Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Nigeria: Poverty Still High in Spite of Reforms - Nnamani

from All Africa

Vanguard (Lagos)

Umoru Henry
Abuja

THE Senate President, Senator Ken Nnamani has said that if Nigeria as a country must reduce drastically the high level of poverty, there was the urgent need for the government to adequately maximize entrepreneurship and cashing out real values from the on-going economic reforms.

The Senate President, who blamed Nigeria's failure to achieve food sufficiency and being unable to be a net exporter of agricultural products on our inability to bring to bear good business practices into agriculture, said good economic policies provide the environment for entrepreneurs to invest in agribusiness.

Speaking yesterday at the opening of the 2nd Abuja International Trade Fair, Senator Nnamani who noted that inspite of government's reforms, poverty remains prevalent in Nigeria, said the basic challenge the country had to contend with today was how to drastically reduce poverty.

"Nigeria is blessed with large expanse of arable and fertile lands. Therefore, Nigeria is a potential food basket of the world. We can grow enough food crops for local consumption and cash crops for export. Nigeria can become a net exporter of both cash and food crops. We have what it takes to make the West African sub-region self-sufficient in food production.

"But all these are potentials that need to be harnessed. We need to raise our productivity in agriculture if we need to be both competitive in agro-export and sufficient in food production. Enhanced productivity results from the mixture of good economic policies and entrepreneurial innovation. With few exceptions, agriculture has remained largely at the subsistence stage. We have thousands of farmers in every community in Nigeria. These subsistent farmers are not able to drive our agricultural policy. What we need now to achieve agricultural policy thrusts are entrepreneurs who can boost the unit productivity of agricultural land", he said.

The Senate President who called for the removal of fiscal bottlenecks to access to credit, especially for small and medium enterprises, said this would help boost agricultural productivity, adding that good fiscal and monetary policies will help create an environment that will encourage people to invest in agriculture.

This year's trade fair which is being hosted by the Abuja Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture{ABUCCIMA} with financial support by DataCorp Limited, Oceanic Bank International Plc as major sponsors, Unity Bank Plc as official Bankers and Globacom Limited as official telecoms company has "Harnessing the gains of Economic Reforms and Entrepreneurship Opportunities in Agriculture" as its theme.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well said Mr Senate President. What food is your President OBJ producing in his many farms or the whites from Zimbabwe who were given land in Nigeria to farm? Instead your govt enacted land decree to releive people of their lands.I read Nigeria newspapers everyday and never in the eight years of OBJ rule has the Senate ever discussed agricultural policies in the country. Instead every available land is for building houses even in your Anambra State there are no open spaces, lakes and rivers are filled to open land for building.
There is no need lamenting because there are many people educated or not who given neccessary support from your government can produce enough food for the country instead of your kins in Igboland forming unions for Ose or Mmanu which they did not farm.

Obi adimaly
obiadimaly@blueyonder.co.uk