Nigeria’s agricultural imperative: Need for a 10-year master plan

This article is a sequel to the one from last week, titled “Nigeria: The Agricultural Imperative.” It concluded thus, “But in the medium to long term, what we need is an entire strategic repositioning of agriculture as a sector with the greatest potential in the next ten years to generate jobs, incomes, growth, and development, fight inflation, achieve food security, fight poverty, and transform lives.” What that translates to in practical terms is a “10-Year Master Plan for the Nigerian Agriculture Sector.”

“While the Federal Government is employing various short-term measures to increase food production and supply to bring down food prices, there is a strong argument to consider and design a longer-term comprehensive strategy to reposition the agricultural sector.”

The following are some of the reasons we need a ten-year master plan for agriculture:

Agriculture has historically contributed the largest share of our gross domestic product (GDP), though that share has been declining over the years due to neglect and underfunding by all tiers of government.

The agricultural sector employed the lion share of Nigeria’s labour force, which was 37.99 percent in 2022, according to Statistica. On the other hand, the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reported on Monday, June 20, 2024, that 70 percent of Nigerian households are engaged in agriculture. These figures are not in conflict as they measure different things, but they both reinforce the strategic importance of the agricultural sector as an employer of labour and a major sector of economic activity for Nigerians.

With adequate budgetary allocation, the agricultural sector has the capacity to turnaround the economy by ensuring food security, bringing down food prices, fighting inflation, and generating a good return on investment with relatively little investment, and it is not highly capital intensive.

Because it is the sector that employs the highest number of people and also engages the largest number of households, every naira of public budgetary allocation has a broad spectrum impact on rural income generation and the fight against poverty.

The agricultural sector has suffered neglect for a number of reasons, including the following: 1) the emergence of oil and gas as huge revenue earners and the consequent “Dutch Disease” syndrome; 2) the disruptive effect of military rule both on governance and economic management and on the agricultural sector; 3) the majority of farmers are rural dwellers, are poor and illiterate, are not unionised unlike the urban workforce, and lack political power, unlike their American counterparts; and 4) most Southern State governments have never seriously engaged with the agricultural sector.

Read also:

The current cost of living crisis has drawn critical attention to the importance of the agricultural sector, especially food crop production, as food inflation hit an unprecedented 40.66 percent in May 2024. While the Federal Government is employing various short-term measures to increase food production and supply to bring down food prices, there is a strong argument to consider and design a longer-term comprehensive strategy to reposition the agricultural sector.

The Federal Ministry of Agriculture has done commendable work in the policy space over the years. Between 1985 and now, it has produced five major policy documents on the agricultural sector. These are the Agricultural Policy for Nigeria (1985–2000), the New Nigeria Agricultural Policy (2001), the Green Revolution and Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) (2012), the Agricultural Promotion Policy (2016–2020), and the National Agricultural Technology and Innovation Policy (NTAP) (2022–2027). The purpose of listing these policies here is not to do a detailed review of them but to make the point that Nigeria has not been lacking in agricultural policy-making. Likewise, there have been a plethora of agricultural programmes that can fill this entire page.

The preparation of the 10-year agricultural master plan should include a robust and comprehensive synthesis of past agricultural policies as the policy framework of the master plan. Additional inputs and perspectives should be contributed by the private sector and international agricultural organisations like FAO, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), among others, as well as the World Bank and the African Development Bank.

The master plan should seek to transform and revolutionise the agriculture sector and contribute significantly to repositioning the Nigerian economy on a path of sustainable growth and development by ensuring food security, bringing down food prices, stabilising the general price level, helping bring it down to a single digit, increasing rural income, generating significant surpluses as agricultural raw materials, and ensuring significant value added for export.

The master plan should also aim to increase the application of agricultural inputs (fertilisers, agro-pesticides, and agricultural mechanisation) from their current abysmally low levels in Nigeria to the global averages, perhaps with the exception of pesticides. Nigeria’s fertiliser application level was 18.6 kilogrammes per hectare (kg/ha), compared to the global average of 139.9 kg/ha in 2021 and 542.6 kg/ha in Egypt. Nigeria is ranked as the second largest pesticide importer (23,412.5 mt. in 2020) in Africa after South Africa. However, data on kg of pesticide per/ hectare of cropped land in Nigeria is unavailable even from World Bank sources, unlike in South Africa (2.2 kg per hectare) and Egypt (2.2 kg per/ hectare). The major challenges of the proposed agricultural master plan will be to ensure safe and sustainable use by smallholder farmers, who constitute 80 percent of our agricultural labour force, and accurate record-keeping for agrochemical use in Nigeria. The master plan should seek to raise Nigeria’s tractor density to 0.27 horsepower/hectare (hp/ha), which is very low, to FAO’s recommended tractor density of 1.5 hp/ha.

Then finally, the master plan should seek to address the key missing link in agricultural policy in Nigeria, which is underfinancing, by aiming to make both the federal and state governments allocate a minimum of 10 percent of their annual budgets to the agricultural sector in line with the Maputo Declaration.

Mr Igbinoba is Team Lead/CEO at ProServe Options Consulting, Lagos.