Minister of agriculture, Audu Ogbe, has announced that the Bank of Agriculture is being restructured in a way that it will be owned eventually by farmers in Nigeria.
“The BPE (Bureau of Public Enterprises) is about to restructure the bank of agriculture after which farmers are going to be able to buy shares in the bank; so eventually it will become the farmers bank.”
Audu Ogbe, who spoke to news men today at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, hoped that in the process, such move will bring down interest rates reasonably “maybe five percent or a little higher, so that agriculture will become attractive and people can raise capital to invest.”
He advocated the ban of fertilizer NPK 151515 which, he said, has been used in the country for many years.
“Recent research revealed that it is not useful for any crop or any soil. Soils differ and so does crop. To believe there is one uniform fertilizer you can spread for every crop is a fallacy.
“And it’s because we have done soil test and change the formulations of fertilizers, local blenders that some of the yields we are getting now are rising from two tons per hectare to five and six. So the President is looking into that, and will see how we can deal with it.”
Speaking on the effect of herdsmen/farmers clashes on food production, the minister said that the government is putting in place a programme that will aggregate all the wastes from harvest, including maize stock, rice stock, sorghum, Millets, beans for the purpose of processing them to feed the cows instead of letting them roam around and getting to this conflict with the farmers.
“We also announced a decline in foreign exchange expenditure on food items in the last five years. The items are sugar, milk, Rice, tomato and wheat. In 2013, we spent $1,424,968.1 importing these five good items but the figure dropped to $1.280 billion in 2014.
“These are figures from the CBN as early as Monday this week.
“In 2015, the figure dropped further to $971 million and to $780.792 million and in 2017 the figure is now $628,643 million. The figure for the 2018 will be ready next year. You can see the decline in our importation of food.”
