We are few days into 2020 and the clock is already ticking. Every minute and second counts, it makes the difference and plays a huge role in the turn out and events of the year ahead. Our year’s resolutions should take top priority in our attitudes, work, businesses, thoughts and actions. However, it is important to reflect on the gains and losses of 2019 while hoping for an improvement this year and beyond.
Just like in most local government councils in Lagos State, budgets for the fiscal year were reviewed, and Oshodi-Isolo LCDA was not left out, as the chairman Hon. Bolaji Muse-Ariyoh, presented a budget of #2,222,461,955.37 for the year 2020 to cater for works, housing and infrastructure, environmental service and waste management, as well as primary health and education. While the 2019 budget was said to have performed above 75 per cent, we hope that 2020 presents us with visible improvements in the lives of its citizenry and alleviate the sufferings of the masses.
As we look forward to a more productive and agriculture-yielding year, we cannot overlook the fact that food is a basic need for every home, hence a determinant to the growth of any economy. With government’s ban on especially the importation of rice and closure of its land borders, more of its gains lies on growing our local food products, hence in markets that used to be filled with assorted brands of foreign rice, now compete with locally produced rice for shelf space.
However, government needs to empower and encourage more people to venture into farming in order to meet up with the demand for rice by the populace. Unfortunately, the 2020 budget for agriculture is a paltry 1.4 per cent of the total budget, which is evident in the continuous decline from previous year’s budget allocation.
In 2016, the budget for agriculture stood at 1.25 per cent to 1.82 per cent in 2017 and to 2.23 per cent in 2018. So, allocation to agriculture as a percentage of the overall annual budget to all sectors in 2019 dropped to 1.56 per cent.
At a time the government is planning to diversify the economy away from crude oil and into such critical sectors as agriculture, there is no acceptable explanation for a decrease in the percentage budgetary allocation to agriculture. Such a decrease suggests that agriculture has dropped in the pecking order of priority sectors of the government. Out of the 2020 budget of N10.33 trillion, the agriculture sector was allocated N83 billion in capital expenditure, which is about 1.4 per cent of the entire national budget. With this, how do we catch up as with the last lap of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), 2020?
There is definitely a need for a supplementary budget because the country is currently responding to the border closure and prices of food stuffs are skyrocketing. The World Bank estimates that Sub Sahara Africa needs about 45 billion dollars investment in agriculture annually, while only about seven billion dollars is being invested in the region annually.
Hence, N83 billion is not even sufficient for the research and development sector talk more of the entire sector. Comparatively, China with a population of 1.3 billion has 1.5 million tractors, while Nigeria has less than 50, 000 tractors for its over 200 million population. In the use of fertiliser, Nigeria is the least. India uses 165.5 kg of fertiliser per hectare, China-503.3kg US-138.6kg, Brazil is about 186, while Nigeria uses 9.7kg which is too poor to facilitate production. The US has about 4.5 million tractors with a population of about 300 million. Brazil has about 900,000 tractors with a population of 232 million.
Hence, subsistent farming which is practiced by most farmers in Nigeria cannot guarantee food sufficiency bearing in mind that our major challenge as a nation is in the dearth of storage facilities to avoid waste and harvest losses. Before goods are transported to cities, they go bad on the roads; and for seasonal farm produce, adequate storage will keep them all year round and prevent hike in prices when they are unavailable.
Just like nearly 40 per cent of tomatoes produced in Nigeria is lost after harvest. Nigeria is spending over N1 billion annually to import tomato paste in spite of being the number one producer of tomato in Africa. Agriculture remains the country’s hope as far as non-oil revenue is concerned.
We therefore need to set our priorities right, embrace positive growth by ensuring that farming becomes a part of us. Let vocational centres include farming as part of their focus and ensure that more young people are encouraged and taught to appreciate farming.
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