NIRSAL, German Firm Sign MoU on Mechanisation of Post-harvest Processing

The Nigeria Incentive Based Risk-Sharing for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL) in line with its mandate to derisk post-harvest loss and promote mechanisation of post-harvest processing has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with RIELA, a leading German agricultural processing technology company, which provides complete value chain solutions.

The Managing Director of NIRSAL, Mr. Aliyu Abdulhameed, who signed on behalf of NIRSAL at the MoU signing ceremony in Abuja weekend, stated that the event was a significant step in supporting commercial agriculture in Nigeria.

According to him, It marks the strategic partnership with RIELA of Germany, adding that RIELA has over eleven production facilities across the globe including Tanzania in Africa.

He added that they are industry leader in post -harvest processing, storage and distribution technology.

“In Nigeria we are blessed with the production of various agricultural commodities, but we all know that the post - harvest loss risk is extremely alarming.

The majority of our farm produce is lost due to pest and deterioration.

This is fundamentally caused by post - harvest processing and storage practices.

We all know that we are blessed with good soil, climate, satellite and everything we need to produce maximally but the fact that you have got maximum yield doesn’t mean you have got maximum value financially speaking.

“And as a risk management company and a finance enabler if we don’t fix that segment of the value chain, it means we are carrying out risk and there’s no way that we can convince financiers to put their money in projects when loss is up to 40 to 60 per cent.

So it’s in our own self - interest as NIRSAL and its part of our mandate to see what is the issue with post- harvest loss and can we leverage technology and science and partnership to solve that problem in a commercially sustainable way,” he said.

According to him, “Our partnership with RIELA is designed to provide increased access to harvest and post- harvest technology equipment, it aims to help our farmers at the primary production level with technology, training, machinery and technical assistance.

,”We believe that this multi-level support will improve their productivity and therefore increase their income, increase the chance that this project will pay back the loan, capacity to make profit and capacity to make a living out of agriculture”.