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Developments in agriculture as government handlers like to put it, has been one of the posters readily brandished when asked of what the Buhari administration has achieved in the last three years.
However, while the sector has to a considerable extent recorded a number of positive developments, determining just how effective and impactful these have been is quite a tricky subject.
Rice production is one of the very first areas the government says it has made significant progress. To some extent, yes it has, but this has also been largely exaggerated, as with virtually everything else.
The agriculture promotion policy of the Federal Government for 2016 – 2020 showed that rice production in the country at 2.3 million metric tonnes, with a four million tonne deficit from the country’s 6.3 million metric tonnes demand. The deficit has been attributed to insufficient supply chain integration which remains a nagging issue in achieving sustenance. The deficit was previously filled through a combination of massive legal imports through the ports, and unabated smuggling through the many porous land borders. The situation even though said to have improved, still remains vulnerable.
BusinessDay reported in 2017 that rice imports from Thailand, one of the country’s largest suppliers had dipped by 96 percent compared to the volume imported in 2015. But a cursory examination shows that even though rice exports to Nigeria have dipped, increase in imports by neighbouring countries such as Benin may imply more smuggling in getting the commodity into Nigeria.
Data by the Thai rice exporters showed that Benin has between January and September 2017 imported 1,330, 809 metric tonnes of rice, a 51.9 percent increase from 876, 228 metric tonnes which was imported within the same period last year. Comparing the 2017 imports (so far) to total imports in 2015 also shows there has been a 65 percent increase.
In essence, while the Nigerian government celebrates its achievements in increasing rice production, the smugglers are very well also celebrating increase in their business.
Three years of Buhari has also not appeared to give confidence and assurance to many industry heavyweights, who feel the sector is running on wheels on trial and error. A deliberate, strategic, action plan, experts say, would see the country’s agriculture delivering far more than currently recorded.
Sani Dangote, vice president, Dangote group, and president of the Nigeria Agribusiness Group (NABG), had noted that at a press conference, that “there is overwhelming evidence that lack of affordable financing, inadequate infrastructure, lack of supply securities, inconsistencies of government policies and regulations are top among constraints facing agribusiness investments in Nigeria.”
While the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has more or less added agricultural banking to its portfolio, going as far as spearheading initiatives such as the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme (ABP), financing still remaining a challenge. This is especially so for the millions of smallholder farmers who produce the bulk of food in Nigeria, yet are unable to access finance. Even some fairly “big” farmers are not left out of the desperate search for funds which continue to elude them.
“I cannot approach banks for loan at 30 percent interest rate. The Agric intervention funds at single-digit interest rate are not accessible, they are mere political statements,” said Bode Adetoyi, chairman, Poultry Association of Nigeria (PAN), Lagos state, who also lamented that the “poultry industry and feed business is already collapsing and farms, feed mills are closing every day,”
Nigeria’s commercial banks’ credit to agriculture slightly increased from N491.3 billion in the third quarter of 2016 to 491.5 billion in the same quarter of 2017 according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). Yet, the average player in the agric sector continues to wonder who the people getting all the money are.
The poultry industry under Buhari has also struggled to survive. BusinessDay reports had indicated many poultry farms had shut down on account of difficulty to feed their birds owing, blaming the situation on inability to access to feed and other inputs, and later in the year, excessive smuggling saw local producers unable to sell off their stock.
The poultry industry is however expected to improve this year as feed supply improves with increase in maize availability. But then, this is not such because local production has gone up tremendously, but as some sources informed us; massive maize importation had been done to address the previous feed shortages.
Onalo Akpa, director general, Poultry Association of Nigeria, projected that this year, “with the prices of maize coming down, if our cost of production is able to come down, then we are able to produce at relatively affordable prices. There is going to be a lot of competition between smuggling and locally produced chicken. But the most important things is patriotism. The locally produced chicken is more preferable than the smuggled one, so the government needs to create awareness on the benefits of locally produced chickens”
In essence, just as rice, even poultry production within the country is threatened by massive smuggling. This, added to other factors make it difficult to determine just how much change Buhari has brought to the agric sector.
CALEB OJEWALE
