The past eight years have seen various interventions to grow agricultural output, make the sector more competitive, increase the sector’s resilience to threats posed by climate change, address food insecurity and boost earnings. However, the scorecard has not been impressive – no thanks to poor funding, low technology adoption, pervasive insecurity, and half-hearted implementation of policies, among other issues. DANIEL ESSIET reports
In the agriculture sector, a crucial segment of Nigeria’s economy, the policy goals have been to increase the capacities of the value chains to boost food security and the processing of agricultural commodities. However, the sector has been characterised by the failure of policy reform, low technology adoption and infrastructure investment in the last eight years, which have impacted farmers’ productivity and profitability. The position of analysts is that reforms in the sector have not generated impressive results in terms of increasing rural incomes, reducing poverty, combating malnourishment and sending agro-food exports soaring.
To this end, they called on the government to address long-term challenges posed by slower rates of production growth, declining commodity prices, limited land for further expansion, which have characterised the sector within the review period. The Deputy Managing Director of OCP Africa Project Incubation (West Africa), Caleb Usoh, said Nigeria has not been bereft of policies. While the government has designed many policies with clear goals and objectives, according to him, the experience has been that they were not implemented properly. Hence, the need for turnaround plans to revitalise agriculture, with a special focus on increasing local production and improving the value chain. He was of the view that the country should have radically boosted its place in global agro-food markets, becoming the world’s largest exporter of key cash crops.
So far, he regards the situation in the sector in terms of transformation over the past eight years as not really remarkable. He called for improvement in the policy environment, to enable investments that will allow the agriculture sector to continue to adapt to the opportunities created by rising demand and the challenges of climate change. Usoh noted that the country remains vulnerable to food insecurity. He attributed this to lack of synergy and collaboration among agencies working in different sectors and various value chains to support the agricultural sector. “Agencies should work to support agriculture. The challenge is that many of the agencies have not worked to their full potential. The leadership of some of these agencies has not lived up to expectations. They have not been able to create an impact based on their mandates on agriculture. Rather, they have been bedeviled with issues around corruption.
“Nigerian Incentive-based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL), for instance, has been confronted with serious corruption issues. Agriculture, at this stage in Nigeria, will need the efforts of many of these agencies that have diverse mandates across the various value chains. Inasmuch as they have different mandates, there is a focused ministry, which they should work in collaboration with and not in silos. They should work closely with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (FMARD).
“You could imagine the positive impact if NIRSAL has had a rewarding parley with FMARD. It is just an example. NIRSAL appeared to have been working in isolation in a space where collaborating with the ministry would be helpful. This kind of collaboration will help,” Usoh said, stressing that a more purposeful and prudent use of public funds in the agriculture sector would make all the difference in transforming the agriculture sector if the government has the will to do so.
Last year, President Muhammadu Buhari sacked the Managing Director of NIRSAL, Aliyu Abdulhameed, over fraud allegations. It was gathered that the removal of Abdulhameed may not be unconnected with multiple allegations of corruption, including a N5.6 billion wheat project meant for farmers in Kano and Jigawa states in 2018. NIRSAL is a $500 million non-bank financial institution, a creation of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) mandated to manage agribusiness-related credit risks in Nigeria.
The CBN has been guaranteeing all borrowings disbursed by NIRSAL. Abdulhameed’s alleged corrupt practices also forced the CBN to suspend funding to NIRSAL. On this, Usoh maintained that one of the challenges of the sector is that agencies working in the sector were not collaborating to ensure that the current agricultural policies and strategies drive investment flows as corruption continued to characterise public expenditure on agriculture. This, according to him, has raised much concern about the security of food and agriculture.
Analysts are of the view that as far as numbers are concerned, there have been modest impacts on food security, with farming getting riskier by the day. Basic rural infrastructure has not significantly improved over the past eight years, resulting in serious infrastructural bottlenecks. As the country’s economic growth is now reoriented towards the production and export of agro-products, the Director-General of the African Centre for Supply Chain and President of the Association of Outsourcing Professionals (AOPN), Dr Obiora Madu, indicated that exporters have failed to meet the quality requirements of foreign markets.
