Agric: 52 ministers, yet little progress

Prior to commercial oil exploitation, agriculture was the bedrock on which the country’s economy was built.

It was the major source of its foreign exchange earnings through the exportation of cash crops such as rubber from Delta State in the South-south; groundnut, hides, and skin from the North; cocoa and coffee from the West; and palm oil and kernels from the Eastern region of the country.

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Mr. Iyang John, a retired agric extension officer, said not only was agriculture able to cater for over 90 per cent of the food needs of Nigerians, it contributed about 64 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and employed over 70 per cent of the Nigerian population.

Then, he said, the export of agricultural produce accounted for 80 per cent of the country’s foreign exchange earnings and 50 per cent of government’s revenue.

Mr Iyang said the oil boom of the 1970s changed everything as the country became overly dependent on oil for its foreign exchange earnings.

Various efforts to save agriculture since 1960

From 1960 when Nigeria became independent till date, the country has witnessed a lot of programmes geared towards revolutionising agriculture.

But 60 years after, the sector is characterised by an array of problems that seek urgent attention to resolve.

Since 1960, Nigeria has had about 52 ministers of agriculture, including those of state for agriculture implementing different programmes.

But until recently, the sector had suffered from the same aged-long challenges.

A cursory look at some of the programmes shows the journey so far but giving many stakeholders cause to criticise successive administrations for failing to achieve significant results despite conceiving good programmes as the sector became a conduit pipe for draining state resources.

In 1959, a year before the country’s independence, some regional governments came up with the Farm Settlement Scheme (FSS).

The system was to bring young school-leavers to settle in a specified area of land, to make farming their financially rewarding ventures to prevent rural-urban migration in search for jobs.

In fact, villages around such settlements picked up the model.

But the scheme could not survive as attention later shifted to oil.

By 1972, General Yakubu Gowon’s regime introduced the National Accelerated Food Production Programme (NAFPP), an agricultural extension programme aimed at increasing the production of rice, wheat, maize, cassava to make Nigeria self-sufficient in food production.

On May 21, 1976, General Olusegun Obasanjo’s military regime launched Operation Feed the Nation (OFN), which became very popular throughout the country during the period.

The goal of the programme was to use available cultivable lands anywhere in the country with government providing the farmers with inputs such as fertilisers, seed/seedlings, agrochemicals, day-old chicks including small farm tools like machetes, sickles, and hoes to farmers.

The end of the Obasanjo military regime also ended his agricultural programme and Alhaji Shehu Shagari’s democratically-elected government introduced Green Revolution Programme (GRP) in April 1980 to boost food production and raw materials for self-sufficiency in major grains.

In addition to input distribution, the programme developed irrigation system, mechanisation and marketing boards to guarantee price strategy for the agricultural products and credit facilities for the farmers.

When Buhari took over as a military leader in 1983, he introduced the “Go-Back-to-Land Programme,” which implemented some of the principles of Gowon’s National Accelerated Food Production Programme.

However, with the return of democracy in 1999, President Obasanjo introduced two agricultural programmes: the National Special Programme on Food Security (NSPFS) in January 2002 and the Root and Tuber Expansion Programme (RTEP) in April 2003.

The goal of the first was to help farmers raise their yields and income as well as the promotion of research and extension services including educating farmers on good agronomic practices.

For the RTEP, the aim was to address rural poverty and up-scale food production for rural economic development and protection of the poor.

Between 2011 and 2015, President Goodluck Jonathan introduced the Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA).

The policy sought to promote agriculture as a business and to add 20 million metric tonnes of food to the nation.

More focus was shifted to rice, wheat, cassava and private sector investments into the sector.

The programme also introduced the e-wallet system where farm input subsidies were sent to 10.5 million farmers through their mobile phones.

However, by the time Jonathan office left in 2015, the programme left over N76 billion debts owed to agro-dealers for the incoming administration of Buhari.

When the current president took over in 2015, a new agricultural policy, The Green Alternative 2016-2020, was introduced.

The Green Alternative was designed to consolidate on the successes of the Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA).

The Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development said: “Building on the successes and lessons from the ATA, the vision of the Buhari administration for agriculture is to work with key stakeholders to build an agribusiness economy capable of delivering sustained prosperity by meeting domestic food security goals, generating exports, and supporting sustainable income and job growth.”

Currently, a new policy regime, tagged the Agriculture Promotion Policy (APP) is being implemented to strengthen the agro-economy.

Where are we today?

The current administration of President Muhammadu Buhari, no doubt, injected renewed vigour into the sector with his call for the people to go back to land.

For the first time in Nigeria, thousands of farmers have access to credit facilities through the various windows at the Central Bank Nigeria.

Although agriculture is the new national focus, there are still lots more to be done to mitigate some of the challenges of the sector in Nigeria.

Mechanisation still eludes thousands of smallholder farmers across the country with many still using hoes, cutlasses and animal traction.

Postharvest losses forms the major headache of many farmers because of poor or total absence of infrastructure for storage.

In addition, many rural communities do not have access to feeder roads to evacuate their produce from the farms.

Irrigation facilities and dams are completely abandoned and or in poor state thereby making farming mostly a wet season affair with very few farmers engaging in dry season compared to the fraction in rain-fed agriculture.

The 16 research institutes are underfunded to undertake demand-driven research that will benefit farmers across the country.

Lack of data about the various industries within the sector is another challenge that needs to be overcome.