BusinessDay has postponed its first virtual annual Agribusiness and Food Security Summit that will bring policymakers, leaders, and industry stakeholders together to advance agribusiness in the country.
The summit, which was earlier scheduled for Thursday, August 27, will now hold on September 3, 2020.
The summit with the theme ‘Interventions-at-Risk: The Outlook for Smallholder Farmers Assistance, Empowerment, and Integration’ will assess the sustainability and scalability of intervention programmes and policies of the government for smallholder farmers from a business standpoint.
Participants drawn from government, research institutions, banks, investors, project owners, project developers, commercial farmers, international partners, and the agro-processing industry will dissect the real issues of agric intervention programmes and recommend concrete steps that should be made so that the country realise its full agricultural potential.
The audience will get to learn from the insights shared, and also interact with these entities and other participants at the summit.
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Focus areas for this year’s summit include a review of the Agricultural Promotion Policy (2016-2020) and its impact on states. Discussants on the panel will review the accomplishments of the APP, where it stumbled, why, and how improvements can be made.
The second panel will focus on the performance of the Anchor Borrowers Programme (ABP) – the most high-profile agricultural intervention programme in Nigerian history. Discussants on the panel will examine the financial and non-financial performance of ABP.
The third panel will focus on how the country can achieve efficiency and raise the resilience of its backward integration programme.
Discussants at the forum will look at the challenges facing multinationals that were required by the government to locally source the agricultural raw materials they use for production. It will also look at what the multinationals are voluntarily doing to support the most vulnerable link in their supply chain, that is, the smallholder farmers.
A number of the issues they face are quality standards mismatch and the high cost of local sourcing versus importation among others.
The last panel focus will be on the reputational future of agritech start-ups in the country.
The 2020 BusinessDay’s Agribusiness and Food Security webinar is sponsored by Flour Mills of Nigeria, groupfarma, TGI Group, and the Nigerian Agribusiness Group (NABG) – industry partners.
Interested participants should visit https://bit.ly/afsd2020 and register for the event.
