During a Heinrich Boll Foundation visit to Germany on renewable energy with certain leaders in Nigeria, we had to drive through corn plantations. What struck me the most was the size of the farms and how closely stacked the maize stems were to each other. It was marvellous to see the high yield per hectare with a modern farming approach. In Nigeria, 37.3% of land can be used for agriculture. The country, situated around the equator, has a mangrove swamp at its foot, a lush green rainforest in its western and eastern areas, savannah in its middle belt and sparse desert in its extreme north.

Whilst millennials might know only oil as the linchpin of Nigeria’s economy, in post-independence Nigeria, agriculture was the path to growth. The decline in the share of agricultural prices is connected to the slump in global commodity prices in the early 1960s. With farmers receiving less from marketing boards, there was a gradual shift from export produce to crops needed for domestic use since those did not require centralised marketing boards and the attendant corruption. Increased school enrolment depleted the manpower for export produce that required backbreaking work and long periods for harvest. With these factors, the collapse of Nigeria’s exports was imminent. The arrival of oil and the attendant boom to the economy of post-civil war Nigeria, sounded the death knell for agriculture. Though agriculture is proposed as Nigeria’s ticket out of extreme poverty, considering the mass appeal of workers – that it could attract, there have been several agriculture revival schemes including Operation Feed the Nation, Green Revolution, Agriculture Transformation Agenda and so on, that have made little impact in reviving the sector. Agriculture is still practised at subsistence levels. What exactly is wrong with Nigeria’s agriculture?

Another pressing statistic is the yield per hectare, especially when compared to the world. The World Bank data on cereal yield per hectare shows that farming in Egypt would yield nearly four times that of Nigeria on the same amount of land. Some analyses have suggested that improved seedlings are a major element in improving agricultural practices in Nigeria. This is why investing in research and development of improved access to quality seedlings, extension services, access to market, price information and inputs such as fertiliser, would help farmers benefit from economies of scale. For instance, agrictech companies such as Farm Crowdy, Thrive Agric, etc., use the model of funding farmers in rural areas and splitting the profits with investors, but this needs to be done on a wider scale with the help of mechanisation. Another statistic to consider is the number of tractors available to work on arable land in Nigeria.

Reducing post-harvest losses and building a pipeline of finished agriculture products through agro-allied industries are important opportunities for Nigeria. The government needs to work on optimising the yield but also needs to focus on expanding derivative products from agricultural produce.

There is also a need to boost the export terminal for agricultural products. Nigeria currently has a large number of citizens in the diaspora that represents a market, and Ghana with its efficiency and standardisation methods have largely profited from this. Treating agriculture as a business cannot be the sole exit mechanism out of poverty for Nigeria. As Akinwumi Adesina, understandably a highly revered promoter of agricultural exports in addition to his portfolio at the AFDB has said, agriculture cannot just be treated as a way of life. The statistics from NBS (2019) showed that 52% of those in rural areas who engage in agriculture are still within the poverty bracket. It is time to stop thinking of agriculture as the silver bullet to eradicate poverty. For example, China’s numbers have shown that the less agriculture contributed to its GDP as it expanded investments in industries and services, the more prosperous the country became.  Agriculture does not need to be back-breaking and rigorous work; upgrading it with a modern approach is critical. This is not just about creating multiple credit schemes but the problems with the fundamentals such as improved seedlings, land reform, access to market, storage and mechanisation have to be resolved.

The government votes billions for agriculture annually, but I believe that this should go into providing support for private sector leaders and setting the right policy framework. Agriculture budgets are hard to track in Nigeria with nebulous items such as “Value Chain Improvement” that have given the opportunity to public servants to siphon funds. Agriculture cannot be a top-down approach, but a business element mixed with development objectives considering its importance to rural economies. Agriculture can be a big foreign exchange earner. Countries such as Brazil earn more from agriculture (2017: soybeans: $25.9 billion, raw sugar: $11.4 billion) in foreign exchange than Nigeria earns from oil (2019: $48billion) on an annual basis. Nigeria’s agricultural exports earn less than $1 billion annually and there is still a dependence on imports, especially through its porous borders with neighbouring countries. Brazil has far more land mass than Nigeria, has seriously mechanised its agricultural process, worked on improved seedlings, reduced post-harvest losses and invested in agro-allied products. It has also eased its export process for agricultural products. Agriculture on bent backs and subsidised retail fertiliser through fragmented investment as currently obtains will not change the dynamics for Nigeria. Can Nigeria choose to do agriculture in a profitable manner or will it continue to be a pivot for “poverty alleviation” that really doesn’t change the matrix?

Excerpts from The Existential Questions by Oluseun Onigbinde