From Juliana Taiwo-Obalonye, Abuja
The Federal Government has given reasons why the budgetary allocation to agriculture in the 2017 budget was low at N92 billion despite its earlier commitment to make it a priority sector of the economy.
President Muhammadu Buhari had during his budget presentation said the sum was to complement the existing efforts by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to boost agricultural productivity through increased intervention funding at single digit interest rate with the Anchor Borrowers, commercial agricultural credit scheme and the Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk-Sharing System for Agricultural Lending.
Chairman, House Committee on Rural Development, Oladipupo Olatunde Adebutu, had, during budget defence, decried the allocation, saying it was “too small for the work at hand”.
He had also noted that the 1.7 per cent of the budget allotted to agriculture and rural development was still not good enough in a country where at least half of the population lives in the rural areas.
The Minister of Budget and National Planning, Udo Udoma, who was “guest of the week” on Liberty television and radio programme at the weekend, said agriculture is for the private sector and the government has no intention of taking over the farms and factories from the farmers.
He specifically noted that the role of government is to provide the enabling environment for the farmers to succeed. According to him, “agricultural production is for the private sector. We don’t want to take over that from the private sector. We don’t want to take over farms from the farmers, we want the farmers to produce, we don’t want to take over the factories from the owners.
“What government does is to provide an enabling environment because government is not as efficient as the private sector. When we say we want to support agriculture, it does not mean we are going to do it ourselves and what is required to support agriculture.
“You require infrastructure and roads; people have to evacuate what they produce. You see power, water resources, we are spending N100 billion on water resources, irrigation, that is what the farmers need.”
Udoma also explained that it is not the spending of money on the farmers that will bring the much desired change to the agricultural sector but the spending on roads, power, health services and all the other services because that is what the farmers need.
“But if you see the increase in the vote, we are spending over a N100 billion on agriculture and it is more than double what was spent last year and it is more than quadruple what was spent a year before that. You see, we have increased the allocation but our role is not to take over from the farmers but to support them by providing the enabling environment,” he stated.