Nigeria trails peers on spend in agriculture

Despite the Federal Government efforts at improving agricultural production in the country, recent report has shown that Nigeria did not make the list of nine countries in the continent spending at least 10 percent of their annual budgets on agriculture.

Spending at least 10 percent annual budget on agriculture is in line with a target adopted a decade ago by the African Union’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) in Maputo, Mozambique. The report listed Ghana, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Guinea, Malawi, Mali, Niger and Senegal as countries spending at least 10 percent of their annual budgets on agriculture.

By the year 2012, over 40 African countries had formally launched the CAADP implementation. The past decade (2003-2013) has been Africa’s unprecedented decade of economic growth. Trends of impressive economic growth, improved governance and improved human development indicators are emerging within the continent.

Though Africa is becoming a new frontier of economic and other opportunities, and host to some of the fastest-growing economies in the world, the current pace and pattern of growth has not delivered the jobs and poverty reduction that the continent has been seeking.

Africa has not achieved the levels of food security needed in a much more precarious global market and with new risks resulting from climate change. The vast majority of Africans living in rural communities have been left behind in this positive economic growth.

More than half of Africans, 388 million, live in extreme poverty while 239 million are chronically malnourished (FAO, 2012). Thus, in a nutshell, growth in Africa over the past decade has not been inclusive. Africa can be considered a dormant global breadbasket seeking an agricultural revolution.

The FAO estimates that 24 percent of the world’s land with rain-fed crop production potential is in sub-Saharan Africa, though this has been argued to be an overestimation due to soil and terrain constraints, natural causes as well as human intervention for instance through salinisation and soil erosion in the irrigated areas, leading to deterioration of the resources productive potential.

In Nigeria, an increasing demand for food and decreasing food supply in some cases has led to price hikes coupled with social and political unrest. However, globalisation has allowed developing countries to more actively participate in world trade; thereby presenting an opportunity for African agriculture to bridge the gap between agricultural supply and demand by leveraging its abundant capital. In 2006, developing countries accounted for 30 percent of world exports, according to AfDB report in 2011.