An entrepreneurial financial expert Bolade Agbola in a book titled, ‘Agricultural Finance: A Practical Guide For Lenders and Entrepreneurs’ said the primary aim of all nations is to be self sufficient in food production to feed its teeming population.
According to him, a lot of government funding is required to create enabling environment for the private sector to continue to play leading role in the five segments of agribusiness value chain of input supply, farm production, storage processing and distribution.
He noted that Nigeria currently spends less than 3 percent of its national budget on agriculture compared to a nation like Malaysia that spends over 25percent of its budget on agriculture for close to 30 years.
Agbola noted that farmers must be supported to access inputs, credit and insurance especially when rare low frequency and high severity disasters such as the bird flu occur.
He said, “Government taxes and tariff as we adjust to current realities must promote and not discourage agricultural production.
The global attention given to Brazil’s feat as the first tropical country to be a net exporter of food means that there are bio-climatic constrains to food production in the tropics. This is further compounded by the underdevelopment of many sub-Saharan African countries.”
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