aribisala0:
tututut. Raw nerve?

Hunger is MY shadow. Following ME till I die . IT IS MY intimate best friends for life

OKAY
May Your curse extend to your miserable family and your entire generation.
Amen

Agriculture is not a bad thing but most of the money is not in food production rather in value addition.

Nestle is a Swiss company that makes billions from cocoa and coffee. Last time I checked there are no cocoa plantations in Switzaerland . In fact it is a landlocked country. It is also the origin of SEVERAL of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies and products.

Now I am not knocking agriculture Food production but my point is there is more money to be made from value addition EVEN IF you import so let us not buy into this dogma that importing food is some kind of economic SIN . If you now what to do it is fine


There is probably more money to be made from fishing the coast of West Africa. Why are we not doing it . We don't know how


The truth obout agriculture is it thrives with huge capital not hoes and shovels . That kind of capital is non existent in Nigeria and even where it exists it will not be put into farming unless you are a Dangote. Our interest rates are like 20% and you want to copete against those operating with 0% interest and even grants and governent guarantees and insurance.?

I very much like the idea of putting something in the ground and watching it grow but we must look at the bigger picture

If we are to farm efficiently many jobs will go..

We need jobs that pay people the kinds of salaries out of which they can buy things like a TV and a fridge and have basic necessities.

In Nigeria that is a pipedream for any farm labourer.

Our people need to get jobs making shoes and TVs and phones and laptops, medicines and tyres and furniture and cars and rifles, bullets and helicopters not packing cocoa and cashew into cartons for export to Belgium.
Even Big brother had to be shot abroad
We need our own Nestle ,oue own Guinness, our own colas. Without our own Multinationals we are wasting time and will always be slaves.


Hell we don't even make textiles anymore..

We can do well importing agricultural commodities adding value and then exporting. That is what multinationals do. The Multinational is the vehicle of wealth

aribisala0:
Whilst addressing journalists at the Rose Garden Trump confdently asserts "it will happen"

The contrast between the two leaders is one who is proud of his country and fghts for its interest in contrast to a president who is a perfect embodiment of the term "analogue"
He is talking about farmming

There is a simple fact about agriculture when it is done properly it does not create jobs ,it kills jobs What 10 men with tractors can do in 1 day 1000 men cannot do in one month.

The jobs for our teeming youth cannot be in agriculture .
Good agriculture creates cheap food which is very good but not jobs.

Buhari simply has no ideas of value

Buhari mindset is worse than analogue, it is medieval. The entire concept of returning to the land arises from a lack of viable ideas as you point out, and a northern preoccupation with maintaining their feudal structure.
The gospel truth is that Buhari is unfit for the presidency, indeed, northerners in general cannot move Nigeria forward.
Rotational presidency is nonsense. Imagine a governor of Gombe wishes to rule over Nigeria after his brother from Katsina.
The conversation needs to change.

IamaNigerianGuy:


Buhari mindset is worse than analogue, it is medieval. The entire concept of returning to the land arises from a lack of viable ideas as you point out, and a northern preoccupation with maintaining their feudal structure.
The gospel truth is that Buhari is unfit for the presidency, indeed, northerners in general cannot move Nigeria forward.
Rotational presidency is nonsense. Imagine a governor of Gombe wishes to rule over Nigeria after his brother from Katsina.
The conversation needs to change.

Agriculture is good FOR SECURITY. But when you are talking employment in a 200 million people economy . That is a bad joke.


We must MANUFACTURE or IMPORT TVs, Computers, Fridges Washing Machines ,Cars and such like to meet the needs of those 200 million. If we import how do we pay for it with cashews?

We cannot manufacture without investment in power and transport infrastructure. Now who is it that is investing in Mambilla Plateau our rail and roads it is China we need to wake up to who our real friends are

Vickygirk:




no, that dude aribisala has a point. just try and digest everything he wrote without any form of bias.
if you try to counter him be realistic and also provide valid points. let's have an interactive session.

Agriculture covers a long range of our day to day lives.
Most people only think agriculture is just planting and harvesting of crops which is not.
Today, we have agricultural engineering, this covers a whole lot of areas, from the operations of machines to the maintenance and innovation of various devices to aid work.
There is also an aspect of agriculture that engages in producing seeds using scientific means. This area also involves themselves with using their produce to solve health issues by focusing on a particular area of concern. (these people cultivate their plants just for the cure of some certain disease's)
How about agricultural economics, and a whole lots of others in relation to agriculture.
This is a field or area Nigerians doesn't want to engage in because of the old method of getting things done.
Life has gone beyond buying land and planting seeds.

