Agricultural policies and practices are critical for building and strengthening the resilience of agricultural landscapes and agricultural-based livelihoods to social ecological shocks and stresses, especially in developing economies. The primary goal of Nigerian agricultural policy in the early years was to increase production in response to the growing demand for food. On the other hand, these policies were created to foster economic development towards eradicating poverty.
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This study examines the Nigerian Agricultural Policies before and after independence. The paper employs secondary source of collecting data. The study reveals that despite the soundness of most of the Nigerian Agricultural Policies, there is a real short fall between the expectations and results. It also identified some of the challenges of the reviewed policies which have been hitherto affecting the translation of these ambitious policy documents into realities. Based on the findings of this paper, it was recommended that government should redouble its efforts in implementing various policies and programmes, adopting a consistent policy measures, avoiding unjustifiable policy reversals, partnering with relevant intergovernmental organizations in order to attract the much-needed private sector capital injections into the agricultural sector, as well as increasing the expertise to make the sector become the engine of growth in Nigeria.
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EAST AFRICAN SCHOLARS MULTIDISCIPLINARY BULLETIN
In Nigeria, agriculture still remains a crucial sector, employing over 70 percent of the force, serving as a potential vehicle for diversifying the economy and enabling economic development. As a critical sector of the economy that seeks to reduce poverty, attain poverty and food security, agriculture is the principal source of food and livelihood in Nigeria. Other important benefits of the agricultural sector to the Nigerian economy include: provision of food, contribution to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), provision of employment, provision of raw materials for agro-allied industries and generation of foreign exchange. Agricultural exports were the main source of foreign exchange earnings until the early 1970s. While agriculture and oil composed about 65 percent and 5 percent of GDP respectively when Nigeria got independence in 1960, the sectors accounted for about 32 percent and 37 percent, respectively in 2006. Today agriculture contributes about 45 per cent of our country’s GDP and employs around two-third of the workforce, including 90 per cent of the rural population. Sustainable development as a concept has been described as development that meets the needs of the present generation, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their food requirement. Therefore adoption of developmental policies and practices that will ensure sustainable technologies and resource efficient farming systems are necessary for optimum food production.
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Over the past three decades, Nigerian government had initiated a plethora of policies and programmes which were aimed at restoring agricultural sector to its pride of place in the economy. However various efforts at promoting investment and export diversification in the agricultural sector have not yielded appreciable dividend. Enormous investment and export diversification potentials for generating higher growth in the economy have remained unlocked and unexploited in the agriculture due to a host of constraining factors that must be removed. Therefore, the paper identified the constraints and proffered policy prescriptions to be implemented to remove them so as to fast track the attainment of poverty reduction and rapid economic development in the country. The identified constraints included marketing problem, infrastructure inadequacies, and unstable input and output prices. Policy actions for removing the constraints must include improvement in downstream commodity activities, environmental management, increased funding and efficiency in agricultural spending. Government must invest heavily in rural infrastructure and such investment must ensure development of infrastructure in the rural area.
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Global Journal of Research in Agriculture & Life Sciences
The state of our agriculture and food security in Nigeria today is a threat to the masses; in fact, it is nothing to cheer about. The country has resorted to the level of importing millions of metric tons of essential food such as rice, wheat, floor, vegetable oil, beefy, chicken, fish, among others from foreign lands, in spite of her great potentials in agriculture. Nigerians were not eating from the dust bin during the era of our founding fathers, but today, Nigeria has got food scaverigers that daily monitor dust bin to get their daily food supply. Alas!! Our country is in trouble. There is no concrete policy of the government on agriculture that can make food production a reality. What the government is good at doing is mere slogans and lousy statements that are devoid of action. They assume that all is well in the agricultural sector because a lot of money is being injected into it whereas all is not well. Agricultural inputs that used to be available to farmers as at the inception of Nigeria till early 1980s were a thing of illusions to common farmers since the inception of democracy (1999) to date. The importation and distribution of fertilizers have been so much politicized and bastardized that the product is not imported at the right time and is not given directly to the end users who are the farmers. Instead, the allocations are given to politicians and their cronies who then re-sell them at exorbitant price which most times are unaffordable by the farmers. The various river basins development authority is not functional and do not produce food. They exist as a mirage where there are workers that receive salary every month, but the production of food is absent. However, the River Basin Farm Authority failed because, in Nigeria today, there are many chiefs and not enough Indians. Many Nigerians want to arrive without travel and this seems to be the reasons our economy is in shambles. In view of these, the paper used available literature to review the status of Nigerian agriculture in the 21st century: the problems and solution proposals.
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Defense, Security, Economy, and Development in Nigeria
