ASSESSMENT OF AGRICULTURAL SECTOR AS A KEY TO DIVERSIFICATION OF THE NIGERIAN ECONOMY FOR SUSTANABLE DEVELOPMENT
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- 1-5 Chapters
- Quantitative
- Regression
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- NGN 3000
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Economic history provides strong evidence that an agricultural revolution is a necessary precondition for economic progress. Ayoola (2015) opined that the agriculture sector has the ability to serve as an industrial and economic springboard for a country's development. Indeed, agricultural operations are frequently concentrated in less developed rural regions where rural transformation, redistribution, poverty reduction, and socioeconomic development are vital (Stewart, 2000). Nigeria's economic ambitions have remained the same: to change the structure of production and consumption patterns, diversify the economy, and reduce reliance on oil, with the goal of placing the economy on a path of sustaining, all-inclusive, and non-inflationary growth. Despite Nigeria's immense agricultural resources, both human and natural, we are nonetheless facing an extreme food crisis, the worsening of poverty, and widespread misery among the great majority of Nigerians. This is, nevertheless, a condition that is common to all third-world countries functioning inside the neocolonial capitalist system (Akor, 2009).
Nigeria is endowed with an abundance of natural resources, both biological and non-biological. Agriculture is one of the most significant areas of the Nigerian economy because of the importance assigned to it. The importance of agricultural resources in promoting economic growth and long-term development of a country cannot be overstated. Agriculture contributes to economic growth, offers job opportunities for the growing population, generates export money, and eliminates poverty in the economy.
According to Jhingan (2018), agricultural stagnation is the primary rationale for bad economic performance, whereas increased agricultural productivity has been the most important concomitant of successful industrialization. Oluwasanmi (1996) articulated agriculture's pervasive influence on Nigeria's economic and social development, saying, "A strong and efficient agricultural sector could enable a country to feed its growing population, generate employment, earn foreign exchange, and provide raw materials for industries." Because of its multifunctional character, agriculture has a multiplier impact on every nation's socioeconomic and industrial fabric (Ogen, 2007).
Agriculture is described as the production of food and cattle, as well as the deliberate nurturing of plants and animals (Ahmed, 1995). He went on to say that agriculture is the backbone of many economies and is critical to a country's socioeconomic growth since it is a vital component and factor in national development. Similarly, Okolo (2004) recognised the agricultural sector as the most significant sector of the Nigerian economy, with a lot of promise for the nation's future economic growth, as it had done in the past. Despite the oil sector's enviable position in the Nigerian economy during the last three decades, the agriculture sector is perhaps the most significant sector of the country.
In general, the agriculture sector helps an economy grow in four ways: product contribution, factor contribution, market contribution, and foreign exchange contribution (Abayomi, 1997; Abdullahi 2002 & World Bank 2007). The goal of this research is to look at the agriculture sector as a way to diversifying the Nigerian economy for long-term prosperity.
Agriculture's definition evolves throughout time. Agriculture is the cultivation of plants and animal husbandry. That is, managing living things and ecosystems in order to provide commodities and services for humans. Agriculture includes farming, ranching, aquaculture, apiculture, horticulture, viticulture, animal husbandry, including but not limited to livestock care and raising, poultry husbandry and the production of poultry and poultry products, diary production, field crop production, tobacco, fruits, vegetables, nursery stock, ornamental shrubs, ornamental trees, flowers, sod or mushrooms, timber, pasturage, any combination of the foregoing, the processing, dr When these actions are carried out alongside, but secondary to, such husbandry or production.
Agriculture's sustainability in Nigeria cannot be separated from economic development's sustainability. A variety of additional comparable definitions are also often used. According to the American Society of Agronomy, sustainable agriculture is one that, over time, improves environmental quality and the resource base on which agriculture depends, meets basic human food and fibre needs, is economically viable, and improves the quality of life of farmers and society as a whole (Uptal, 2001).
According to Macrae (1990), sustainable agriculture is both a philosophy and an agricultural method. It is founded on a set of ideals that reflect an understanding of both ecological and social reality, as well as a commitment to responding properly to that understanding. It stresses design and management practises that interact with natural processes to preserve all resources, reduce waste, and protect the environment while preserving and growing farm profitability.
Agricultural development, a subset of economic development, entails a sustained improvement in the level of output and productivity over a fair period of time, as well as better farmer well-being as reflected in greater per capita income and a higher quality of living. Rural development refers not only to a sustained increase in the level of production and productivity of all rural dwellers, including farmers, and a sustained improvement in their well-being, as manifested by rising per capita income and living standards, but also to the physical, social, and economic development of rural communities.
The colonial administration recognized the agricultural sector's potential to enhance the Nigerian economy and hence implemented measures targeted at raising output and extracting surpluses in the industry. The surplus extraction philosophy or strategy was the major emphasis of growth during this period, in which enormous goods were created from rural regions to meet the need for raw resources in metropolitan Britain (Eboh 2019). The extractive policy's initial focus was on forest resources and agricultural exports such as cocoa, coffee, rubber, groundnuts, oil palm, and cotton. Since 1900, Nigeria's capitalist agriculture practices have mostly stayed unchanged. There has been no attempt to significantly alter them. The nature and consequences of these agricultural policies contributed to Nigeria's agricultural disorientation and food crises.
