Trade distortion affects our crops yield says Kebbi state Governor

Sen. Abukarka Bagudu

The Kebbi State Governnor, Sen. Abukarka Bagudu has said that the low crops yield in the country was intentionally created by other competing countries so as to increase the cost of productions thereby making our produce not competitive in the global markets of rice and wheat.

 
His Excellency, Sen. Bagudu disclosed this at the 8th Bola Tinubu Colloquium held in Abuja as part of the ceremonies to mark the 64th birthday of the national leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC)  Sen. Bola Ahmed Tinubu in an event theme “Agriculture: Action, work, revolution”.




 The Governor said in the message tagged “our steward in the last seven months in agriculture” that  uncompetiveness in terms of market price in wheat and rice production occasioned by low yield per hectare have resulted to our importation of food from countries with cheaper price. 




He pointed in the last seven months that a lot have been achieved in rice and wheat productions especially in the face of alternative import substitutions of escalation of  local crops production through development of Agriculture with intensified effort of the  Research Institutes towards diversification from mono economy of crude oil saying “with the oil sector in crisis, the Buhari administration is focusing on agriculture, which he described recently as the traditional wealth of the nation”.

His Excellency said that “our yields per hectare have been affected, because those countries that have distorted trade in these commodities have been able to send them around the world at a lower production cost, and consequently, rather than buying from us we end up buying from them. 

This is not because our soils are not rich or our farmers are lazy, but historically, this distortion has depressed prices in such an extent that our farmers cannot compete. But that is not to say we cannot do better, and improve yields significantly. Our current average yields per hectare for wheat and rice during the dry season is 4.5 tons per hectares.  In the wet season, because farmers could not get control over the variable, it dropped to 2.5. But wheat which is grown in the dry season, the yield per hectare is between 3-4 tons, and this is low when compared to other countries of the world. I have mentioned the effect of trade distortions.

Speaking on past administration inputs subsidy and agriculture financing, the Kebbi state Governor said that “before now we have an agriculture regime, that tends to give farmers what government can afford as subsidy, but rather than giving farmer six bags of fertilizer that an hectare requires, they gave out one bag of fertilizer, because that is what the government can afford and as a result yield are therefore surely to be lower. 

The financiers are not interested in financing agriculture because of low yield, low incentives and none understanding of the business model of the farmers. With all the past intervention programmes, such as the Operation Feed the Nation, the Green Revolution and  many Central Bank Interventions, but what we have discovered in the past seven month is that most of these intervention programs have cut short of recognizing the quantum of money that is required to put agriculture in a sustainable way”