Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Chief Audu Ogbeh has reiterated his commitment that there will be no policy somersaults in the nation’s agricultural sector in the present dispensation.
The minister made the assertion when he led a delegation of the Ministry staff to the LEADERSHIP Corporate headquarters in Abuja on Wednesday.
According to Ogbeh, “What I have said is there will be no policy somersault; we will grow along the existing policy lines, deepen and widen, because somersaults create anxiety among investors and many investors are coming. But we are also going to help that policy by creating extension offices in every local government so that on-the-spot, there is the office accommodating the expert and the private sector teaching the farmers and renting machineries.”
He also revealed that Nigeria would be self-sufficient in rice in the next 3-4 years, further revealing that youths in agriculture would be supported to do farming.
“We have a programme for supporting the youth; I think we are likely to get some support from the AfDB of about $150 million, a good part of that will go into supporting some of these schemes, including Fishery.”
The minister assured that small-holder farmers through cooperatives will begin to get better access to loans through a N300bn lending to agricultural sector set by the banks.
“Issue of loans has been a major one, but at the bankers’ conference three weeks ago, the bankers agreed that they were going to put in place N300bn for lending to agriculture and we are trying to make sure that the money goes to the rural farmers,” he said.
The minister assured that there is enough dry season farming to meet the needs of the nation, but lamented that pressure was on the sector as neighbouring countries depended on Nigeria for their agricultural sustenance too.
He said, “So there may not be hunger that much because the only thing putting pressure is that North of Nigeria, there are another 60 million people feeding on us. We have Chad, Mali, Niger, even Libya; trucks come from Libya and load food from the Maigatari market in Jigawa every Thursday. They load food in Laila market in Sokoto, trucks come in from Burkina Faso and there is simply nothing you can do.
“They cross the border and come and buy food, it is an informal trade, but there is nothing we can do because of the ECOWAS treaty. And this is the albatross we have. With Seme border, there is a warehouse for smuggling fish. It sits across the border line; the entrance is in Seme and the exit is into Nigeria. If you go there, they say they have broken no laws and yet arms and things are coming in.
The Benin Republic man does not eat parboiled rice. They eat white rice, so every grain of parboiled rice is coming this way. So we have a heavy burden to carry. But the agriculture thing has to be taken seriously by everybody, because if we relax, we will have problems. So irrigation.”
-Leadership
