Oil price slump didn’t catch us unawares, Jonathan says
President Goodluck Jonathan has said that the current oil price decline did not take his administration by surprise.
Jonathan said at the Presidential Villa in Abuja yesterday while launching the Youth Employment in Agriculture Programme (YEAP) and the Fund for Agricultural Finance in Nigeria (FAFIN) that for the past three years, his administration had been preparing by engaging in a carefully designed agricultural transformation agenda.
“The decline in the price of crude oil did not take us by surprise. For the past three years we had been engaged on a carefully designed and implemented agricultural transformation agenda”, the president said.
Describing the agriculture sector as vital for the nation’s economy, he said the oil price decline further underscored the necessity to rapidly diversify the economy away from dependency on crude oil.
He said by producing her own food, Nigeria would save scarce foreign exchange, reduce dependence on food imports as well as revive her rural areas and create wealth for the farmers.
He said over $5.6 billion of new private sector investments had also come into the agricultural sector. This, according to him, shows that local and foreign businesses see Nigeria’s agricultural sector as very viable for investments.
He added: “Our massive food production efforts, which led to the production of 21 million metric tons of food in the past three years, has created a buffer and mitigated the impact of the devaluation on food prices. Our food import bill declined from N1.1trillion in 2009 to N624bn by December of 2013, and continues to decline”.
The president said Nigeria needed younger and more entrepreneurial commercial farmers to further boost the performance of the sector.
According to him, the rapidly ageing population of farmers poses a significant challenge, and unless younger farmers are quickly developed, the nation’s future food security and competitiveness in agriculture will be compromised.
The president disclosed that the FAFIN would deploy $100 million towards providing affordable long term financing to support the development of small and medium scale agribusinesses.
He said his government had worked closely with the German government to enhance the development of Fund to provide agribusiness leaders with access to grants and subsidised loans to help further grow their businesses.