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BusinessDay’s annual Agribusiness and Food Security Summit holds today at the Landmark event centre in Lagos, where stakeholders across different value chains in agriculture have gathered to proffer solutions to some of the sector’s pressing concerns.
Some of the confirmed special guests and speakers attending today’s summit include Audu Ogbeh, minster for agriculture and rural development, Godwin Emefiele, governor, Central Bank of Nigeria, and Godwin Obaseki, governor, Edo State.
The keynote speaker is Hans-Willem van der Waal, managing director of AgroFair, a company which imports Fairtrade and/or organic certified bananas, pineapples and other tropical fruits mainly from Central and South American countries, and distributes all over Europe out of its Rotterdam based logistics centre. Hans-Willem is also an administrator of ColeACP, the association of importers and exporters of the Africa Caribbean Pacific countries.
The Agribusiness Summit is themed ‘Evolving actionable models and innovations to make Agribusiness more viable.’ The summit this year, takes a pragmatic approach, as focus areas will not be platforms to discuss problems, rather, to advance solutions that will fix germane problems plaguing the country’s agricultural sector. Individuals and organisations (both local and international), that have cognate experience and outstanding success rates in the focus areas will participate in discourse on solving these problems in Nigeria. The audience will get to learn from the insights shared, and also interact with these entities and other participants at the summit.
Focus areas for this year’s summit include Practical Access to Finance; as funding remains a critical issue in Nigeria’s agricultural development, players in different parts of the value chain remain unable to secure funds for expansion and improve productivity. This summit aims to champion purposeful discourse on innovative, effective funding models that will offer a definitive solution to this problem in Nigeria.
The second focus area will attempt to solve the problem of Supply Chain Integration. Even when funding is available, the uncertainties of accessing a market in good time and at the right price, is a very discouraging element for agribusiness investment in Nigeria. Post-harvest losses remain of serious concern to producers and other players in the agriculture value chain and needs more strategic efforts to be adequately addressed. Discussants on this panel will chart a course on making the process from farm to market better streamlined; creating an efficient supply chain system that is based on well-defined marketing mechanisms and pricing.
The third focus area is on innovations driving agribusiness development. Technology is increasingly driving agribusiness in many ways, but the possibilities still remain endless. Experts with knowledge on innovations in funding, seedlings, and mechanization will offer insights into how these can be used to further advance agricultural development in Nigeria.
CALEB OJEWALE
