The Deputy President of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI), one of Nigeria’s organized private sector (OPS) advocacy groups, Mr. Gabriel Idahosa, has projected Nigeria’s agricultural sector could record 5%-6% growth in 2023 if the issues of insecurity and infrastructure are addressed by the government
Idahosa, who made this forecast when he featured in a TVC News programme on Friday, lamented that the current under-performance of the agricultural sector given its huge potential was due to the nation’s poor infrastructure in form of bad roads, and a lack of technical equipment and the lingering insecurity.
He said: “If these issues are tackled, we can see very significant growth in the sector. Anything between 5 to 6% is very affordable because of the presence of demand, farmers’ knowledge, and access to finance.
“We need to keep fighting against insecurity so that all farmers can go freely to their farms daily and do the only business they know without having to see the destruction of their crops and to pay a lot of extra costs for personal security for themselves and their farms. That is the most important farming constraint.
“The other constraint is the infrastructure around the agricultural business. The quality of roads as well as power supply, the quality of technical equipment like tractors and harvesters that farmers need”, the LCCI boos added.
Idahosa maintained that tackling the myriad of problems would boost farmers’ productivity, improve the food processing and marketing value chain and the contributions of the agricultural sector to the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and foreign exchange earnings.
Speaking on the poor quality of road and rail networks which he described as suboptimal currently, the entrepreneur also identified access to finance as not necessarily a significant problem to address given the sundry funding facilities being provided to farmers and food processors and millers by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Bank of Agriculture (BOA), and other commercial banks.
It would be recalled that the World Bank had last week, in its just published 2023 ‘Global Economic Prospects’ report, noted that sub-Saharan African (SSA) food markets remained tight due to declining stocks, limited imports, weather-induced disruptions to production such as the floods in Nigeria, high prices of farming inputs, and the negative impact of insecurity on farming and suppliers’ ability to access food markets.
The Breton Woods institution predicted these inclement conditions would make food systems in the SSA region vulnerable to various shocks, including the volatility of global food prices and climate change.
