maddock:
This commentary is culled from someone post on facebook and I think its makes a whole lot of sense.

Anytime I hear Nigerian presidents, ministers,
governors, economists, analysts and
commentators declare that agriculture is the
alternative to oil, and that the solution to
Nigeria’s economic woes is to return to the
farm, I am tempted to jump up and ask at full
volume: “Who agriculture alone don epp?”
Some states have hilariously declared work-
free days for civil servants to go to the farm.
It would be nice to see those farms and how
well the emergency farmers are doing. We’ve
been told again and again that agriculture, as
Nigeria’s biggest employer of labour, is the
magic solution to unemployment, that we will
export agricultural produce and earn plenty
forex. Well done.
I’ve been hearing this fairy-tale all my life.
When I was a primary school kid, Lt. Gen.
Olusegun Obasanjo, then head of state, asked
Nigerians to tighten their belts because the oil
boom would not last forever. He added drama
by tightening his military belt on TV. He
launched Operation Feed the Nation. President Shehu Shagari did
Green Revolution. The structural adjustment
programme (SAP) of Gen. Ibrahim Babangida
was basically about diversifying into
agriculture. My dad then a manager in A.T. & P alongside
other management staff embraced farming in the mid and late 80s.
In different shapes, forms, sizes
and packaging, we have been talking about
agriculture, agriculture and agriculture forever.
Since we love glamorising our exploits in the
export of cocoa, coffee, palm oil and
groundnuts before the oil boom doom, I will
pick on just cocoa to dispel this ill-conceived
notion and never-ending campaign that
agriculture is the magic wand.
We used to be the biggest producers of cocoa
in the world. Chief Obafemi Awolowo utilised
cocoa revenue to develop the south-west
when he was premier of the region in the
1950s. But we dropped the ball along the line
and Cote d’Ivoire overtook us. And now we
are lamenting that we are nowhere to be
found. The solution, therefore, is for the south-
west to revive the cocoa farms. Oh, the good
old days!
Okay, let us talk about Cote d’Ivoire’s fabled
cocoa wealth. Cote d’Ivoire produces 33% of
world cocoa and exports to manufacturers
such as Hershey’s, Mars Inc. (both in the US)
and Nestlé (Switzerland). You know what Cote
d’Ivoire earns yearly from exporting raw
cocoa? A whopping $2.5bn. I repeat: a
whopping $2.5bn!
So Mars buys Ivorien cocoa and makes
several products from it: Bounty, M&M, Mars
and Milky Way, to name a few. You know
Mars’ net income from chocolate products
alone in 2015?
According to the International Cocoa
Organisation (ICCO), Mars made a pathetic
$18bn, compared to Cote d’Ivoire’s whopping
$2.5bn. Agriculture, indeed.
If you are wondering how just one company,
which manufactures chocolate, can earn
seven times more than a whole country, which
farms and exports the cocoa input, then you
are asking the same question with me: Who
agriculture alone don epp?
On ICCO’s list of the world’s top 10
companies in net revenue from chocolate, you
have three from America, two from Japan,
two from Switzerland, and one each from
Luxemburg/Italy, Argentina and Turkey. None
from Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana and Indonesia — the
world’s three biggest producers of raw cocoa.
There must be something that Hershey’s,
Mars and Nestlé know that we don’t know as
we keep planting cocoa.
To be fair, Cote d’Ivoire is waking up. In 2015,
French chocolatier Cémoi opened a plant in
Abidjan, the economic capital, to produce
chocolate. President Alassane Ouattara, on
touring the plant, said: “We want to be able to
make chocolate for Ivoriens, for Africans and
especially West Africans.” Ouattara
(pronounced Wa-ta-ra) understands what we
still don’t understand here: that agriculture
without industry is dead, being alone.
How could I buy cocoa worth $1m from you
and make chocolate worth $10 million from it
— and you think you are smart? If you are
smart, you will start making the chocolate
yourself and stop romanticising about the
“good old days”.
There was a video that went viral sometime
ago. CNN’s Richard Quest visited a cocoa
farm in Cote d’Ivoire. Come and see poverty
written all over the faces of the farmers, who
have been told for decades that agriculture is
the magic solution to their problems. Quest
gave the farmers bars of chocolate. They were
