AfDB Calls For Enhanced Local Production As Nigeria Spent $10bn On Food Imports In 2023

The Senior Special Adviser to the President on Industrialisation, African Development Bank Group (AfDB), Prof. Banji Oyelaran-Oyeyinka, on Monday disclosed that the country spent about $10 billion on food imports including fish.

He said despite having large bodies of water and ocean, the bulk of these imports – cereals, corn, maize, and wheat gulped $3 billion last year.

Speaking at the opening of the 2024 Agriculture Summit Africa (ASA), with the theme, “From Scarcity to Security” which was organised by Sterling Bank in Abuja, Oyeyinka said These are things we can produce…Yet all the preconditions are there for us to be self-sufficient in food production”.

This came as the Managing Director/Chief Executive, Sterling Bank Plc, Mr. Abubakar Suleiman, said in spite of current security challenges in the country, farmers should not be denied access to finance to boost food production, adding that the bank had committed over $33 million to fund women in agriculture at single- digit interest rates.

Oyeyinka lamented that over 60 per cent of individual income was being spent on food – one of the highest in the world, adding that the country must maintain political stability and security at any cost, adding that without stability in these areas, “we’ll keep losing production”.

According to him, the most fundamental reason for current food scarcity was “our lack of production capability. In other words, our inability to produce sufficiently on our farms, our inability to also process in our factories. Scarcity is widespread in every poor country”.

The AfDB scribe said, “Africa must get its own Green Revolution in the next five years, or else we remain a laughing stock. We must change this narrative.”

He said the output contribution of the industrial sector to overall GDP had consistently declined from about 15.6 per cent in the 1970s to 1980s to 5.7 per cent, adding that “manufacturing countries’ GDP remains under 10 per cent, for most countries in the middle income, it’s about 25 per cent”.

He said, “This country has over 84 million hectares of arable land, of which only 40 per cent is cultivated. We are the largest African market. We are the largest in terms of population.

Maybe not in terms of spending power – 230 billion cubic meters of water, and abundant and reliable rainfall in over two-thirds of Nigerian territory.

“So, it is befuddling that we are food exporters – of course, decisions and actions and investment required to set up production structures can be complex – they are technological in nature, economic and of course, for the most important part, always political.

“And politics always trump common sense in poor countries. But unless we master the mechanics of production by which other societies have been able to overcome scarcity, we will not get out of food scarcity.”

He said, “When you see the most striking feature of an industrial society, it is their capacity to mass-produce not only the final consumer goods, but also all the means of mass production. Raw materials, machineries, equipment, transportation, logistics. All of these you require to ensure that you have smooth trade within and outside of the country.”

This came as the Managing Director/Chief Executive, Sterling Bank Plc, Mr. Abubakar Suleiman, said in spite of current security challenges in the country, farmers should not be denied access to finance to boost food production.

In his welcome remarks at the summit, however, Suleiman also said the bank had committed over $33 million to fund women in agriculture at single- digit interest rates.

Further highlighting other achievements through previous summits, he said the bank had increased its loan book to agriculture to 15 per cent, adding “This has not been done by any financial institution that we know of on the continent”.

He said access to finance remained a key problem that needed to be solved to boost food production in the country, and stressed that the current security challenges are directly linked with a breakdown in the country’s food supply chain.

The Sterling Bank MD said, “I think solving food security has multiple approaches. Obviously, we expect the government to deal with the issues of insecurity. That is not something that the private sector can deal with. What we can do in the process is to ensure that there are millions and millions of farmers out there that would still benefit from access to finance.

“And again, even though the insecurity issue is real, we also have a lot of farms today that are not exposed to any form of insecurity. So, we don’t wait. We continue to support those who are able to continue to farm, and we continue to count on government to keep fighting the insecurity, and expand the available land for agriculture.

“And we intend to continue to keep it at that level…the reason why when we convene, you listen to us, is that we are a financial institution, and the promises that we make here, we back it up by producing financing to agriculture.”

He explained that in collaboration with its partner, the Mastercard Foundation, the bank had been able to create a programme called “Sway Action” that enabled it to lend money specifically focusing on women in agriculture, with some extension to youth in agriculture.

He said, “And through this programme, we’ve been able to deploy over $33 million of funding to women in agriculture at single digit rates. And we intend to continue to grow that programme because we have seen the benefit of it.

“It has affected over 20,000 people directly. We also realised that the future of agriculture does not belong to those of us who are approaching retirement, and that if you look at the rural communities, a lot of people who still have to carry the burden of agriculture today are getting older, and so until we bring in the youth into agriculture, we would not have solved the problem for the future.”

Suleiman said, “The Agri-Summit Africa was started seven years ago as a response to what we saw as the lack of collaboration between the various stakeholders. We observed that so many people were trying to solve the problem of food security. They were trying to find solutions to post-harvest losses. People were investing in finding solutions to the low agricultural yields.

“But a lot of them were not having conversations, they were not collaborating. So, the primary objective of the summit is to bring together people from government, people from the private sector, people from financial services, people from academia, so that they can talk to each other, debate the issues and come up with solutions that can very quickly be implemented.”

He stressed that food security and self-sufficiency remained at the centre of economic prosperity.

He said, “And that is why for seven years, every year without fail, we set aside everything else we were doing and try to convey what I have come to believe is the most productive summit for agriculture on the continent. And we hope we can continue to grow this further.

“When we think about Nigeria in particular, much of the problem we face today can be traced back to the breakdown in our food supply chain. And it’s not just in the food supply chain, it started with the challenges we face with climate, where a lot of the lands that made it possible for us to produce, even without adopting modern technology, became unproductive, not just because of the crisis, but also because of water supply. And so, for us, if we fix the food supply, then we can begin to worry about all the other things.

“Without fixing food supply, we can never fix security. Food insecurity is the ultimate insecurity. And in seven years, I would expect that most of us will start to suffer some level of summit fatigue, because this is not the only summit.”

James Emejo

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