Forward Looking Agriculture Policy – Eze Onyekpere

SUN NEWSPAPER: NOVEMBER 2, 2025

Forward Looking Agriculture Policy

Eze Onyekpere

Nigeria’s agriculture has been undergoing endless reforms in response to food and related challenges facing the economy. From the days of Operation Feed the Nation in Olusegun Obasanjo’s first incarnation as a military president to President Shehu Shagari’s Green Revolution; fast forward to President Goodluck Jonathan’s Agricultural Transformation Agenda, the Agricultural Promotion Policy of President Muhammadu Buhari to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s National Agriculture Technology and Innovation Policy. However, it appears that these reforms have majorly been about sloganeering rather than critical improvements founded on the right of the Nigerian people to development, food sovereignty and freedom from hunger. Billions and recently trillions of naira have been spent, yet the food and farming situation has stagnated.

In all of these policies, there have been fundamental defects. Although some of them looked good on paper, they were not anchored on the popular aspirations of the farming community. They were top down, not based on detailed consultation and negotiation with people who do the actual farming but simply the fancy ideas of a few “experts” following the prevalent ideas emanating especially from the hegemony of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Who are the actual farmers who do the back-breaking farm work? They are small scale farmers working in far flung and distant rural areas across Nigeria. Majority of these framers are women and it is estimated that women make up about 70% of the agriculture labour force.

The implication of this lack of consultation or “carrying along” in popular street language is far reaching considering the aphorisms encapsulated in the Declaration on the Right to Development. Essentially, development, whether in farming, manufacturing or service delivery, is a peoples work in progressive action by virtue of which individuals and people are entitled to participate in, contribute to and enjoy developmental perquisites. The human being is the central subject of development and should be the active participant and beneficiary of developmental initiatives. Thus, the majority of the proposed beneficiaries of policy action are unaware of the policy, its critical provisions, the rights accruing from the policy, how they can benefit and or hold duty bearers to account for the promises of the policy. The policies were bound to fail.

Nature abhors a vacuum. When actual beneficiaries are unaware and have not been mainstreamed into policy implementation, all manner of charlatans claiming to be farmers arise to take advantage of what belongs to real farmers. Politicians and brief case emergency farmers take advantage of the situation and in programmes like the Anchor Borrowers Programme, trillions of naira were spent with little or no results delivered and the clear absence of value for money. Again, it appears that the agriculture authorities instead of locating real farmers sometimes share farm inputs through the line-up of the ruling political party leading to inputs being in wrong hands while the actual farmers become outsiders. 

As a follow up to the foregoing is the disconnect between policies and budgeting because laws and policies must find expression in the budget for their implementation and effectiveness. To a great extent, agriculture budgets over the years did not strongly express the key ideas of policy initiatives and this leads to policy failure. Furthermore, when the majority of farmers are women and over the years, budgeted inputs for improved yield do not reach them because budgets are supposedly made to be gender neutral and there is no purposive targeting of resources towards these small-scale women farmers, then policy goals were realized in the breach. The pretence of budget neutrality when available data evidence is pointing in the direction of de facto disadvantages and discrimination is a failure in the performance of state duties to guarantee equality and non-discrimination.

When Nigeria made commitments to reduce emissions in agriculture as part of its nationally determined contributions with key strategies in agroecology and regenerative farming, enhancing agro-processing, restoring ecosystems, and empowering smallholder farmers, especially women and youth, it attracted applause but reflecting these lofty ideas in the budget is a missing element. Resources for implementing agricultural transformation have simply been reduced to the naira and kobo element without a bigger picture of resources including human, environmental, technology, information which will need to be harmonised with money for progress to occur.    

Nigerian governments seek to implement policies in a disconnected and staccato manner. Policies in education, health, housing, environment, technology, research, gender, etc., all effect and impact on agriculture. Therefore, there should be concerted overarching national goals which harmonises, reconciles and validates all sectoral policy interventions. For instance, when Nigeria was confronted with high food inflation and high food prices, the Federal Government’s response in 2024 was a zero percent duty rate and Value Added Tax (VAT) exemption on the importation of selected basic food items. This led to a situation where imported grains and other food items crashed the prices of food in the market to the detriment of local farmers whose stock of these foods had to be sold below the cost of production and definitely at a loss. How will these local farmers continue in business if they cannot recover costs or make a marginal profit? 

This import policy, even though temporary, raises critical issues. If the object of the policy is to reduce food prices, was zero import and VAT duty the only reasonable option to pursue? FGN was ready to forego revenue accruing from import duties and VAT which amounted to hundreds of billions or even trillions of naira. Imagine if that money was spent on targeted input subsidies to local farmers or if the money was used to provide modern storage facilities to cut down post-harvest losses which is reported to waste over 40% of farm produce on a yearly basis. Did it make sense to subsidise importation and disempower local producers at a time the government has sloganeered the need for food self sufficiency and food sovereignty? The answer is obvious, the zero-duty import policy was flawed and not reconcilable with other high-level national goals which should have trumped that thought from the beginning.         

It is therefore imperative to reach out to the real farmers; discuss and validate policy positions with them; enforce the continuum of law, policy and budget for expenditure and policy effectiveness; ensure that farming inputs and resources reach the real farmers; select and implement agriculture interventions that are harmonizable with overall national goals.