eating the sweet stuff for the first time in their
lives!
Compare their lives to those of the executives
of Mars Inc., who buy the cocoa beans from
Cote d’Ivoire. They are flying private jets and
holidaying in the moon, while the Ivorien
farmers are fighting off flies and bees in the
bushes of Koffikro. For your information, Mars
Inc. has no cocoa farms!
Don’t get me wrong please. If I have created
the impression that agriculture is useless, I do
apologise. That is not my intention. After all,
agriculture is our culture. Millions of Nigerians
are farming rice, beans, cassava and corn.
That is huge employment. Also, we certainly
can produce many food items that we are
importing and burning precious forex on. But
is that why governors are declaring work-free
days for civil servants to go and plant melon
and maize to solve Nigeria’s economic
problem and stop the dependency on oil? If
only these governors knew that Switzerland
does not grow one tree of cocoa, yet makes
the world’s most elegant chocolates!
Let us break this whole agric logic into pieces.
If we really want to diversify from oil and
create proper value, agriculture must give
birth to industry. If agriculture currently
employs, say, 5 million Nigerians, agro-allied
industry can employ 15 million in the value
chain. So why do we spend so much time
discussing farming and not industry? For
example, how many graduates can a tomato
farm employ compared to a factory making
tomato purée? The factory will employ or
engage the services of engineers, technicians,
chemists, marketers, accountants,
communicators, lawyers, administrators,
drivers, and so on. It may even have a sick
bay and employ doctors and nurses.
I’m not done. A basket of tomatoes sells for
N800 in Kaduna. A 400g tin of purée sells for
N300. Look at how many bottles of purée you
can get from a basket, and how much value
you will be getting. Who, then, is making the
real money? The factory will pay company tax,
its employees will pay PAYE and the
consumers will pay VAT. That is how
government will boost its revenue.
The purée bottle makers offer a different
business altogether that employs workers and
pays all kinds of taxes too. And if we are good
enough, we can begin to export purée to other
countries, and earn forex. This is just purée.
Think of a thousand agro-allied factories.
Think of our huge population.
Sure, agriculture is very important in a
primitive economy like ours. But we always
miss the bigger picture. One, we need full
optimisation of the sector to enhance
productivity. A country like the US knows this
much better: the percentage of the population
engaged in farming is insignificant, but it is so
optimised that the output is out of this world.
For instance, the US produces enough rice for
local consumption, for export, for aid and to
dump in the sea to “stabilise” market prices.
Two, processing is where you find the
massive job opportunities. The agro-industry
will yield far more output, more jobs and more
economic value than Benue Friday Farming.
These things look so simple and doable, but
commonsense is not common. Our
agricultural output can be far better in quantity
and quality than currently obtains. We can do
with better technology, storage, conditioning,
packaging and transportation. Most
importantly, our brains should focus on how
industry can bring out the real value of
agriculture and spark off a chain of economic
activities that will create millions of good jobs
and generate billions of dollars in revenue to
investors, employees and government. But we
seem excited only about preaching and
promoting the export of raw produce, and we
feel so smart we think this is the way out of
our oil dependency!
But how can we add value when, despite the
billions of dollars we have made from oil
since 1999, we don’t have the basic
infrastructure to inspire an agro-based
industrial explosion? Where are the roads?
Where are the rails? Where is the electricity?
Where is the security? Where is the finance?
Yet I can point to uncountable private jets,
mansions and customised cars that politicians
and their friends have acquired since 1999
with proceeds from the oil boom , while they
keep preaching stone-age agriculture to
Nigerians.
So if your governor joins this craze of
declaring work-free days for primitive farming,
just ask him politely:Your Excellency, who
agriculture alone don epp?

kgr8mike:
When they get power they forget what is good for Nigeria & they think themselves fortunate.


