This paper reviews the period between 1992 and 2000 when the National Agricultural Land Development Authority (NALDA) intervened in the agricultural development of Nigeria. During the period of operation, remarkable progress was noticed in the performance of agricultural sector. More lands were opened up and cultivated within a short time compared to what used to happen in the past. However, weaknesses that require special attention for better performance of agriculture and their sustainability were identified and highlighted. These include the area of fund release to agricultural programme, inputs sourcing and purchase, machinery acquisition and repairs, training of programme staff and programme publicity. The review exposed areas of challenges for the future of agriculture in Nigeria as the consolidation of fragmented farmers’ holdings into contiguous farm lands and organizing farmers into co-operative group to enhance credit sourcing and farmer training respectively. Other areas include the reactivation of the Nigeria produce marketing board as a way of standardizing the agricultural produce for better foreign exchange earnings of the country and improving the standard of living of the farmers. Link of the paper: https://www.wflpublisher.com/Abstract/131
See Full PDF See Full PDFOver 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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Despite numerous attempts by urban and regional planners to develop societies and make their environments conducive for living, livelihood in some parts of the world remains miserable due to chaos and social unrest. The continuous socio-economic and political unrest that enveloped most under developed world has been attributed to poverty. A number of attempts have been made around the world to overcome poverty but mostly have been in vain. This is most likely due to non-utilization of effective means of poverty eradication. History has revealed that agricultural development has been the best approach for improving living standard of the citizenry. Creation of agricultural villages enables the realization of objectives of rural planning by stimulating economic growth, jobs creation and improving living standard. This research was carried out by reviewing literatures on agricultural development in Nigeria, simple GIS analysis and a simplified survey approach. Problems and challenges o.
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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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