Agriculture in Nigeria: identifying opportunities for increased commencialization and investment

Abstract

The USAID-Nigeria Mission contracted the International Institute Tropical Agriculture (IITA) to conduct a study on identifying opportunities for increased commercialization and investment in Nigeria’s agriculture. IITA teamed up with the University of Ibadan to implement the study. The primary purpose of the Agriculture in Nigeria (AIN) study was to provide USAID-Nigeria with the analytical basis for the Mission to design its new Agricultural Policy Strategy that contributes to unlocking constraints to commercialization and investment in the Nigerian agricultural sector for sustained economic growth; enhanced food security; increased competitiveness of products in the domestic, regional, and international markets; sustainable environmental management; and poverty alleviation. The key issue in the study was the identification of constraints to investment in the agriculture sector and the evolvement of strategies and priority areas for intervention by USAID-Nigeria, other donors, the home governments, and the private sector for the purpose of providing catalytic support for the flow of investment into the agricultural sector. The AIN study is in line with both the strategic five pillars (science and technology, improved agricultural trade and market systems, building human capital, infrastructure and institutional capacity, promoting sustainable environmental management, and supporting community organizations) of the US President Initiative to End Hunger in Africa (IEHA) and the long-term USAID-Nigeria new strategic directions for a sustainable agricultural and diversified economic growth. The country was divided in six development domains on the basis of differences in agroecology, population density, market opportunities, farming systems, and geopolitical division of the country. In this study, investment is defined as additions to stock of capital that are the sources of future income streams, while commercialization should be understood to be the movement from a subsistence production system to a market-based system. The importance of investment derives from the fact that agricultural growth requires increasing doses of investible funds.