Page:Niger Delta Ecosystems- the ERA Handbook, 1998.djvu/140

The Resources of the Niger Delta: Agriculture agroforestry should not jump to conclusions or carry pre-conceptions which are mythical. In this respect, it is also worth quoting work done by Lawry, Steinburger & Jabbar, the results of which were published in 1992. (Land Tenure & the Adoption of Alley Farming in West Africa.) They say that in Nigeria, 66% of farming land is under tenure, not systems that provide long-term security. They go on (also quoting P. Francis, 1987, "Land Tenure Systems and Agricultural Innovation: the case for alley farming in Nigeria") to differentiate between land tenure systems in the Southwest and Southeast.

In the Southwest, most farmers had long-term individual inherited rights to use land. Though they might not always have had individual property, the arrangements were not unfavourable for the adoption of technologies like alley farming.

In South-eastern Nigeria, land could be categorised in three ways: compound land, near fields and distant fields. While compound land is controlled and used by individual households, the use of near and distant fields is to a varying degree controlled by extended families and by community level decisions. Because these lands are reallocated for use after every fallow cycle, the same person or family may not get the same plot every time. Under such conditions there may be little incentive to adopt alley farming. (And even less incentive, one assumes, to plant perennial trees.)

The current system ensures that the small farmer does not have access to cheap fertiliser. Even if the fertiliser market was liberalised, many farmers would not be able to afford it, especially women and where transport is expensive.

Farmers cannot afford to waste energy on anything which does not show an obvious and fairly immediate return, which is a major reason why exotic agroforestry technologies, which have long term benefits, are not taken up. Even the immediate yield benefits of alley cropping may not be considered worth the extra labour involved, particularly if the hedgerow plant does not yield a useful crop.

For this reason, as has been said, farmers are more likely to spend time working on land near home. This is by no means always the case particularly where tree crops have been planted, but it is most often the case because land far away from home requires an expenditure of energy just to get there.

13.2.4 THE OIL PALM AND ITS PRODUCTS

The most common tree in the LEM ecozone is the Oil Palm, so that palm oil and palm kernel are important products of the agricultural economy of the whole area. There is a ready market for these products, and even on the most degraded soils of the ecozone, oil palms grow well and apparently yield well. They are a good small-farmer cash crop.

Local farmers are well acquainted with the production of palm oil and kernels, from producing a palm seedling to processing oil and cracked kernels. However the local industry is held back by the strenuous effort (by men, women and children) needed to produce the oil. This involves primitive methods whereby fruit is shaken or cut off the bunch, then boiled to soften the fruit, which is subsequently mashed, pounded or pressed in a variety of ways to squeeze out the oil and separate the kernels. Sometimes the oil is boiled again as a refinement and the kernels are sold to cracking mills. Small cooperative palm oil and palm cracking mills, or even just presses (for squeezing the oil out of the boiled fruit) would encourage production to the benefit of local income and to Nigeria which needs to increase production. 138