For Nigeria to attain food security, maximise its agricultural value chain opportunities and create jobs for its teeming youth population, it must first address lingering problems limiting productivity and eliminate corruption in its intervention programmes, farmers say.
The farmers, who reacted to the recent declaration of
President Bola Tinubu’s blueprint for attaining food security and the
declaration of state of emergency, urged the federal government to exclude the
Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) from the control of any intervention fund for the
sector.
Tinubu plans to deploy savings from the fuel subsidy removal
into the agricultural sector to revamp the sector and also grow its
contribution to 70 percent in the long term.
But farmers in Africa’s biggest economy noted that for this
to happen, intervention programmes must be transparent, properly implemented
and institutionalised in the Bank of Agriculture to ensure real farmers are
beneficiaries to drive impact.
“The control of CBN in interventions must be removed if
truly this administration wants to record success. It must also eliminate
corruption in its programmes,” Jude Obi, president of the Association of
Organic Agriculture Practitioners of Nigeria, said in a response to questions.
“The administration must address lingering problems limiting
productivity. Without this, it will just be like the other plans we have had in
the past,” Obi said.
The apex bank has been heavily criticised for poorly
managing the Anchor Borrowers Programme – the principal initiative of the last
administration to attain food security.
The failure of millions of farmers to repay loans extended
to them by apex underscores the weakness in the intervention initiative with
the country’s yield per hectare still low when compared to its African peers.
“I sincerely hope that the President’s plan will bring about
the attainment of food security,” said Ibrahim Kabiru, national president of
All Farmers Association of Nigeria.
Kabiru urged the government to reappraise the CBN intervention
programmes for the sector to ensure transparency and proper implementation.
Intervention programmes should be institutionalised and
managed by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture in collaboration with various
farmers’ associations, not with the apex bank, he said.
Successive governments have pushed forth several
agricultural intervention programmes and policies in the quest for food
sufficiency, but many have yielded little or no result, making them fall short
of expectations.
Most policies and programmes have constantly focused more on
supporting farmers with finance – which has been marred by a high rate of
corruption rather than addressing lingering issues such as insecurity and
infrastructural gaps among others that have continued to limit productivity for
decades.
Nigeria’s food system today faces enormous challenges that
make it difficult to provide affordable and nutritious food to the majority of
the population.
“Nigeria has been given subsidies on fertiliser all through
its life span yet it has amounted to nothing. This is principally because the
government has failed to address issues of insecurity, low mechanization, and
poor storage facilities among others,” Obi, who is also a lecturer at the
Department of Soil Science at the University of Uyo, said.
However, Tochukwu Okafor, a senior lecturer at Baze
University Abuja, said the country cannot tackle its food security problem
without addressing its debt problem.
“The food security problem is supposed to be tackled towards
addressing inflation and you can tackle inflation by first dealing with your
debt problem. If you don’t, the interest will keep accruing,” he said.
He advised the government to channel the fuel subsidy funds
towards paying off the country’s debt, tackling inflation, and ensuring a
sustainable solution to the foreign exchange crisis to ease the importation of
agricultural products for farmers.