Professor Olufemi Peters is the Executive Director, Nigerian Stored Products Research Institute (NISPRI), Ilorin. In this interview with Daily Trust, he said the institute has started undergoing extreme high-tech cottage age research. Excerpts:

In what way has the West Africa Agricultural Productivity Programme come to the aid of your institute to increase technology development, dissemination as well as adoption by farmers?

Well, one of the first things that West African Agricultural Productivity Programme has done is that it has increased our research activities. It has also increased our activities towards the concept of adopted villages. When I came we had three adopted villages, we have increased it now to six. We now have it in two geopolitical zones.

Without WAAPP, it would have been very difficult to do this. There are a number of researches that we have conducted that have resulted in developed technology; and it is through WAAPP that we have been able to do this.

There is talk about research adopted villages. What is the essence of these adopted villages?

The essence of adopted villages is especially to do three things: one,it wants to reduce the mechanical labour that our farmers put in their farming activities; it could be in terms of mechanization, techniques or handling. Second, that if you are able to improve the processing in the particular adopted villages, there is going to be increase in the economy accruing to the farmers. Three, is that if the economy is sustainable, farmers don't have to go to urban areas. What it does is it reduces urban drift because if we can maintain the sustainable adopted village system it will reduce migration and enhance the economic activities therefore the need to go to urban areas will be reduced.

For us at the institute, what it does is that, it gives us an enabling environment to display and transfer the technology we have developed to be able to help farmers.

How is the response of the communities to your technologies?

The issue is before we put in any technology, we first do a need assessment where we ask the villagers a number of things. First is will they be willing to form themselves into cooperatives to manage the business? Second we ask them which farming activities they want us to intervene on?

Sometimes we have to go outside our own main developed technology - not because we are not aware of it, but because the second object of the adopted villages is to reduce urban drift. So even for a mechanical processing that does not involve our own developed technology; the fact that we are able to provide it for them under WAAPP, reducing the urban drift, increases the wealth of the farmer and improves the agric process that they are doing so that they will be able to get good quality products that they can sell. That way you are serving two different aims - you satisfy the farmer and then you satisfy the institute.

What we think should happen is that if these villages are able to sustain it, other villages will come and emulate them. If entrepreneurs see that these things are thriving, they might also go into them.

... In other words is technically an extension system?

It is an extension system of you transferring developed technology and making them to know what the technology is; teaching them and also teaching them the business aspect of maintaining the technology because after a time the fund stops. When the funds stop, they have to continue. Usually for a thing like this, it should have a gestation period of say five years during which you expect people, who are perhaps stark illiterates, to now start getting the feel of business.

So it is not something you just do this year and its works. It is something that takes time. The extension officers have to go there to teach them, if they have forgotten any of the skills, he will teach them again. The business side, too, he will try to explain to them.

These are issues about adopted village and it is WAAPP that has been able to support us and that is why we are extremely grateful to WAAPP.

When you were appointed to head this institute, what were your plans and how far have you gone in implementing them?

Well I have just spent a year and the immediate plan was that I realize that NISPRI is not known outside the NISPRI campus. So the first thing we needed to do is to re-examine our focus, re-aligned our priorities to try and make the place environmentally friendly for research and extension activities and those technologies that we've developed, try and start providing the business plan that would make the society be aware of them. If you get to our campus now we have totally made the place very friendly thanks to WAAPP again. We started undergoing extreme high-tech cottage age research. We have just developed a coating technology for our fruits and vegetables that would prolong their shelf life for at least about two weeks. So in terms of technologies, I think the institute has really developed since I came.

We have also started tackling the issue of aflatoxin which is one of the major problems affecting Nigerian export.

In actual fact, it was because of the issue of bad quality that we lost our export potentials. Let's take the issue of groundnut pyramid.

People used to make statement now that at one time we had groundnut pyramid all over the North West, especially Kano. That was the export point. But the reason why they came was because when this produce moved to Europe, the aflatoxin composition was intolerable. So we were not able to do that and gradually your product starts getting rejected and that is the issue. What we are trying to do now is that we are setting up aflatoxin centres in Kano and Lagos to be able to give assistance to Nigerian export promotion in a manner that would give our products that is going out standard.

Recently the minister of Industry Trade and Investment, Olusegun Aganga, said that almost 103 produce of Nigeria were rejected outside.

If you check, it is mostly due to bad quality, mainly because of the aflatoxins and he was saying it because he had just opened a chemical laboratory in Lagos but we need more than that. So what NISPRI is trying to offer is to compliment what the federal government or federal agencies are doing. It is our primary mandate to do that.

The other primary mandate is the pesticide residue. You know that sometimes people eat and from there they die. The recent one is that of Ondo State. But because of underfunding, we have been unable to do that. But these are things that we have the expertise to do and under my watch, these are things we have to do.

I am hoping that at the end of this year, some of these things we will be able to do and bring NISPRI back to its old glory, of what it used to be, so that the expenditure by the federal government and other donor agencies would not be a waste.