined since 2014 due to the strong reduction of both area harvested and yields. Sorghum is considered as a thinly traded commodity owing to the small amount of exports and imports. A large part of the production is self-consumed.

Agricultural industry was accorded scanty attention after the discovery of oil in commercial quantity in Nigeria. This has created a gap between the demand and supply of domestic food requirements. Consequently, the country has found it increasingly difficult to feed her teeming population and supply the local

By the late 1970s, it was apparent that the macro planning or the transformational approach to agricultural development could not achieve the desired purpose of bridging the gap between demand and supply of food crops. Hence the government of the nation diverted its attention to small scale farmers as the centrepiece of the country’s agricultural development efforts (Oredipe and Akinwumi, 2000). Most of the initiatives pursued by the government were planned and organized around the small-scale farmers. Some of these programmes included; the National Accelerated Food Production Project, (NAFPP) 1972; Agricultural Development Programme, (ADPs) 1975; Operation Feed the Nation, (OFN) 1976; National Seed Service, (NSS) 1977; Agricultural Credit Guarantee Scheme, (ACGS) 1977; River Basin Development Authority, (RBDAs) 1977; Green Revolution Programme, (GRP) 1980, Directorate of Food Roads and Rural Infrastructure, (DFRRI) 1986; National Agricultural Land Development Authority, (NALDA) 1991; National Fadama Development Project, (NFDP) 1992; National Agricultural Research Project, (NARP) 1999; Nigerian Agricultural Cooperatives and Rural Development Bank, (NACRDB) 2000; National Agricultural Development Fund, (NADF) 2002; Commodity Marketing and Development Companies, (CMDS) 2003 to mention a few (Oredipe and Akinwumi, 2000; Babatunde and Oyatoye,

What is observable across the country is a case of gross inability to achieve self sufficiency in the production of local food such as sorghum, maize, rice, yam and millet among others. In the opinion of Idachaba (2005), over 50 percent of the Nigeria population is food insecure and several studies (Onyenwaku and Ukeagbu, 1987; Okuneye, 1990 and IITA, 1995) attributed the high food deficit in the country to low resource productivity and macroeconomics instability induced disincentives to agricultural production.

To reverse this scenario, Zalkuwi (2013) stated that there is the urgent need to improve the productivity and efficiency of resource use among farmers in the study area. There is, also, the need to investigate the nature of productivity and efficiency in production among small scale farmers under sorghum