This has created competitive pressure on agro-exporters as farm products get to the global market quickly from countries with better farming technology and higher quality standards. According to him, the requirements for quality of export products are increasing, even as he lamented that not much has been achieved in terms of implementing measures to build projects and programmes to support the agriculture sector. Such programmes include creating better connections with the export terminals, empowering its position in the supply chain, increasing the value-added content and enhancing the competitiveness of agricultural products.
Last year, there were heavy floods which destroyed millions of hectares of farmlands. Subsequent to this, many operators such as the National President of the Federation of Agricultural Commodity Associations of Nigeria (FACAN), Dr Victor Iyama, warned that the country could soon face food shortage if thousands of acres of cropland aren’t restored. With considerable damage done to the agricultural sector, the Vice-Chairman of the All Farmers’ Association of Nigeria (AFAN), Otunba Oke Babafemi, warned of a looming food crisis.
The Chief Executive of Agricultural Management and Rural Training Institute (ARMTI), Ilorin Kwara State, Dr Olufemi Oladunni, stated that climate change and erratic weather patterns make farmers’ situation worse. He and the team at ARMTI have been working with farmers for many years in areas considered vulnerable in terms of water and in drought-prone areas. However, Oladunni expressed his hope that the future of the agriculture sector is bright despite the challenges across the sector. In the face of sustained macroeconomic volatility, he explained that on a national scale, there were moves to transform agriculture into a dynamic, high-growth sector.
He listed long-running programmes aimed at raising agricultural productivity and reducing poverty in rural communities. He added that they were crucial to meeting the emerging domestic and global market opportunities, even as he said it would create jobs, raise farmers’ incomes and ensure the food security needs of the country. These long-running programmes include the New Act of the Agricultural Research Council, Anchor Borrowers’ Programme, the Bank of Agriculture (BOA)’s funding of agri-businesses, public-private partnership in fertiliser production, a collaboration between private input companies and public agricultural extension agencies, school feeding programme, National Agricultural Technology and Innovation Policy (NATIP) and capacity-building for stakeholders through various departments and agencies of government.
For him, there are several projects in the pipeline to help raise agricultural productivity, resilience and access to farmers’ markets. He believes that ARMTI has, over the past eight years, been involved in youth agriculture empowerment programmes. The institute has been implementing climate-smart training where farmers and producers learn about new technologies and cultivation techniques through demonstration plots and workshops, significantly enhancing skills in crop production, in addition to mastering best practices in managing climate risks in the fields. He stressed that what the sector requires is a better understanding of what to do to ensure agricultural productivity while reducing risks and increasing farmers’ incomes.
Analysts maintain that the sector needs to improve its policy environment, to enable investments that will allow the farm sector to continue to adapt to the opportunities created by rising demand and the challenges of climate change and limited resources. With the increasing population, one issue that has plagued the country has been the growing percentage of food that is lost or wasted. Currently, Nigeria is still one of Africa’s 10 biggest food wasters, with nearly 30 per cent of its output almost completely discarded after harvest.
In the past eight years, reduction in food loss has been the subject of several workshops across the sector, including non-governmental organisations (NGOs), universities, and research institutes. In a chat with The Nation, the Executive Director of Nigerian Stored Products Research Institute (NSPRI), Prof. Lateef Oladimeji Sanni, noted that the problem is found throughout the country’s production chain, which is evident in lacks of infrastructure, handling, packaging, transportation and storage. He has been part of a working group to identify technologies and procedures to reduce food loss and food waste in Nigeria, harmonisation of safety regulations and preservation of wholesomeness of foods for consumers.
“The critical problem we have as a country is that most of our agricultural commodities are wasted. So, the post-harvest losses are very high-almost 25 to 40 per cent, depending on the crop, especially the perishable crops. This has given us an opportunity as a country to preserve our food so that we can gain more and also reduce post-harvest losses. When we reduce post-harvest losses, we are extending the storage period of the commodities and products. We are lucky as a country because we have a government that is interested in the promotion and deployment of agricultural technologies and innovations.
