On the right Akinwunmi Adesina, minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, in Abuja. Photo: FMARD
“Agriculture is not a social sector. Agriculture is not a development activity. Agriculture is a business. Everything about it is a business,” says Akinwumi Adesina, Nigeria’s minister for Agriculture and Rural Development. Speaking to global policymakers and private sector representative attending a recent international economic summit, Adesina outlined the shift the oil-rich nation is trying to make away from its economic reliance on oil and gas to a sector that still employs three out of five of Nigeria’s 167 million people and accounts for 41% of the country’s total GDP.
Nigeria has not made as much of its agriculture as it should have. Worse, the country’s growing reliance on imported food, most of which it could produce in abundance at home, fuels domestic inflation. Since taking office in 2011, Adesina has focused on renovating an industry plagued by years of corruption and mismanagement. He believes it can be transformed for the better on both counts.
“We have over 84 million hectares of arable land, out of which we only cultivate about 40%. And even of the 40% we cultivate, not more than 10% is optimally cultivated,” he said in an interview with The Guardian Nigeria. (Access a PDF presentation by Adesina, Repositioning agriculture to drive Nigeria’s economy).
Foreign investors are showing some readiness to buy into his dream. Since 2012, the federal government has attracted nearly $8 billion in investment commitments to its development program formally known as the Agricultural Transformation Agenda.
On May 18, the government announced a new plan, “Youth in Agriculture”, with which it expects to create jobs for 700,000 young Nigerians. “These will be farmers of the future, under mechanized agriculture, who will make Nigeria’s agriculture competitive for decades into the future,” Adesina said. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous nation, and the world’s seventh, and youth unemployment is one of the country’s largest challenges.
Earlier in the month, the World Bank pledged $1 billion to support Nigeria’s agriculture over the next five years. According to the World Bank’s Director for Nigeria, Marie Francoise Marie-Nelly, the decision was taken in part because of the potential the bank sees in agriculture improving rural household incomes.
Nigeria will soon roll out new credit facilities for agribusinesses and farmers, “to allow them to build their productive assets, diversify income sources and enhance their resilience,” Adesina says. The country will also delineate 14 staple crop-processing zones — high potential agricultural production areas — where infrastructure support will be provided to private-sector investors in local farms.
These initiatives and others, Adesina hopes, will help achieve a goal of increasing foreign investment to more than $10 billion by 2015. “Nigeria is set to become a major contributor to global food and nutrition security and poverty eradication through the creation of the right business conditions and government support to smallholder and large-scale farmers to significantly expand agricultural productivity,” Adesina voiced at the economic forum. The ultimate test of Adesina’s drive to achieve that lofty ambition through the expected $10 billion in foreign investment will be how soon and by how much Nigeria decreases its reliance on food imports.
