Stakeholders reassess Nigeria’s agriculture policy implementation

Stakeholders in the Agricultural Sector during the Feed Nigeria Summit reassessed the implementation of agricultural policy from the Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) of 2015 and the Agricultural Promotion Policy (APP) of the present administration.

Stakeholders pointed out loopholes that needed to be addressed in the present policy, while some stakeholders gave reasons for a partial deviation from ATA to APP.

The Director Planning and Policy Coordination of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Zubairu Abdullahi, said there were a lot of sessions that involved a lot of stakeholders, where they looked at what they were able to do successfully under the ATA policy program.

“We also looked at what we were able to do under the APP. There are many issues that came about, the major issues are the lack of collaboration, coordination so that you go headlong to face the challenges facing the Nigerian farmers, and then the new policy took those things into consideration.

He said by the time the final document is out, it will be a reflection of all the government and stakeholders expect as a policy to guide them towards achieving food security.

“I can assure you that this country will be happy that we have actually lived up to the aspiration of every stakeholder in the agricultural sector.

“The policy has also looked at the issue of agricultural research and extension which had its own problem in the last implementation, and which we have looked at very well.

The Executive Secretary of the Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria (ARCN), Professor Garba Sharubutu, said that because of some new agencies and laws created by the present administration, there was a need to get a new policy to accommodate the new laws and agencies.

“Looking at the implementation of ATA and APP certain things came to mind, number one, there are so many agencies that were created by this administration, so many laws were accented by Mr President that bothers on agricultural production.

“The introduction of the NLTP was considered, the coming on board of the Soil Science Council, the new energy given to NABDA, Seed Council. And if in a policy, each agency is expected to play its role, you find out that the National Agricultural Transformation and Innovation Plan (NATIP) was intended to create a role for some of these agencies for them to perform very well,” he said.

He said currently, research findings are no longer on the shelves, instead, “our researches have gone to the farmers, because there are so many things we have developed, they may not be perfect, but there are so many seeds, so many inputs that have been developed.

He said the major problem is that Research Institutes were not actually meant to proliferate or to multiply those research findings.

“It was left for us to wait for off-takers to come and take the product of our research to meet the farmers. This is very important and I think, and I think that is why the Feed Nigeria Summit is important for us to sensitise those who have the capacity to invest to look at the research institute and come up and actually pick up their technologies.

“Go through all our 15 agricultural research institutes and the international research institutes we have in this country, there are so many inputs that are there that have the capacity to boost your investment when you invest into them.

“Each of these inputs is an investable input that when we have off-takers to come up, we will be there, that is the area we want the agricultural policy to look at, to encourage off-takers to come into research institutes.

Professor Gbolagade Ayoola, Executive Director, Farm and Infrastructure Foundation in his presentation, reviewed the design elements of past policies and the implementation bottlenecks.

He said some past policies failed not because the handlers of those policies were at fault but because of the natural process of implementation which is full of several failures.

“We have implementation failures in terms of risks and uncertainties that were inherent in those policies but which manifested during the time of the implementation which we did not anticipate would happen, and that is the nature of implementation.

He said the implementation stage of the policy process is the most critical stage. Professor Ayoola said it is the stage where the unknown happens, the stage where certain things you did not call upon taking the centre stage of your implementation.

He also established the fact that policy is a process from one stage to another. He said it gets to a stage where the policy should be reviewed so that the negative points of implementation of one fits the positive point of the implementation of the other in order to make the policy process smooth in the long run.

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CLAIM: A viral Whatsapp message claims that mobile telecommunications company, MTN, is giving out N20,000 cash, 5GB worth of data, and cars to celebrate its 20th anniversary in Nigeria.Stakeholders reassess Nigeria’s agriculture policy implementation.Stakeholders reassess Nigeria’s agriculture policy implementation

Stakeholders reassess Nigeria’s agriculture policy implementation