The population of Brazil is just 9 million higher than Nigeria’s. Both countries are blessed with fertile land and exportable cash crops.
The difference, however, is that Brazil turns its sugarcane into raw sugar and exports to Nigeria, while Nigeria sells its own cocoa to the United States and in turn buys chocolates from the world’s biggest economy.
Partly as a result, Brazil’s GDP is $1.85 trillion while Nigeria’s is $397 billion—nearly five times bigger.
The South American country earned over $8 billion from sugar alone in 2018/19, even with 24 percent decrease in production.
That is three times Nigeria’s earnings from all of its non-oil export products in that year. About 1.2 million Brazilians work in sugarcane plantations and this number triple when the processing and refining segments are considered.
In 2011, Brazil contributed 5 percent to world’s milk production.
In 2018 Brazil exported $242 billion worth of goods —more than half of Nigeria’s GDP— making it the number 25 exporter in the world.
Brazil has 220,000 coffee farms with each farm employing at least five people, and it earns over $5 billion annually from its exports.
Brazil’s success in making its agriculture market-oriented through value addition and investments in research holds many lessons for Nigeria in employment generation.
“Nigeria should learn from Brazil how it grew its agriculture by stimulating value addition and local demand for its agro commodities,” said Babatunde Shodipe, senior manager-export development financing, African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank), at a First Bank agribusiness summit recently.
According to Shodipe, more wealth and employment is generated in the value chains that are closer to the consumers, saying that processing to the retailing of any agric commodity chain account for 80 percent of the entire profits of the produce.
The total number of people in employment (people with jobs) in Q2 2020 in Nigeria was 58.5 million, according to the NBS, which is nearly the population employed in agriculture in Indonesia in 2013 (49m), according to the country’s data agency. Indonesia has 68 million more people than Nigeria.
Nigeria’s agriculture is making some progress, nonetheless. In real terms, the sector grew by 1.58 percent (year-on-year) in Q2 2020, but this represents a decrease of 0.21 percent from the corresponding period of 2019. On a quarter-on-quarter basis, the sector grew at 6.57 percent.
The sector contributed 24.65 percent to aggregate real GDP in Q2 2020, higher than the contributions in the second quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2020, which stood at 22.78 percent and 21.96 percent, respectively, said the NBS.
Even though Nigeria’s labour intensive method seems to be generating a lot of jobs, most of the jobs are subsistence as they earn less than $2 per day, making them poor.
Mechanisation in Nigeria agriculture, which can expand the value chain and create more jobs, is lacking, according to NOI Polls.
Nigeria is one of the least mechanised farming countries in the world with the country’s tractor density put at 0.27hp/hectare, which is far below the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) recommended tractor density of 1.5hp/hectare.
Nigeria is 132nd out of the 188 countries worldwide measured by FAO/United Nations in terms of the number of tractors in the country. This is one reason farming has been mainly subsistence, rather than commercial.
Yield per hectare is low in Nigeria compared with other emerging economies. Nigeria’s yield per hectare for rice is two, whereas it is 6.3 in Brazil, 3 in Ethiopia, 2.8 in South Africa, and 4.2 in Kenya. Also, Nigeria has 6.4 yield per hectare for tomato, 71.9 in Brazil, 6.2 in Ethiopia, 75.5 in South Africa, and 21.2 in Kenya.
“We must address lingering infrastructural challenges that have continued to hinder us from developing the agriculture that can create jobs,” said Kola Adebayo, a professor at the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta.
“This is what the likes of Brazil did. With infrastructure and the right technology, we will realise the potential of our agriculture,” Adebayo said.
The Nigerian government has renewed its focus on the agricultural sector since the late 2014 collapse of global crude oil prices.
The shift was necessitated by the growing statistics of youth unemployment and the vast agricultural potentials that can drive a more sustainable economic development in Africa’s most populous nation.
Triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a consensus across board that there is no better time to leverage the potentials in the agricultural sector than now, not just to pull out of the recent recession, but also to diversify the economy and place it on the path of sustainable growth and development.
Experts say Nigeria will be able to generate more jobs and hedge its farmers against price volatility when the country adopts Brazil’s model of concentrating more investments in agric research and value addition.
Shodipe, earlier quoted, cited an example using the Brazilian coffee model, where the country was able to drive local production and processing as well as promote local consumption to ensure jobs were created and coffee farmers were hedged against global price volatility.
Analysts say central to the Brazilian model is investment in research to raise incomes and productivity of farmers, thus resulting in lower food prices.
Nigeria has constantly focused more on supporting farmers with finance – that has been marred with a high rate of corruption rather than addressing lingering issues that have limited productivity for decades and driving industrialisation through the sector.
Abiodun Olorundenro, operations manager, Aquashoots Nigeria, said despite the country having a dedicated research institute for specific crops, the country was yet to boost its farmers’ productivity.
Annual income of farmers in Nigeria is $9,815, according to the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FOA), but this is lower than Brazil’s $11,472; Ethiopia’s $14,952, South Africa’s $20,193, but higher than Thailand’s $6,346. Food production in Nigeria is insufficient to satisfy 200 million population.
Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, has seen its unemployment rate increase to a record high of 27.1 percent in the Q2 2020, data from the NBS show.
