|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The annual BusinessDay Agribusiness and Food security summit will hold on April 27, 2018 at the Landmark event centre in Lagos, bringing thought leaders, policy makers and industry stakeholders together in advancing agribusiness in the country.
The summit which was earlier slated for March 23 is themed ‘Evolving actionable models and innovations to make Agribusiness more viable.’ The summit this year will take 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, as well as discourse on Innovations and Technologies that can transform agriculture in Nigeria. 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. Furthermore, the process from farm to market needs to be better streamlined, to create an efficient supply chain system that is based on well-defined marketing mechanisms and pricing. This is important to address erratic pricing of agricultural commodities, and in cases of glut, extremely low pricing which puts producers at a loss.
Also, individuals and organisations that have developed technologies and innovative ways of solving different problems across different value chains will get a seat on this panel, to share knowledge for others to run more profitable, less risk-prone businesses.
There will be specially designed sessions on experience sharing by some of Nigeria, and Africa’s most successful companies and individuals in agriculture. These sessions will serve to offer practical directions to different value chains on how to run more successful businesses, which will be significantly immune to the many challenges confronting agribusiness in Nigeria.
CALEB OJEWALE
