Stakeholders in the Southwest Nigeria have urged governments in the country to agriculture-friendly financing policies to support farmers and other agribusiness entrepreneurs for improved productivity and growth in order to attract more youths into agricultural sector. They expressed confidence in the ability of the reforms implemented by the former Minister of Agriculture, Dr Akinwumi Adesina, to sustain abundant food production and the attendant benefits, urging the President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration to adopt, adapt and upgrade the Agricultural Transformation Agenda, ATA, blueprint to maximise the gains emanating from the reform.
This was a major point canvassed by participants at a one-day Town Hall Meeting anchored by AgroNigeria, a media organization promoting agriculture and its value chain in Nigeria, in Ibadan, Oyo State. The CEO, Agric House, Mr. Kayode Ehindero, advised that the new administration should avoid policy summersaults in agriculture, but refine and sustain good agricultural policies and frameworks put in place by past governments.
Ehindero, said that despite its shortcomings, the past administration did very well in agricultural sector, while admonishing the present administration to sustain the ATA programme’s key components such as the Growth Enhancement Support (GES) scheme and other beneficial ones. He recommended that the nomad cattle herdsmen across the country should be incorporated as integral part of the policy and frameworks to be put in place by the new administration to forestall needless clashes between crop producers and herdsmen to ensure a food-secured Nigeria.
In his remarks, the Chief Executive Officer, Aquatech, Dr. George Sheghona, who identified challenges faced by farmers in Nigeria and other parts of developing world as finance, management and marketing, said farmers should be able to show financial institutions what they needed financial support and should be sincere in the implementation of financial proposal to engender trust in the industry. He also advocated that youths should be attracted into agriculture by making training in management, land and farm tools available at subsidised prices.
A University of Ibadan post-graduate student who was also a participant, Miss Michele Opinache, and some other graduates of agriculture and allied disciplines were not interested in agriculture because they were mobilised into such studies as a result of failure to secure admission into their chosen disciplines.
Responding to their complaints, Professor Rasheed Awodoyin of the Department of Crop Protection and Environmental Biology,in the university, said that the nation’s public universities were overwhelmed with lopsided admission applications, with over 70 per cent applying to study popular programmes such as Medicine, Law, Accounting, and Economics, among others, while agriculture and its allied disciplines were always neglected.
He said this lopsidedness in the education system accounted for the reason why most candidates were given the courses they did not apply to study, including agriculture. He therefore urged agricultural and other graduates to develop interest in agribusiness as their contribution to reduce unemployment, poverty and associated vices.
While lamenting poor financing of youths in agriculture, the Chief Executive Officer of Fagna Consult, an agricultural service provider, encouraged youths to ignore all odds, explore agriculture with passion, plans and determination to make a difference with quality products, good agricultural practices and cost-cutting strategies.
Representative of the Oyo State Agricultural Development Programme, OYSADEP, Mr. Akinola Dauda, said although youths should be incorporated into schemes of things in agriculture, most of them entrusted with facilities were not usually faithful based on experience. He urged youths to be honest when saddled with resources for agricultural purposes.
He further advised the youths to look into cassava value chain businesses, saying the root crop has the potential to employ as many youths as possible sustainably. A communiqué issued at the end of the one-day South-West Town Hall Meeting recommended that policy formulations should adopt bottom-up and end-userdriven intervention approaches on fundamental issues affecting agriculture.
It added that the Farm Settlement Scheme should be resuscitated, strengthened and better positioned to address the 21 century needs of agriculture, while attitudinal orientation should be encouraged and institutionalised by all stakeholders as this would address the negative impressions of the youths in venturing into agriculture.
The communiqué also stated that risk management and insurance policies should be tailored towards the generality of Nigerian farmers in order to make the sector competitive and attractive to investors.
It recommended that the youth and women in agriculture should be accorded priority attention whenever policies on financial interventions are being formulated, while stating that there must be a national declaration of a state-ofemergency in agriculture insisting on a policy that Nigeria has no reason to be food insecure.
The stakeholders also agreed that “all States in the South West Nigeria should as a matter of policy, invest massively into commercial agriculture. There must be urgent efforts calculated at bridging the gap in food production between the North and the South. They also canvassed urgent solution to the huge infrastructure gaps in the rural areas to make for a rewarding season for agricultural stakeholders.