Business
Akinwumi Adesina, the man behind the reviving and mordernizing of Nigeria’s agriculture and breaking the “oil curse”
“Poverty is the source of a lot of the insecurity problems we have. A hungry man is an angry man,” Adesina said.
The minister plans to create 3.5 million new jobs in agriculture and boost food production by 20 million tonnes by 2015, the year of the next federal election.
To achieve this, he wants to boost access to microfinance for farmers and draw in US$10 billion of foreign investment into farming and food processing.
He has received tentative praise for early successes from bankers and implementing partners, but big agro-business projects have yet to take off.
Adesina took a corrupt fertilizer subsidy out of politicians’ hands and now farmers are texted subsidy vouchers directly to their mobile phones so they can recoup from fertilizer sellers, a policy used in Kenya’s farming reforms.
Seventy percent of farmers now receive subsidized fertilizer and seeds, compared with 11 percent under the inefficient program previously run by state governments, Adesina said.
Production of rice, cassava, wheat, sorghum, and corn are rising and cocoa, Nigeria’s most important export crop, looks set to go up by more than a third this season. In 2012, agriculture exports rose by 128 billion naira (US$788 million) and food imports fell by 850 billion naira (US$5.23 billion), Adesina says.
