A major obstacle to the nation’s economic development has been the lack of sustainability of government projects and policies such that a change in government is likely to stall major projects. Ruth Tene Natsa writes on the need to sustain the gains made in agriculture towards eradicating hunger and ensuring food security
An online English dictionary defines sustainability as endurance, standing/bearing up against continuously.
Sustainability in these context is ensuring that the gains made in agriculture through the Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) are sustained even after the President Goodluck Jonathan-led regime is long past gone.
The need to sustain these gains is for achieving poverty/hunger reduction, job creation and ensuring food security towards preserving the nation’s growing population.
Nigeria, once an agragrian economy, was well known for its dominance in cocoa in the West, oil palm in the East, cotton and groundnuts in the North, among several other agricultural products until the discovery of oil which led to the total neglect of the nation’s agriculture, leading to low agricultural activity and a heavy dependence on importation, rising poverty, collapse of agricultural extension services as well as an ageing population of farmers as young energetic youths refuse to engage in agriculture.
In the past three years, the federal government, through the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, has witnessed tremendous progress in the sector while the momentum towards the actualisation of set goals continue to increase. These successes have been attested to by several farmers and major players in the industry who assert that the success in the sector is such that it has never been witnessed and, thus, the need to preserve it and ensure its continuity.
In the words of the minister of agriculture and rural development, Dr Akinwumi Adesina, the sector has successfully ended four decades of fertiliser sector corruption and ended the era of government buying and distributing seeds, building and creating a data bank of farmers in which a total of 14 million farmers had received subsidised seeds and fertilisers between 2012 and 2014.
He added that through the ATA, they had successfully ended government monopoly over foundation seeds and opened it to the private sector, thereby encouraging an increase in seed companies from 5-80, with five billion increase in the private sector investment in fertiliser only.
The minister also asserted that the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)’s Nigerian Incentive-based Risk Sharing Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL) facility to reduce the risks of lending to agriculture is working as total bank lending to agriculture expanded from two per cent in 2011 to five per cent in 2013, while government in the bid to reduce post harvest losses also completed a total of 1.3 million metric tonnes silos capacity across the country within the past three years, among several other achievements.
The need to preserve these successes, according to the minister, is what has led to the inauguration of the National Agricultural Policy Committee in Abuja, recently.
The post Sustaining Gains In Agriculture To Ensure Food Security appeared first on Nigerian News from Leadership Newspapers.