Nigeria joins G8 New Alliance for food security and nutrition
Nigeria was titled a partner country in the new coalition for food security and nutrition, which is a G8 initiative to boost private-sector investment in African agriculture. Nigeria’s inclusion in the G8 food security and nutrition coalition will help the country to generate 3.5 million new jobs and offer over $2 billion additional income for Nigerian farmers. Nigeria has bold targets for its agriculture and this is something the world is acknowledging.
With Nigeria’s inclusion into the food alliance, the country’s agribusinesses and major multinationals will leverage our domestic resources to deliver on the country’s agricultural promise. Nigeria is already seeing results from bold policy reforms, donor country support and private sector commitments. This initiative will help Nigerian farmers and agribusiness to endure this momentum. The minister said Nigeria would be a strong advocate for substantive initiatives to improve agricultural production and incomes, focusing attention on empowering women farmers.
The country’s new partnership will remain to drive the need to reduce the food import bill; promote domestic and regional markets and create jobs across the entire value chain, ultimately keeping the country on track to meet its agriculture target of increasing food production by 20 million metric tons of food for 2015. Presently, 28 corporations have signed letters of intent to invest a total of more than $3.3 billion in the country’s agriculture sector.
Agriculture in Nigeria is a main division of the economy in Nigeria and provides employment for 70% of the population. The sector is being renovated by commercialization at the small, medium and large-scale enterprise levels. Key crops include beans, sesame, cashew nuts, cassava, cocoa beans, groundnuts, gum arabic, kola nut, maize, melon, millet, palm kernels, palm oil, plantains, rice, rubber, sorghum, soybeans, and yams (yummy).