Manufacturing is the way to go for Nigeria.Nigeria should aim to become the Japan of Africa, the most industrialized country in Africa.
How did China lift millions of people out of poverty?

Nigeria needs to set up economic zones all over Nigeria that have electricity and good infrastructure. By now, Nigeria should have been a major exporter of home appliances.

Agriculture does have a role to play, but ultimately manufacturing will provide the massive amount of jobs Nigeria needs.

adegeye38:
Netherlands makes more money from agriculture than we make from oil, and the country is not as big as Niger state,

agriculture has chains that are linked everywhere and can create millions of job across all platforms if utilized

Do you have the same Human Capital Neherlands has? Na beans?


Do policemen stop trucks of food in the Netherlands and delay them for flimsy reasons? Do they have endless power shoortages

yes agriculture has chains so too does incompetence

There are synergies in foolishness too.


Your remark is akin to saying Messi has two legs just like Aiyegbeni


We do not have the Human Capital or embedded knowledge or competences

Netherlands is a society of law and order ours is not


You cannot have a thriving agriciulture without markets ,markets require law and order, contracts and dispute resolution systems that are transparent and effiicient not judges that take bribes.

Maybe you have heard of the FUTURES market. That is crucial to agriculture and requires courts that work
We are talking of a society where contracts are enforceable.

Netherlands did not wake up one morning and say go back to farm. It has taken several generations
Netherlands is part of a bloc that guarantees access to PREMIUM markets
Can agriulture work without finance , on 20% interest , without refrigeration and storage? Without serious capital


Most of our produce rots on the farm. How can value addition chains in agriulture work without refrigeration/power?


Finally they have a working population in OTHER sectors that can pay good money for added value to agric products even if they are on minimum wage. What is our minimum wage . Our farmers would have to export to make money and everyone is protecting their markets insisting you sell products with no added value so the value addition accrues to their economy, their people.

Whatever the case. Agriulture cannnot provide employment for our nearly 100 million workforce so do not get me wrong agric is good but that is not the route to general wealth.


WE MUST ADD VALUE TO OUR PEOPLE


Bill Gates message about Human Capital won't go away

We need to have our own Nestle or KRAFT or whatever and that will not happen with or current human capital

Without major multinational companies we will always be spectators on the world stage
Netherlands has Shell even though they have no oil
They have De Beers even though they have no diamonds
they have Philips
They have Heineken

What do we have?

Aribisala is 100 percent right. I can't make a better argument than what he/she has written down. We need education. Without quality mass education Nigeria is going nowhere.

Positive change is not going to occur over night but the signs that changes are occurring will be evident in a short time.

Please my Nigerian youth, for the sake of the future of this nation, vote in a young candidate. The old men will never educate the masses. They send their children abroad while the pauperise the masses by providing poor education.

Please vote in a youth. No revolution has been carried out by older people.

aribisala0:


Value chain sounds good in textbooks. The reality of real life is value chain requires skilled workers and technology as welll as nfrastructure.

Tell me how many third world countries have broken out of poverty with agriculture ?? Leave all that talk for the seminars and lecture theatre and welcome to reality. What happens to all the produce rotting in our farms that fail to enter the so called value chain??

The only value chain you see in third World countries is packing bananas cashews groundnuts coffee in cartons and loading them into refrigerated containers . How many of those do we need to sell to pay for one of those new helicopters.
Oldest and best form of generating income? What do you mean by "BEST" People just throw words around how is agriculture better than selliing Military helicopters IF you know how to make them.
The Nestles and Cadburys of ths world are not African and they are the ones that call the shots. We have not organized ourselves into companies like KRAFT and UNILEVER and so on who have the ear of their presidents and advise them on trade deals

My point is Agriculture cannot employ our millions of young people and give them good income. It is slave labour for peanuts . Not only can it not employ them but if we do not develop our own manufaacturing we would continue to import shoes and clothes and cars and tyres and paper and hair like we do now .

The question is with what will we pay for our imports? Yams and onions?

