Issues in FG’s agricultural programmes
Shortly after Chief Audu Ogbeh, the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, was officially sworn in by President Muhammadu Buhari, he came up with a number of agricultural programmes designed to revamp the sector. takes a look at some of these programmes. Are they driving the president’s quest for a diversified economy?
This is partly the problem that has made the sector unattractive to young people, particularly in crop production. Statistics from the ministry, however stated, “The FMARD established a N50 billion mechanisation fund to facilitate 1,200 Agricultural Equipment Hiring Enterprise (AEHE) to roll-out 6,000 tractors and 13,000 harvest and postharvest equipment units across the country.’’
But despite the ministry’s claims, many rural areas do not have access to equipment, and farmers still use the aged-long method of using hand and animal tractions. Anchor Borrowers’ programme This programme seeks to address the challenges of agro-financing. It intends to create a linkage between anchor companies involved in the processing and smallholder farmers (SHFs). Launched on November 17, 2015 by President Muhammadu Buhari and originally designed to meet the nation’s domestic rice requirement, the programme has been expanded to include other crops like wheat, ginger, maize, soybeans and cassava.
Driven by the Central Bank of Nigerian, in collaboration with the Federal Ministry Agriculture and Rural Development, the programme seeks to increase the access of rural farmers to finance. The challenge is that in some of the crops, farmers, like a group of women cultivating cassava in Bayelsa, are finding it difficult to get off-takers, a condition for accessing the fund. Government also needs to scale up the funding to get millions of farmers to key into the scheme. For now, some farmers feel they have been locked out. Special focus on rice Rice is one programme that has gained so much attention from the federal government with a target to export rice this year. The last administration also spent billions of naira in rice production, yet, the nation is still struggling to be selfsufficient. So what exactly needs to be done?
The ministry said it had established 40 large scale rice processing plants and 18 high quality cassava flour plants with a stake commitment of China EXIM (85%) and Nigeria BOI (15%) through concessional credit facilities of $383.1 million for the rice mills and US$143.7 million for the high quality cassava flour plants.