Expert Outlines Five Agricultural Opportunities to Transform Rural Economy in Nigeria's Egbe

An analysis of Egbe, a rural Nigerian community, outlines five agricultural opportunities including fish, rice, tree-crop and cotton value chains to address rural poverty and underdeveloped infrastructure.

Original report
businessday.ng

Industry impact

The analysis highlights how weak value-added processing, fertiliser import dependence and security gaps continue to constrain agricultural investment and industrialisation across West Africa.

Nigeria's rural communities have seen little improvement in livelihoods or infrastructure since independence in 1960, with rural residents twice as likely to be poor as those in urban areas despite producing much of the food that feeds the country's cities. Focusing on Egbe, a rural Nigerian community, five economic opportunities tied to local natural resources are identified: vegetable and fish production, particularly catfish and tilapia, at the roughly 2,000-hectare Omi/Kampe irrigation scheme and other inland valleys, supported by an integrated value chain covering production, cold storage, transportation, packaging and distribution; rice production at the same irrigation scheme, backed by a 36,000-tonne rice mill at nearby Ejiba that is currently underutilised; and tree-crop farming and sustainable agroforestry combining cashew, oil palm, cocoa and timber in place of exporting raw rosewood.

Broader structural problems are described as holding back African agriculture, including productivity at roughly one-third of the global average, weak value-added chains, unreliable energy and rural roads, and dependence on imported inputs. Africa produces about 30 million tonnes of crop nutrients but imports around 12 million tonnes of blended fertiliser, representing about 80 percent of the continent's needs, leaving farmers exposed to supply-chain shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war and disruptions at the Strait of Hormuz. West Africa's cotton sector illustrates similar obstacles: the region has an estimated 4,000 garment industries but only 51 ginning and spinning mills, compared with about 250 mills in Bangladesh for a similar number of garment factories, resulting in roughly 90 percent of the region's approximately 1.1 million tonnes of raw cotton lint being exported for about $1 billion while more than 60,000 tonnes of fabric valued at $2 billion are imported and an estimated 500,000 jobs are lost.

Realising these opportunities is said to require modern agricultural technology, mechanisation, extension services, longer-term and lower-cost capital, technical-assistance grants and coordinated market information, with security against banditry, kidnapping and criminality identified as a fundamental prerequisite described as a chicken-and-egg problem. Organised business, including processors, producer organisations, commodity associations, aggregators and chambers of commerce, is called on to lead in bringing stakeholders together alongside development banks such as the Bank of Agriculture and the Bank of Industry, development partners and philanthropic organisations.