Even agriculture requires KNOWLEDGE and CAPITAL which means consolidation not fragmentation. It means that many small players would be wiped out or you cannot compete with cheap imports. Ask any poultry farmer how much it costs to produce a chicken in Nigeeria. In the US and Brazil they would produce for a quarter of that because you have farmers with $100 million capital growing corm on land the size of Ikeja and Surulere next to their poultry.


We live in a globalized world and if Buhari signss the proposed trade deal we just cannot compete with our hoes and shovels.

Our farmers would just have to surrender

The only way those billions spent importing is to be spent at home is when we organize into big companies . Without that forget aboout farming and even with that we will make money but lose jobs.


Our people are very low skilled and poorly educated

Bross, you are on point. People throw lots of words around without really having a clue about their meanings.

Mechanized agriculture creates very little high-end job that most developing countries don't have the manpower and financial power to handle. It is a myth that agriculture, when done properly, will generate the much-needed job and lift people en mass out of poverty. Agriculture without corresponding strong manufacturing sector will only make a country a poor third world nation that produces raw materials for industries in the developed world.

People should ask how countries like Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Singapore were able to lift people out of poverty and developed a more robust and diversify economy

kingkakaone:

Agriculture covers a long range of our day to day lives.
Most people only think agriculture is just planting and harvesting of crops which is not.
Today, we have agricultural engineering, this covers a whole lot of areas, from the operations of machines to the maintenance and innovation of various devices to aid work.
There is also an aspect of agriculture that engages in producing seeds using scientific means. This area also involves themselves with using their products to solve health issues by focusing on a particular area of concern. (these people cultivate their plants just for the cure of some certain disease's)
How about agricultural economics, and a whole lot of others in relation to agriculture.
This is a field or area Nigerians doesn't want to engage in because of the old method of getting things done.
Life has gone beyond buying land and planting seeds.

The contribution of agriculture to GDP is an indication of how developed or poor a nation is, the larger the contribution of agriculture to GDP the poorer or less developed the nation is.

Most developed countries with a more advanced mechanized agriculture have GDP accounting for less than 5% of GDP while industries accounting for over 20% of GDP and servicing accounting for the larger chunk of over 60% in most cases. These clearly show that priority should be given to education as a means of bridging the cap of human capital, the more educated the population are the more efficient and productive they becomes.

aribisala0:
Agriculture is good FOR SECURITY. But when you are talking employment in a 200 million people economy . That is a bad joke.


We must MANUFACTURE or IMPORT TVs, Computers, Fridges Washing Machines ,Cars and such like to meet the needs of those 200 million. If we import how do we pay for it with cashews?

We cannot manufacture without investment in power and transport infrastructure. Now who is it that is investing in Mambilla Plateau our rail and roads it is China we need to wake up to who our real friends are

You are 100% percent correct. The mindset that agriculture can solve the unemployment of 180m people is a joke taking too far.

Agriculture is an insignificant part of the economy in the long run, what we should really be looking at is the development of our hydrocarbons to generate the much needed electricity, extraction of our raw materials to meet up with our industrial demands and massive industrialization policies to utilized the large cheap labor we have in our disposal.

aribisala0:
Agriculture is good FOR SECURITY. But when you are talking employment in a 200 million people economy . That is a bad joke.


We must MANUFACTURE or IMPORT TVs, Computers, Fridges Washing Machines ,Cars and such like to meet the needs of those 200 million. If we import how do we pay for it with cashews?

We cannot manufacture without investment in power and transport infrastructure. Now who is it that is investing in Mambilla Plateau our rail and roads it is China we need to wake up to who our real friends are

These are true and relatively simple ideas. That they elude the ruling class in Nigeria gives me cause to believe Nigeria is doomed to underdevelopment.

So much lies.

kingkakaone:

Agriculture covers a long range of our day to day lives.
Most people only think agriculture is just planting and harvesting of crops which is not.
Today, we have agricultural engineering, this covers a whole lot of areas, from the operations of machines to the maintenance and innovation of various devices to aid work.
There is also an aspect of agriculture that engages in producing seeds using scientific means. This area also involves themselves with using their produce to solve health issues by focusing on a particular area of concern. (these people cultivate their plants just for the cure of some certain disease's)
How about agricultural economics, and a whole lots of others in relation to agriculture.
This is a field or area Nigerians doesn't want to engage in because of the old method of getting things done.
Life has gone beyond buying land and planting seeds.