How many other men's chudrens have you ever taken care of

Restructure Nigeria and let every state or region control their resources human and natural and the government will say no.


Who is holding your state from developing it's resources. Only oil

OK. Let them continue to bit more than they can chew. It is brewing...

KINGwax007:
Stop talking rubbish and do more research.
New Zealand makes more money on agriculture than anything.. Even till today..

Moat agricultural settlement generates power from reusable energies or generating plants..

The beauty of agriculture is the release of pressure on the urban region...

KINGwax007:
Stop talking rubbish and do more research.
New Zealand makes more money on agriculture than anything.. Even till today..

Moat agricultural settlement generates power from reusable energies or generating plants..

The beauty of agriculture is the release of pressure on the urban region...

9jii:
You don't no Farming that's why this rubbish interested you.
The existence of every single being depend on the hard work of those peasants and super farmers you mock.

Any sane person will not ask who Farming help
Because the answer is.when last did you Eat?

9jii:
You don't no Farming that's why this rubbish interested you.
The existence of every single being depend on the hard work of those peasants and super farmers you mock.

Any sane person will not ask who Farming help
Because the answer is.when last did you Eat?

Justiyke4u:
try to reason with the op. For instance if farming can employ 1,000 people to produce the raw materials or the farm produce and make N1,000 but processing the raw materials or the farm produce will employ 10,000 people which make N10,000 then which one will you prefer? The point is that the former cannot stand alone it must be complemented by the later

mikolo80:
where will chocolate be without the cocoa or puree without tomatoes.
Control the raw material (quick win) and you can always add value to it.

Agric counts for 1% of USA GDP and employment
But supports 16% ancillary industries
Take away that 1%,the 16 come crumbling down
Besides look at our import bill
Clearly we cant feed ourselves
1 trillion worth of rice wheat sugar and fish
Staples fa, I won't Evey talk tin tomatoes
What with rising food costs
Yes manufacturing should be the focus but still without raw materials e go hard you o

maddock:


You really have serious problem reading and comprehending English.

maddock:
This commentary is culled from someone post on facebook and I think its makes a whole lot of sense.

