Daily Times Nigeria Thursday, January 14, 2016
25 Opinion
Nigeria Vision 20-2020 Mirage (3)?
ÏÏÏIn part 2, we began
an examination of the economic potential of Nigeria, specifically, agribusiness. Subsistence farming, when the country is not importing food, which it does scandalously in billions of naira, is the order of the day. One painful ‘joke’, albeit true, is that whereas Nigeria gave palm oil seedlings to Malaysia in the 1960s, the latter now supplies palm oil to Nigeria! This is Indefensible. It is unpatriotic. It is scandalous. Naturally, I support Central Bank of Nigeria’s summer 2015 decision to take off a number of food items from access to official foreign exchange for their imports. There is no food that Nigeria needs to import. This includes Irish potatoes. Plateau State can supply more than enough. And cheese. Kwara and many other states in Nigeria can supply tons of it. And fish. Between Lagos, Kogi, Rivers, Delta, Benue, Borno, Niger and Bayelsa States, they can supply sufficient for Nigeria. The potential of agribusiness is best appreciated when one calculates how much food is imported to Nigeria. If I am right that the country can supply all its food needs, we can use FAO’s figures to do our calcula-
tions. FAO reports that in spite of petroleum, agriculture remains the base of the Nigerian economy, providing the main source of livelihood for most Nigerians. It then goes on to inform that Nigeria has lost US$10 billion in annual export opportunity from groundnut, palm oil, cocoa and cotton alone due to continuous decline in the production of those commodities. But that does not tell us how much Nigeria eats. However it adds to the information we are looking for i.e. the potential of agribusiness. So we have US$10 billion i.e. 2,000,000,000,000 (N2 trillion) untapped annually. Rice eaten is 6 million metric tons. That is N880,000,000,000 (880 billion naira) per annum. Nigerian can produce 150 million metric tons of cassava per annum that is N12,450,000,000,000 (12.5 trillion naira) per annum. If we take cassava to the secondary level by turning them to chips before selling/ exporting the value would increase. At 20kg per person per annum, Nigeria can consume 3.9 million tons of fish, that is, N191,832,000,000 (192 billion naira per annum). OPEC Revenues Fact Sheet shows that Nige-
Buhari
ria’s earnings from crude oil exports in 2014 was N15,169,000,000,000 (15 trillion naira). For 2015 it is estimated to be half of that figure, which would be about 7.5 trillion naira. What all these facts and figures are already pointing to is that we can make more money from agribusiness than from petroleum where we have erroneously focused all our economic thought for decades. This is apart from the fact that with agribusiness, majority of Nigerians would actually be employed incompara-
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bly more than is the case with the elitist oil and gas industry. Alexander Chiejina has done a comprehensive review of the potential of agribusiness in Nigeria. I set out here the outlines of his submissions titled “Unlocking Nigeria’s Agribusiness Potential”. He invites us to picture Kaduna, Abuja and Onitsha as mega-polis just like Lagos with populations of over 12 million people. Let us then imagine them eating made-in-Nigeria food. Let us picture some of the food coming from urban
agriculture on roof tops and gardens along rail and waterways; a rail and road network that picks up food where it is produced and delivers it to consumers with marginal losses of goods. Imagine Nigerian researchers breeding a cassava variety that grows in the most difficult of climates and gives double the current yield; researchers breeding livestock immune to some of the new epidemics and under extreme weather conditions.; researchers and extension services supporting big and small farmers to decide what best to grow on their lands, even where extreme rains and droughts are degrading lands. Imagine new generation of Nigerian farmers who choose what to grow next season after checking domestic and international market trends online, using appropriate technology and machinery even on medium sized farms. Citing Chinedum Nwajiuba, professor of Agricultural Economics and executive director, Nigerian Environmental Study Action Team (NEST), he argues that this indeed is the huge untapped agricultural market awaiting investment in Nigeria. I totally agree with them. Quoting from World Bank estimates, he went on to submit that, together, agriculture and agribusiness are Africa’s largest economic sectors, projected to reach $1 trillion in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) by 2030 (compared to US$ 313 billion in 2010). We know that one out of every four persons in SSA is a Nigerian. The meaning of this, he argues is that as agribusiness plays a critical role
in jump-starting economic transformation through development of agrobased industries, successful agribusiness investments would stimulate agricultural growth by providing new markets and developing a vibrant input supply sector. He explains that the agriculture sector contributes about 40 percent to Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and employs over 70 percent of over 150 million people, mainly made up of smallholder farmers focused on subsistence farming. Interestingly, over 90 percent of agricultural production is rainfed in a nation with about 924,000 square kilometres of land mass, of which 32 million hectares are cultivated. He went to say that with agro-allied industries extending from production, manufacturing, agro-inputs (fertilisers, pesticides, etc.), to packaging and distribution, not talk of extension of credit facilities for agricultural investment, the market potential in Africa’s fast growing, arguably largest economy, Nigeria, is huge. But, according to him, the sector is yet to reach its potential production level as crop and livestock production remain below demand, not enough to support the ever-growing population. As a result, Nigeria, once a net exporter of food has now become a net importer, spending over $4.2 billion on food in 2010 with import rising exponentially in order to feed the growing population. Next week in this column, we shall continue our analysis of the potential of agribusiness in Nigeria.
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