‘Embrace Long-Term Investment For Rural Dev.’

The president of international Fund for Agricultural Developmnt (IFAD)  Dr Kanayo Nwanze, has said that long-term investment in agriculture will help to boost the sector and make it more profitable for all stakeholders.

Nwanze, who made the observation  in Abuja while exchanging views with newsmen said that the lack of long-term investment in agriculture had contributed to the problems in the sector.

“The problem we have in agriculture is that we always have short-term vision of between two, three to five years.

“Agriculture and rural development calls for long-term investment; it calls for longer term vision of about 25 years to 50 years.’’

The IFAD president stressed the need for the Federal Government to envision projects into the next 50 years by estimating where the agricultural sector ought to be in terms of growth and development, among other things.

He noted that several countries that succeeded in their economic transformation achieved the feat through long-term investment in agriculture and urged the government to endeavour to learn from them.

“That is what China did. China in the 1970s and 1980s could not feed itself; about one million people died of famine; but between 1990 and the year 2000, China moved 30 per cent of its population out of poverty through investment in agriculture, rural and community development and putting infrastructure in rural areas. “Vietnam is doing the same thing; but at the fundamental base of this transformation was the role of small producers, holders.’’

Nwanze told newsmen that large-scale commercial farming was not the only way to develop the nation’s agricultural sector as 80 per cent of farmers in the country were small-holder farmers.

He urged the government to ensure that its programmes in agriculture were targeted at small-holder farmers, whom he said, produced between 80 per cent and 90 per cent of the food consumed in the country. “How can you have agricultural programme that does not recognise the role of these people and then between 60 per cent to 70 per cent of farmers are women and you target agricultural programme towards men farmers?

“So your targeting is wrong,’’ he stressed.

On IFAD work in Nigeria, Nwanze said the UN agency had so far supported nine programmes, the funding of five of which the benefiting communities had taken over and were sustaining them.

He harped on the need for government to replicate the five programmes in its effort to transform agriculture at the rural level.

He noted that all the IFAD-assisted programmes were community-driven.

“Our programmes work with communities at the grassroots; they are involved and they determine what the programme should be. “The communities take charge, so there is ownership and there is a degree of sustainability because even when the programme is finished, it continues because it is driven by the communities,” Nwanze said.