Why govt should stop paying lip service to agric

Speaking recently at the commissioning ceremony of its head office located along Mando road in Kaduna, the CEO noted that Nigeria’s greatest comparative advantage lies in agriculture.“The government should stop paying lip service to agriculture because agriculture is in results, you talk of food security, there are places in Nigeria that are not food secured, […]

Speaking recently at the commissioning ceremony of its head office located along Mando road in Kaduna, the CEO noted that Nigeria’s greatest comparative advantage lies in agriculture.
“The government should stop paying lip service to agriculture because agriculture is in results, you talk of food security, there are places in Nigeria that are not food secured, people still cannot afford to eat three square meals and now even in the world, food is used as weapon of international policy and diplomacy. If a country cannot feed its people, you cannot have a voice in the committee of nations, so one of the positive aspects of having crowd that is when you talk, people listen, is the ability of a country to feed its people so if we cannot do that, it is unfortunate.
“There is a lot of competition in the market and people are not ready to invest in agriculture, so we will continue to make it attractive because we believe that Nigeria’s greatest comparative advantage lies in agriculture and that whether you have oil today, oil is an exhaustible resource; something that will finish, so we will go back to the land and that is why we have faith in agriculture and we believe the grace lies in the agricultural sector,” he said.
He said that the company is a wholly Nigerian company, adding that “we have four regional offices in Lafia, Nasarawa state, Kano state, Minna, Niger state and Bauchi state, and by January next year, we are opening two more regional offices in Enugu and Ibadan because we want to tap the potential of the southern part of the country.”
“We also have a subsidiary company in Liberia called Miagro-Liberia Limited, in Nigeria we have another subsidiary company called Gamji Agro chemicals. We are purely into the importation, distribution and marketing of agro chemicals in Nigeria and our friends are Nigerian farmers, so we are rural people.
On his part, the Chairman of the occasion, Alhaji Falalu Bello,  said agriculture still accounts for 46% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product  (GDP) and can only grow higher and higher.
“It is a good thing that young Nigerian’s have deemed it fit and proper to establish an agro based company that will supply pesticides and other farm chemicals for the teeming farmers in Nigeria, because it is a sector of the economy that is contributing greatly to the economic activities of this nation,” he said.
Meanwhile, a close associate of Miagro Limited, Ibrahim Tanko Mohammed said virtually everybody is scared of going into the agricultural sector because of the difficulty in dealing with the sector.
“Agriculture, is one of the major areas that can boost the Nigerian economy, but because of the difficulty in dealing with that sector, it is an area where virtually everybody is scared of going into, but Miagro has ventured into that field and at this point, I can say, we have been successful and I see the building of this head office as a milestone,” he said.