The revolution to put food on Nigerians tables -Adesina

To him, inclusive growth in the economy is not complete
without the rural dwellers whose life depends on
agriculture, so he sees himself as being on a mission to
integrate the rural dwellers through transformation of
agriculture.
Today, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, Agriculture and Rural
Development Minister, sees his journey in the corridor of
power as an opportunity of being an instrument in
transforming the country's agriculture.
In this chat with Editors in Lagos, he talks about the
Agriculture Transformation Agenda of the government and
what they have been able to do with fertilizer, various crops
and the investments they have attracted to agriculture
which have helped in bringing down the food import bill of
the country in the past three years.
ON INVESTMENT IN AGRIC
What we are building right now in agriculture is a very
effective value chain that goes from the farm to the table
and this involves smallholder farmers and the big off takers
like flour mill of Nigeria, Nestle , Honey well and all of that.
We are very excited about the new energy the private sector
is bringing into agriculture. We are working in the ministry
in Kogi state with one of the world largest food
manufacturing companies that will be investing 250m US
dollars into a cassava to starch plant and we are advising
that this particular plant is about 63000 metric ton starch
plant.
I just used that as a leeway to make a point that investment
in Nigeria agriculture today is raising very well. We have in
the space of just three years being able to concretise on the
ground investment of well over $5 billion into the
agriculture sector.
The most recent of them is the one by Aliko Dangote who
has offered investment spanning over $1b into commercial
rice production, which is the largest single investment into
food production in Africa.
By the way when we were in Washington for the US African
summit, Dangote's investment was the buzz that people
were talking about that Nigeria is now driving towards self
sufficiency in rice.
This means that the President's policies are working and it
means that the government position that we would give
incentives to private sector to drive agriculture is working.
I am even more excited that most of the private sectors
coming into the space are Nigerians private sector, not just
global companies. I think that is the way it should be, if you
go to other part of the world, it is the local companies that
take the agriculture spaces.
In terms of overall food production, when we started we set
a target for ourselves that we will produce 20million metric
tons of food by 2015. I think if you don't set target, you can't
measure anything, I am please to tell you that by the end of
this wet season we would have produce 21m metric tons of
food.
Total between 2012 and 2014, this is well ahead of 20m
metric tons we promised for 2015. I am confident by 2015
we far exceed the target that we have set.
The reason this is so is that the policies on fertilisers and
seeds distributions continue to grow, that particular policy
was where we ended 40years of corruption in fertilisers
distribution in this country within 90days.
We used the mobile phone system, the E-wallet system to
get fertilizers to farmers. That is getting global and regional
attention, but for us we have been able to reach 14million
farmers by this wet season, that is between 2012 and now.