“The focus of the Federal Government agriculture policy of 2022 to 2027 is very strategic in this regard. The incoming president has also alluded to the fact that we need to provide storage facilities, so we can have dry commodities that can be utilised by the commodities boards. These are some of the interventions that are opportunities for research institutes such as NSPRI, where I have assumed office as the Chief Executive/Executive Director.
“NSPRI, in the past 75 years, has developed technologies and post-harvest solutions that will be able to take care of farmers at the farm gate and also primary processors, dietary processors as the case may be. We have quite a lot of NSPRI cold technologies and solutions at low and medium levels, which we are ready to showcase to the Nigerian communities. We have dry kinds of dryers, especially solar smart dryers. We have a solar-smart cold chain to store vegetables such as carrots and cucumbers, among others before marketing. We have smoking and inner atmosphere silos. In the nearest future, we are going to organise national seminars to promote an effective post-harvest system as a nation. Secondly, we are going to carry out a lot of sensitization and training for capacity building.”
Experts have noted that agriculture as a sector has been getting less and less attention in terms of the budget in the past eight years. While the amount invested in the agricultural sector might be increasing, the percentage of the total budget allocation has not improved significantly. Overall, the national budget allocation for agriculture has not improved significantly between 2015 and now and failed to meet the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) commitment to allocate 10 per cent of their national budget to agriculture. In most cases, under-disbursement has been a big challenge, leading to available funds being absorbed by wages and running costs. Consequently, issues such as research have gotten less or no funds.
In 2003, as part of the Maputo Declaration and the adoption of the CAADP, African countries committed to eliminating hunger by allocating 10 per cent of their national budgets to agriculture and achieving a six per cent average annual growth rate at a national level. On average, budgetary allocations to the agricultural sector have not exceeded two per cent. The Federal Government allocated 1.8 per cent of its budget to agriculture in 2011, 1.6 per cent in 2012, 1.7 per cent in 2013 and 1.4 per cent in 2014. In 2015, N40.66 billion was allocated to the agriculture sector of the total national budget of N4.49 trillion, representing a meagre 0.9 per cent. There was a marginal increase between 2016 and 2019. In 2016, it rose to 1.3 per cent; while in 2017, it was 1.8 per cent. The Federal Government increased budgetary allocation to the sector by three-digit billions for the first time in 2017 when N135.6 billion was allocated to the sector. In 2018, budgetary allocation increased to ?203 billion; while in 2019, it was ?137.9 billion. In 2020, it dropped to 1.51 per cent and later increased in 2021 but dropped again to 1.25 per cent in 2022.
So, analysts are not surprised that the agricultural sector has not done well given the poor leadership at the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, which was not grounded towards measurable action plan delivery of agricultural development. Most analysts believe that increased production could have driven the local economy and potentially create jobs by providing opportunities for supply chain services, such as bulking, processing, and transportation. However, even when operating with less funding due to under-disbursement, there are still issues with the absorption capacity in the implementation of the agriculture budget.
Pundits posit that the sector has been undermined by the under-utilisation of funds, especially with regard to infrastructure. Programmes such as research, extension, fisheries, and forestry have received low budgets. The development budget includes expenditures for the implementation of public agriculture investments such as infrastructure, irrigation, mechanisation, farm inputs, research and development and renewable energy. Oladunni was of the view that adequate budgetary allocations for extension services, research and development would drive agricultural production and productivity. Hence, he emphasised that the main thrusts of the agriculture policy should ramp up productivity, research and development, markets, training, private sector participation, and nutrition and food security.
Thus far, the ABP of the CBN has been affected by the low rate of loan repayment. According to the CBN, only N503 billion or 52.39 per cent of loans disbursed to beneficiaries under the scheme had been recovered as of the end of February this year. The CBN has disbursed N1.07 trillion to about 4.57 million smallholder farmers, out of which N960 million is due for repayment. Last year, the World Bank, in its 2022 Poverty and Prosperity Report, indicated that more than six million Nigerians enter the extreme poverty bracket as the number of poor people races towards 95.1 million. Also, Nigeria was ranked 103 out of 121 countries in the 2022 Global Hunger Index (GHI), a position that signifies that the country has a level of hunger that is serious and worrisome.