Muhammad Sabo Nanono, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development on Monday decried the poor growth in the Agriculture sector despite notable interventions, particularly coming from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
The Minister acknowledged that in the last 5years, only the CBN through its interventions has vigorously supported agriculture as he admitted that the fiscal authorities which he is part of have failed that all important sector.
“We need to do more on the fiscal side”, he stated, speaking at the Senior policy seminar of the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) which held in Abuja.
Despite its critical importance in terms of jobs and FX earnings, Nigeria’s agriculture only grew by 1.79% in Q2, 2019 even though it peaked up to 2.28% in Q3 and then to 2.31% in Q4.
“The Nigeria agricultural sector in recent past has attracted several influx of investment as well as the CBN intervention but we have not been able to fully tap and make optimum use of these investments. Our market are disorganized, we still have poor extension workers as well as the issue if logistics, we need to create mobility for goods and services,” Nanono stated.
Emphasizing that the potential of the sector has not been adequately harnessed, the minister stressed the country has up to 92 million hectares of arable land but has only been able to cultivate about 4 million hectares, due to continued old method of farming as against mechanisation.
“There is no way the sector can record substantial improvement without mechanization. At 7 tractors per 100 square kilometers of land, Nigeria is still far from reaching it’s target of food security as it currently need 100-200 tractors per 100 square kilometers of land.”
He further said that developing the sector is critical to addressing the issues of unemployment and malnutrition in Nigeria as the sector holds the potential to create jobs through it’s various value chains.
CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele said that Africa is not winning the war against acute hunger and malnutrition as food insecurity and malnutrition has continued to plague the lives of millions across the continent.
Represented by Isaac Okorafor, Director of Corporate Communications, Emefiele noted that according to the 2019 Global Report on Food Crises, Africa remains disproportionally affected by food insecurity with more than half of the global 113 million acutely malnurished.
“Africa which holds 65 percent of the world uncultivated arable land, particularly its vast 400 million-hectare savannas which are the world’s largest agriculture frontier, should have no business with food insecurity.
Regrettably, its agriculture continues to be vulnerable to climate- related shocks, disease, weak input supply chains, conflict and economic shocks”.
“As it has been pointed out severally, we must stop romanticizing food malnutrition in Africa, because it is evident that malnourished children today will lead to malnourished economies tomorrow,” he stated.
He stressed that binding constraints, such as limited access to technology, markets, infrastructure, finance need to be addressed as these challenges has continued to limit agriculture across the continent and reduce its potential as a wealth creating endeavour.
“Access to and secured ownership of land remain major challenges particularly for women and smallholder farmers in general because they lack eligible collateral. The absence of policies to encourage the use of movable collaterals, rather than fixed assets continues to constrain attempts to scale-up requisite financing to smallholder farmers in the region”.
Speaking further, Okorafor said that the apex bank has forged alliances with financial and non-financial institutions to improve smallholder farmers’ access to finance in furtherance of its developmental mandate.
He said that the Bank through the Nigeria Incentives-based Risk Sharing for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL) and the National Collateral Registry (NCR), as well as the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme (ABP).
Agriculture Credit Guarantee Scheme (ACGS), Agribusiness Small and Medium Enterprises Investment Scheme has intervened to deepen development in the sector with emphasis on expanding credits with single digit interest rate to about 1.5 million smallholder farmers and cultivating over 1.6 million hectares of various agricultural commodities, he told the audience.
“The programmes have also helped to reduce the nation’s food import bill from about US $3.40 billion as at 2014 to US $0.59 billion in 2018”.
He stressed on the urgent need for governments to develop innovative policies to unlock the wealth in agriculture, which market size (food and agribusiness) could be worth US $1 trillion by 2030 according to the African Development Bank (AfDB).
Njuguna Ndung’u, Executive director, AERC, in his speech said that there was urgent need of evidence based policy to address the issues of malnutrition and food security related problems on the continent.
“There is a dearth of quality data to properly inform policies on nutrition. This has tended to limit the effectiveness of agricultural policies in improving nutrition outcomes”
“In addition to data challenges, there has been lack of high-quality policy analyses that explore the effect of agricultural policies on nutrition. Hence, we need to combine forces to achieve the best nutrition outcomes”, he said.
Cynthia Egboboh, Abuja
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