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Stakeholders advocate more investment in agriculture

By BusinessNews Staff on January 27, 2014

Agriculture has grown over the years and could be the future mainstay of the country’s economy, stakeholders have said.

The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina, said agriculture was a viable business, which more people should engage in not just to make food available, but to boost the economy.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Adesina said his ministry had plans to double agriculture’s share of banks’ credit to 10 per cent in two years with the aim of cutting food imports.

He said, “We were not looking at agriculture through the right lens. We were looking at agriculture as a developmental activity, like a social sector in which you manage poor people in rural areas. But agriculture is not a social sector, it is a business. Seed is a business, fertiliser is a business, storage, value added, logistics and transport are all about business.

“We made a fundamental shift that agriculture is not a developmental activity, agriculture is a business. And so, it shifted the mind-set of the banks.”

He added that loans to agriculture as a share of total credit rose to N320bn, amounting to five per cent at the end of 2013 from less than one per cent in 2011, adding that efforts to boost agriculture had yielded a drop in food import bill by more than half in the past two years.

He said against this backdrop, different agricultural programmes on food production and security had been developed.

President of the World Bank-assisted Commercial Agriculture Development Project, Mrs. Bolaji Dania, in an interview with our correspondent, said if agriculture would grow beyond its current level in the country and boost the economy as it was being positioned to, a lot of farmers needed assistance to be able to grow better than they were doing.

She said the CADP programme remained a pointer to the fact that most farmers only needed enlightenment and assistance to harness their potential.

She said, “In the federation, CADP is implemented in five different states: Lagos, Kano, Kaduna, Enugu and Cross River, but the positive results that were got from Lagos were quite encouraging as the intervention contributed 12.75 per cent to the state Agricultural Gross Domestic Product in 2012.

“Ever since the implementation programme has been introduced, the project has supported 1,483 farmers in Lagos alone under the aquaculture value chain, 741 farmers under the rice value chain and 1284 farmers under the poultry value chain.”

She said the programme had strengthened agricultural production systems and facilitated access to market for participating small and medium scale commercial farmers, with focus on rice, poultry and aquaculture, but also admitted that more people needed to be engaged in agricultural activities for its impact to be felt.

[Punch]

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