Meanwhile, the majority of these policies were developed without suitable institutional arrangements, plans, particular projects, strategies, goals or targets, and explicit objectives aimed at realizing the policies' ideals. This is demonstrated by the fact that there was just one documented agriculture system, known as the farm settlement scheme, that arose towards the conclusion of the era (early 1960s) (Iwuchukwu & Igbokwe, 2012). Since the colonial era, the imperialistic theoretical frameworks of development and modernization have had a strong impact on Nigerian agricultural practices. The rate and direction of agricultural growth in Nigeria were therefore decided by British colonialists and taken up by Nigeria's neocolonial governing elites after 1960..
Nigeria's agricultural development was totally decentralized, with regions and states carrying out all operations while the federal government gave assistance, allowing for a state/region specific strategy. This strategy involves the collaboration of small-scale farmers, the private sector, and the government. During the era, this method was remarkably effective, and agriculture remained the basis of the Nigerian economy, providing jobs, raw materials for industries, the major source of foreign exchange profits, and ensuring the populace's food security. The colonial and neocolonial imperialist powers' expropriation and usage of Nigeria's economic surplus is crucial to the explanation of structural distortions in the agriculture sector and Nigeria's food crises. The transfer of economic surplus to reinforce the capitalist class and the capitalist mode of production in Europe and North America was the focal point of the imperialist relationship (Akor, 2019).
However, when the 1970s began, there was a national disregard of this industry due to the oil boom, which effectively led to a fall in the sector (Abimiku, 2009). Regardless of how much growth and structural transformation Nigeria achieves, agriculture will continue to maintain its relative dominance in the economy for many decades to come. More significantly, agriculture, and particularly agricultural exports, was the primary stimulus for economic expansion throughout the 1950s and 1960s. It will continue to play an important role in Nigeria's economic growth as the greatest employer of labour (approximately 72% of the labour force in 1970-1971), the primary provider of food and raw materials for the people and industry, and a substantial, albeit declining, earner of foreign money. Accelerating agricultural growth is so critical for the country's future success (Ayoola 2015).). The policy tool developed by the government in the 1970s featured a succession of national development plans. Following this, the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) was established in 1986, and efforts were made to make the agricultural sector commercially competitive and remunerative, as well as to redress Nigeria's defective mono-economic imbalance through diverse diversifying programmes in order to reduce dependence on the oil sector and on imports. This policy package aimed to boost domestic food production, domestic agricultural raw material supply, exportable cash crop output, and rural employment. Nigeria's client status in the international capitalist system is the basic structural underpinning for inflicting underdevelopment abuses on the country (Ayoola 2015).
The initiatives only succeeded in establishing and boosting knowledge about the need of diversifying the economy via agriculture, as well as the catalytic and leading role that the private sector must play in agricultural development, which rekindled public interest in agriculture. Despite its enormous potential, the country is a net food importer. The nation's food import basket is composed comprised of products that can be produced in adequate quantities domestically. Furthermore, the economy is characterised by price instability and high prices as a result of an overreliance on rain-fed agricultural output. Under-investment, low productivity, insufficient input, poor and primitive storage culture, and unfavourable exchange rate policy are some of the issues confronting the agriculture industry. Furthermore, (Adesina, 2011) asserted that agricultural receives barely 1% of overall loans in the banking sector, although accounting for around 70% of job possibilities and 44% of the nation's GDP. From 1970 to 1979, the encouragement of capitalist agricultural growth in Nigeria resulted in a substantial reliance on imported agricultural inputs from core capitalist nations. While imported agricultural inputs grew, there was no evident improvement in both food and cash crop output. The increase in agricultural input imports coincided with an increase in food imports, food shortages, and negative cash crop production. The low agricultural performance records in the face of enormous imported agricultural inputs show that the plan is flawed and the solutions envisaged are misconceived (Ayoola 2015)..
According to (Sanusi, 2011), Nigeria incurs a total food import expense of $4.2 billion, or N638.4 billion, yearly owing to agricultural neglect and partially due to Nigerians' insatiable hunger for goods not produced locally. Nigeria, for example, is the only country in the world that does not produce wheat but consumes 100% wheat bread. According to Okojie and Mike (2006), the link between export performance and economic growth has piqued the interest of development economists, particularly those who think that economic growth should be sustained. According to Chenery and Strout (1994), for a long time, there was barely any nation that displayed sustained economic growth rates greater than its export growth rate. They also argued that individual developing country growth rates correspond with export performance better than any other single economic metric.
Several agricultural policies have been developed and executed by the Nigerian government at various periods in order to handle the multiplicity of difficulties affecting the sector while also maintaining food supply and foreign exchange profits for the country. However, for a policy to have a real influence, it must include strategies (that is, programmes or initiatives) aimed at achieving specified objectives and the policy's ultimate purpose. Various policy programmes and projects have been launched in Nigeria to this end. Some of these policy projects were enormous successes, while others were major disasters. Similarly, Offiong (1980) stated that the general impediments to African economic emancipation have remained imperialism and reliance. The process of producing and unmaking leaders is another example of imperialism's influence. According to Onimode (2018), "there is no advantage in arguing that most coups carried out in the African continent were organised by colonial imperialist countries to attain their goal of supremacy."
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