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Bank Lending To Agric Sector Rose 614% In One Year

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Total bank lending to Nigeria’s agricultural sector rose astronomically from N3.5 billion in 2012 to N25 billion this year buoyed by the Federal Government’s agricultural transformation agenda, Akinwunmi Adesina, minister of agriculture and rural development, said on Tuesday.

Adesina disclosed this in Abuja at the opening session of the 19th Nigerian Economic Summit (NES#19) with the theme: ‘Growing Agriculture as a Business to Diversify Nigeria’s Economy.’

Giving update on the agricultural transformation agenda he initiated some two years ago, Adesina also disclosed that in the past 18 months, the Nigerian agricultural sector had attracted private sector financing commitments with $4 billion in executed letters of intent for investments.

According to the minister, development finance institutions such as the African Development Bank (AfDB), the World Bank, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the USAID, DFID, and several others, are putting in $2 billion to back the agricultural transformation agenda as well as irrigation and water resources development.

At the summit, he told the audience that the impact of agricultural transformation agenda had been significant, and an additional 9 million metric tons of food was added in 2012/ 2013 to the nation’s domestic food supply, which is 80 percent higher than the annual target of 5 million metric tons that had been set.

Food imports, he also said, declined by N857 billion by the end of 2012. For example, the nation’s import bill for wheat, rice and sugar was down by $3 billion in 2012.

Also, agric exports expanded by 822,000 metric tons in 2012, as the sector’s contribution to non-oil exports expanded by N759 billion.

Over 2.7 million farm jobs were created with 77 percent of the target of 3.5 million jobs that the government had actually planned for 2015, Adesina told the audience, saying the efforts at extricating Nigeria from decades of rice imports to becoming self sufficient in rice by 2015, had been intensified and that the country was well on its way in achieving this goal.

For instance, in one dry season in 2012, Nigerian farmers produced over 1 million metric tons of rice paddy, which is one third of all the additional rice paddy needed to become self sufficient in rice, he said.

Farmers across 10 states in Northern Nigeria have never witnessed such a massive rice production, as villagers there boomed with activities in the midst of the dry season when the youths will normally fold their hands without much to do, he noted.

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