Experts, industry stakeholders, leaders and policy makers will gather at the 2019 BusinessDay’s Agribusiness and Food Security Summit to proffer possible solutions to the broken linkages between the farm and market.
The summit scheduled to hold on July 18th, 2019 at the Landmark Event Centre in Lagos, with the theme ‘Fixing the Broken Linkages between Farm and Market’, will take a pragmatic approach in advancing solutions that will fix germane problems plaguing market linkages in the agricultural sector.
Individuals and organisations with cognate experience and outstanding success rates in the agricultural sector will participate in the discourse in fixing the problems. The audience will get to learn from the insights shared, and also interact with these entities and other participants at the summit.
“To achieve real success with connecting farmers to industry – a 360-degree approach which will include the aggregators, processors, and logistics suppliers, must be considered within this value chain,” said Mauricio Alarcon, managing director and CEO, Nestlé Nigeria plc, in a statement.
“Forums such as the BusinessDay’s Agribusiness and Food Security Summit will bring all the players within the ecosystem together to design solutions to strengthen the linkages. This is why we continue to support this event over the years,” Alarcon said.
He said that his organisation expects that the 2019 summit will help in making progress towards an end-to-end solution in line with its theme.
Focus areas for this year’s summit include risk management approaches to agricultural finance and trading; as lack of access to adequate financing by farmers and other actors in the sector has remained a major impediment to increase productivity and sustain growth.
The summit will champion purposeful discourse on ways banks can hedged against risks associated with funding agriculture so that the sector can attract more finance from the financial sector.
The second area of focus will attempt to solve the issues of post-harvest losses as farmers continue to lose more than half of their produce owing to inadequate storage facilities.
The discus will centre on innovations and technologies that can help address the issue of post-harvest losses.
The third area of focus will be on the state of agriculture across various states in the country. Government officials and representatives from various states will give insights on projects executed or designed to create jobs through the sector.
Owing to this, Governor Godwin Obaseki of Edo state will be the special guest of honour at the summit.
The fourth area of focus will be on improving attractiveness of local backward integration for multinationals in Nigeria. This panel discussion will also attempt to identify ways of making backward integration attractive in harnessing Nigeria’s agric resources, creating jobs and a ready market through the value chains.
Lastly, there will be a fireside chat on the role of quality inputs.
Furthermore, there is need to better streamline the process from farm to markets to create efficient supply chain system that is based on well-defined market mechanism and pricing of agricultural commodities which will also be discussed at the summit.
Also, advocacy for policy change and support for private sector action will be of utmost priority across all sessions.
Josephine Okojie
