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Nigeria
Agriculture Enabling Environment (AgCLIR)
For the past 15 years, Nigeria’s business community has focused on developing sectors other than agriculture, including oil and gas, telecommunications, and financial services. The agricultural sector has not received consistent or adequate government or private sector attention. As a result, agriculture has not developed as rapidly as other sectors of Nigeria’s economy. Indeed, the state of agribusiness in Nigeria has regressed significantly from a time when the country was a significant exporter of food products. Today “agribusiness” is largely informal and happens mostly on a smallholder level with 90% of production occurring on farms with less than 2 hectares of cropping, [1] and the country imports the vast majority of agricultural products that its population consumes.
Agriculture employs approximately 65% of all Nigerian workers, but contributes only about 40% of GDP. Like many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria has two distinct agricultural sectors. One sector consists of the millions of small farmers who live at or just above subsistence level, producing food and other products for consumption or small-scale local trade. The other sector consists of larger enterprises producing for major internal markets and export. However, Nigeria is unusual in that it is a net importer not just of food, but of agricultural products generally. Nigeria’s exports are dominated by its energy products, oil and gas. Only two agricultural products, cocoa and rubber, account for as much as 3% of total exports.
Nigeria’s agricultural sector has been both neglected and subsidized, often at the same time. While agriculture has huge social importance, most government policy makers have not seen it as a potential engine of growth or a means to increase national wealth. The government has repeatedly addressed the need for agricultural development – for instance, food security and agriculture are prominently highlighted in President Yar’Adua’s Seven Point Plan – but as a practical matter, it has not yet been treated as a high priority. A patchwork of policies, developed piecemeal over years, has left the sector subject to a wide variety of contradictory approaches and perverse economic incentives, and vulnerable to various forms of rent-seeking and self-dealing behaviors. The private sector, too, tends to neglect the sector. Credit and investment flow toward the energy, construction, and services sectors, leaving agriculture capital-starved.
[1] Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources, Draft National Food Security Programme, May 2008, 7.
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