Nigeria’s agriculture needs private boost to attain food sustainability, says Adefeko

Ade Adefeko, chairman of the Industrial Group of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) says for Nigeria’s agriculture to attain food sustainability, it needs adequate private investments.

In an interview with Arise Television Wednesday, Adefeko highlighted the limitations of food imports and called on private investors to invest in agribusinesses, which he says will boost sustainable food production.

“The deep pockets (Agro industries) have what it takes to take us out of our food crisis. This is because they have what is called scale,” he said.

Adefeko revealed that the country spends an average of $4 billion on wheat imports annually, which he says is not sustainable.

According to him, private agro-industries like Wacot, BUA Foods, Olam Agri, and Dangote have the resources to pull farmers together as well as empower them.

“Olam Agri supplies about 10 percent of Nigeria’s rice but this is still small,” Adefeko said. “Now imagine other agro-industries investing in rice production, we would have about 50 to 60 percent in production.”

“Agribusiness is an expensive business and we need to understand the end-to-end value chain — from seed to shelf – therefore we need to do more in terms of investments,” he added.

Nigeria currently produces about 5 million tons of rice and consumes about 7 million tons leaving a deficit of 2 million tons, hence there is a need to ramp up production, he explained.

Adefeko, who is also the director of corporate & regulatory affairs of Olam Agri stressed that Nigeria’s agric budget, which is less than 10 percent of the total budget, focuses more on recurrent expenses than capital needed to enhance the sector.

In the 2025 proposed budget, agriculture’s allocation of N826.5 billion is only 1.7 percent of the total budget (N49.74 trillion).

He stated that Nigeria was not applying the Malabo Declaration of Agriculture, a rule that notes that every country must budget at least 10 percent for agriculture from the total budget.

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He revealed while the country’s food production is increasing in an arithmetic progression, indicating slow growth, its population was growing geometrically.

“We have a food crisis emergency which if we are not careful, we might be seeing the worst food crisis in decades.”

Therefore, he called on the federal government to provide a duty-free window for people in agribusiness as well as provide enabling policies that would guide production, such as subsiding inputs like fertilisers and easy access to farm credits.

“In other countries we see production being subsidised but in Nigeria, we subsidise consumption. We have to start subsidising production,” he stressed.

He urged the federal government to provide improved mechanised tools that would encourage sustainable farming across the country.

Similarly, he called on the government to promote climate-smart agriculture practices that will help farmers adapt to the effects of climate change, a major threat to Nigerian farming today.