Man has always managed to turn adversity into opportunity. I am thus perplexed as to how Nigeria has not used the herdsman crisis to turn the nation into the world's largest milk producer by 2030

Ayo Akinfe

[1] Anywhere else you go on planet earth, a crisis leads to the introduction of measure that turn the adversity into opportunity

[2] Just look at World War Two. After suffering severe shortages during the conflict, the Europeans introduced their Common Agriculture Policy. This led to the biggest food glut ever seen

[3] One also only needs to look at the after effects of Covid-19. Today, Zoom and Teams meetings have led to millions of dollars in savings as travel and hotel accommodation have been cut drastically

[4] Nigeria accidentally stumbled on an opportunity to make a major breakthrough in the livestock and dairy industry but alas, we have not taken it

[5] We are shamelessly a net importer of milk despite the fact that we have something like 5m cattle in Nigeria. Last year, Nigeria only produced a paltry 700,000 tonnes of milk domestically.

[6] We consume about 1.3bn tonnes of milk annually, so spend between $1.2bn and $1.5bn annually to bridge the gap between production and consumption

[7] Why five or six of our state governors with huge land masses did not create mega ranches to gather all these herdsmen together and start making millions is totally beyond me. Just imagine how much their states would be generating if their had abattoirs, leather and dairy plants functioning at full capacity

[8] Once they had these mega ranches in place, all they then had to do was give them steep milk production targets

[9] Personally, I would build one mega ranch each in the six largest states of Nigeria and get a dairy company to open a nearby milk processing plant. If you have one such plant in Niger, Borno, Taraba, Yobe, Kaduna and Bauchi states, with each producing say 200m tonnes of milk a year, we are nearly there

[10] Do you know that global milk production has nearly tripled since 1961, reaching around 950m tonnes today. Nigeria has basically been fast asleep while everyone else is soldiering on.

Look at the world's top 10 producers:

[1] India - 213.77m tonnes

[2] US - 102.74m tonnes

[3] Pakistan - 62.55m tonnes

[4] China - 39.9m tonnes

[5] Brazil - 35.94m tonnes

[6] Germany - 33.18m tonnes

[7] Russia - 32.97m tonnes

[8] France - 25m tonnes

[9] Turkey - 21.56m tonnes

[10] New Zealand - 21m tonnes

ayoakinfe@gmail.com