It is common knowledge that the Nigerian economy has taken a downturn in recent years as unemployment continues to rise, inflation rises and the strength of the naira is in a free fall. President Buhari in his Channels TV interview on January 5th, 2022 when asked his thoughts on these and what his government is doing to reverse the trend advocated that Nigerians have to go back to the farm.
No doubt, the instability in the price of crude oil has brutally exposed the need for a diversification of the economy, a term that has been used by all leaders since the 4th republic started in
1999, and the Buhari government had also boasted of his investments in agriculture, a move which was further confirmed by the launching of the largest rice pyramid on January 18th, 2022. However, the facts and data don’t seem to support the president’s claim that we have to go back to agriculture to transform our economy.
Across the world, there is an inverse relationship between the percentage of the population employed in the agriculture sector and economic prosperity. Countries that are heavily dependent on agriculture seem to be much poorer. According to the data provided by the World Bank, the USA and United Kingdom has 1 percent of their population employed in agriculture and Japan has just 3 percent. In contrast, countries like Burundi, Chad, and Malawi have 86, 75, and 76 percent of their population in agriculture respectively while Nigeria has 35 percent.
This trend shows that trying to push people back to the farm is romancing economic underdevelopment.
Furthermore, the world has become so technologically advanced that having a large population involved in agriculture is not a prerequisite for generating huge foreign exchange revenue from agriculture. For example, the United States in 2020 earned $135 billion in export from agriculture despite having just 1% of its population in agriculture, the Netherlands also earned 95.6 billion
euros from agriculture in 2020 with just 2% of their population employed in agriculture while Nigeria generated less than a billion dollars in from agriculture in the same period despite having 35% of the population employed in agriculture.
This points to the fact that agricultural productivity is not only by population in agriculture. The industrial revolution has ensured that agriculture is not the major determinant of its destiny, rather productivity in agriculture is boosted by development in the industrial sector, research, and an increase in the purchasing power of the population.
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It is time the Nigerian government, therefore, recognizes that its continual obsession with asking people to go back to farming is based on a pre-independence economic order which is now outdated. In those days, agriculture drove economies but now the economy drives agriculture. A viable industrial sector will create demand for agricultural raw materials which would have to be produced locally to reduce cost, this will create a demand and a market for agricultural products.
This demand will in turn create investment opportunities as potential investors rush to meet the demands of the industrial sector. This will further mean that research geared towards agricultural productivity will be taken seriously and implemented to boost productivity. This, in reality, is where the agricultural sector in Nigeria is lacking, the unavailability of the buoyant industrial sector has made the creation of the cycle that increases agricultural productivity impossible and unless this is fixed, increasing agricultural productivity will be a pipe dream.
Finally, the need for the government to put in place the right economic policies not only to facilitate investments in agriculture but to also increase the purchasing power of the citizens to ensure that investments in agriculture are met with a population willing to purchase the products. To therefore ensure that agriculture contributes decisively to Nigeria’s foreign exchange earnings, the government must shift its focus from quantity to quality.