Maybe you read all this stuff in a book somewhere Let us talk REALITY

Do you know how much the cheapest tractor in the market costs? but we do no manufacture tractors or spare parts. So we wlll have to import them. Do you know how much it costs to run a tractor daily?

You say WE HAVE agricultural engineering today .Who exactly is this WE.? Already there are millions of people employed in the agricultural industry today in Nigera most of them as UNSKILLED LABOUR. There are EVEN MORE millions unemployed elsewhere in our cities. My point is if agriculture is done properly in , let us call it the upstream sector, millions of upstream jobs would be lost to mechanization. These are mainly unskilled folk who would join the existing millions of already unemployed.

The number of jobs created downstream will not compensate for those lost upstream not to talk of creating jobs for the existing unemployed. Many of those who lose their jobs are largely uneducated ,unskilled and low value Human Capital economically

To do agriculture properly is capital intensive. How do we do that with a 20% interest rate environment. How will the output compete against input from countries where farmers get interest free loans and grants

The one thing you fail to recognize is agriculture is a KNOWLEDGE and TECHNOLOGY INTENSIVE industry. When you say it is not just planting and harvesting you are spot on. We simply do not have the knowledge in Nigeria. I use the word knowledge in the technical sense in which economists use it.

Value addition must happen competitively in a globalized world otherwise your output will be snuffed out by cheaper more competitive imports. We saw that in the textile industry . We see it with imported chicken.

There is a simple correlation between energy use and national wealth. The countries that use more energy are more industrialized and wealthier. The agriculture sector is no exception. In fact for Nigeria to become a wealthy nation we would probably have to become a net importer of crude oil.

In agriculture it would mean expanded use of energy on the farms and thereafter in mobile refrigeration and storage facilities amongst other technologies all of which we would have to import.
Bg question is how do we pay for all these imports?

The reality is succesful agriculture will create very cheap food which is a good thing but it will lose jobs.

Successful agriculture needs players with huge capital to be successful as a NATIONAL PROJECT. Individidually one can make a good living with modest capitall but on an aggregate national level from the perspective of national planners it is inconsequential. How many farmers did Buhari take with him in his business team There are few f any such farmers of that scale in Nigeria. Those that exist are foreign concerns like OKOMU oil. The reality is those Nigerians with capital do not believe in agriculture and who can blame them with Fulani herdsmen causing mayhem everywhere. They are better off importing petrol

aribisala0:
Do you have the same Human Capital Neherlands has? Na beans?


Do policemen stop trucks of food in the Netherlands and delay them for flimsy reasons? Do they have endless power shoortages

yes agriculture has chains so too does incompetence

There are synergies in foolishness too.


Your remark is akin to saying Messi has two legs just like Aiyegbeni


We do not have the Human Capital or embedded knowledge or competences

Netherlands is a society of law and order ours is not


You cannot have a thriving agriciulture without markets ,markets require law and order, contracts and dispute resolution systems that are transparent and effiicient not judges that take bribes.

Maybe you have heard of the FUTURES market. That is crucial to agriculture and requires courts that work
We are talking of a society where contracts are enforceable.

Netherlands did not wake up one morning and say go back to farm. It has taken several generations
Netherlands is part of a bloc that guarantees access to PREMIUM markets
Can agriulture work without finance , on 20% interest , without refrigeration and storage? Without serious capital


Most of our produce rots on the farm. How can value addition chains in agriulture work without refrigeration/power?


Finally they have a working population in OTHER sectors that can pay good money for added value to agric products even if they are on minimum wage. What is our minimum wage . Our farmers would have to export to make money and everyone is protecting their markets insisting you sell products with no added value so the value addition accrues to their economy, their people.

Whatever the case. Agriulture cannnot provide employment for our nearly 100 million workforce so do not get me wrong agric is good but that is not the route to general wealth.


WE MUST ADD VALUE TO OUR PEOPLE


Bill Gates message about Human Capital won't go away

We need to have our own Nestle or KRAFT or whatever and that will not happen with or current human capital

Without major multinational companies we will always be spectators on the world stage
Netherlands has Shell even though they have no oil
They have De Beers even though they have no diamonds
they have Philips
They have Heineken

What do we have?

thats y i said massive investment on the path of the government

adegeye38:

thats y i said massive investment on the path of the government

Sorry I really do not understand this sentence?

What are you proposing exactly