In the past eight years, food security and self-sufficiency have been the main objectives of agricultural and trade policies.
To this end, various policies adopted over time seek to achieve food security. Expectations were that the agricultural sector was on the verge of a significant transition. Despite series of policy reform initiatives, the perspective of analysts is that so many gaps exist from a broad overview of the current scene in the sector. Clearly, the various national agricultural policy documents released by the government have not attained an agricultural output growth rate in excess of 15 per cent per annum. Data output growth stands between five and 10 per cent.
In 2011, President Goodluck Jonathan launched the Agriculture Transformation Agenda (ATA). It was created with the hope of boosting smallholder farmers’ income and rural entrepreneurs, who are engaged in the production, processing, storage and marketing of selected commodity value chains on a sustainable basis. Like other policies, analysts’ complaint was that not much has been achieved in facilitating hunger and poverty reduction. However, there was a large-scale programme of agricultural production support. Powerful farmers’ organisations and food associations lobby against several reforms, including fertiliser subsidy implementation, food safety practices and the adoption of new technologies.
According to experts, reforming agricultural policies has been intensely political due to the involvement of groups and politicians. The relationship between the federal and the respective state governments affected the implementation of policies. Also, the collaborative framework on which the Federal Government and state governments coordinate with related departments and agencies has hampered the pace of how the policies should be implemented effectively. At the end of President Jonathan’s regime, the agricultural sector had contributed an average of 21.09 per cent to the gross domestic product (GDP).
When President Muhammadu Buhari assumed office in 2015, he launched the Agricultural Promotion Policy (APP) to consolidate the ATA policy. Known as the Green Alternative 2016–2020, it was geared towards the provision of legislative and agricultural framework conducive to macro-policies, security-enhancing physical infrastructure and institutional mechanisms, so as to enhance access to essential inputs, finances, information on innovation, agricultural services and markets. It had components to address livelihoods, production, markets, value addition, trade and finance, food and nutrition security and investments in agri-business, among others.
So, poor implementation has affected the government’s plans to achieve broad-based growth, poverty reduction, food and nutrition security, resilience, climate change adaptation and trade development. Since its inception, the policy faced several hiccups. Though the emphasis of the Green Alternative Policy was to facilitate the transition of farming communities from subsistence production to non-traditional high-value agricultural value chains that would ultimately result in wealth creation, analysts are still questioning its impact. Not so much has been achieved in increasing sustainable irrigation development and mechanisation.
In 2016, the government established the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme after banning the importation of rice through the land borders 2016. Following its inauguration, the CBN released N40 billion for ABP for rice farmers. While they carpeted the implementation of the scheme in terms of failure to boost overall national production, the other challenges identified were that it poorly targeted loan recipients, funds were used for purposes unrelated to agriculture and a faulty repayment structure. For instance, by 2020 agriculture contributed an average of 22.94 per cent to the country’s GDP.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) expressed concern over the effectiveness of the scheme. According to the IMF, about N1.4 trillion or 76 per cent of the N1.9 trillion loans collected by farmers under the ABP initiative remain unpaid as of January this year. While the government would need to critically reconsider how it can improve agriculture to have a meaningful impact on food security, analysts believe that some minimal accomplishments have been recorded.