Anytime I hear Nigerian presidents, ministers,
governors, economists, analysts and
commentators declare that agriculture is the
alternative to oil, and that the solution to
Nigeria’s economic woes is to return to the
farm, I am tempted to jump up and ask at full
volume: “Who agriculture alone don epp?”
Some states have hilariously declared work-
free days for civil servants to go to the farm.
It would be nice to see those farms and how
well the emergency farmers are doing. We’ve
been told again and again that agriculture, as
Nigeria’s biggest employer of labour, is the
magic solution to unemployment, that we will
export agricultural produce and earn plenty
forex. Well done.
I’ve been hearing this fairy-tale all my life.
When I was a primary school kid, Lt. Gen.
Olusegun Obasanjo, then head of state, asked
Nigerians to tighten their belts because the oil
boom would not last forever. He added drama
by tightening his military belt on TV. He
launched Operation Feed the Nation. President Shehu Shagari did
Green Revolution. The structural adjustment
programme (SAP) of Gen. Ibrahim Babangida
was basically about diversifying into
agriculture. My dad then a manager in A.T. & P alongside
other management staff embraced farming in the mid and late 80s.
In different shapes, forms, sizes
and packaging, we have been talking about
agriculture, agriculture and agriculture forever.
Since we love glamorising our exploits in the
export of cocoa, coffee, palm oil and
groundnuts before the oil boom doom, I will
pick on just cocoa to dispel this ill-conceived
notion and never-ending campaign that
agriculture is the magic wand.
We used to be the biggest producers of cocoa
in the world. Chief Obafemi Awolowo utilised
cocoa revenue to develop the south-west
when he was premier of the region in the
1950s. But we dropped the ball along the line
and Cote d’Ivoire overtook us. And now we
are lamenting that we are nowhere to be
found. The solution, therefore, is for the south-
west to revive the cocoa farms. Oh, the good
old days!
Okay, let us talk about Cote d’Ivoire’s fabled
cocoa wealth. Cote d’Ivoire produces 33% of
world cocoa and exports to manufacturers
such as Hershey’s, Mars Inc. (both in the US)
and Nestlé (Switzerland). You know what Cote
d’Ivoire earns yearly from exporting raw
cocoa? A whopping $2.5bn. I repeat: a
whopping $2.5bn!
So Mars buys Ivorien cocoa and makes
several products from it: Bounty, M&M, Mars
and Milky Way, to name a few. You know
Mars’ net income from chocolate products
alone in 2015?
According to the International Cocoa
Organisation (ICCO), Mars made a pathetic
$18bn, compared to Cote d’Ivoire’s whopping
$2.5bn. Agriculture, indeed.
If you are wondering how just one company,
which manufactures chocolate, can earn
seven times more than a whole country, which
farms and exports the cocoa input, then you
are asking the same question with me: Who
agriculture alone don epp?
On ICCO’s list of the world’s top 10
companies in net revenue from chocolate, you
have three from America, two from Japan,
two from Switzerland, and one each from
Luxemburg/Italy, Argentina and Turkey. None
from Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana and Indonesia — the
world’s three biggest producers of raw cocoa.
There must be something that Hershey’s,
Mars and Nestlé know that we don’t know as
we keep planting cocoa.
To be fair, Cote d’Ivoire is waking up. In 2015,
French chocolatier Cémoi opened a plant in
Abidjan, the economic capital, to produce
chocolate. President Alassane Ouattara, on
touring the plant, said: “We want to be able to
make chocolate for Ivoriens, for Africans and
especially West Africans.” Ouattara
(pronounced Wa-ta-ra) understands what we
still don’t understand here: that agriculture
without industry is dead, being alone.
How could I buy cocoa worth $1m from you
and make chocolate worth $10 million from it
— and you think you are smart? If you are
smart, you will start making the chocolate
yourself and stop romanticising about the
“good old days”.
There was a video that went viral sometime
ago. CNN’s Richard Quest visited a cocoa
farm in Cote d’Ivoire. Come and see poverty
written all over the faces of the farmers, who
have been told for decades that agriculture is
the magic solution to their problems. Quest
gave the farmers bars of chocolate. They were
eating the sweet stuff for the first time in their
lives!
Compare their lives to those of the executives
of Mars Inc., who buy the cocoa beans from
Cote d’Ivoire. They are flying private jets and
holidaying in the moon, while the Ivorien
farmers are fighting off flies and bees in the
bushes of Koffikro. For your information, Mars
Inc. has no cocoa farms!
Don’t get me wrong please. If I have created
the impression that agriculture is useless, I do
apologise. That is not my intention. After all,
agriculture is our culture. Millions of Nigerians
are farming rice, beans, cassava and corn.
That is huge employment. Also, we certainly
can produce many food items that we are
importing and burning precious forex on. But
is that why governors are declaring work-free
days for civil servants to go and plant melon
and maize to solve Nigeria’s economic
problem and stop the dependency on oil? If
only these governors knew that Switzerland
does not grow one tree of cocoa, yet makes
the world’s most elegant chocolates!
Let us break this whole agric logic into pieces.
If we really want to diversify from oil and
create proper value, agriculture must give
birth to industry. If agriculture currently
employs, say, 5 million Nigerians, agro-allied
industry can employ 15 million in the value
chain. So why do we spend so much time
discussing farming and not industry? For
example, how many graduates can a tomato
farm employ compared to a factory making
tomato purée? The factory will employ or
engage the services of engineers, technicians,
chemists, marketers, accountants,
communicators, lawyers, administrators,
drivers, and so on. It may even have a sick
bay and employ doctors and nurses.
I’m not done. A basket of tomatoes sells for
N800 in Kaduna. A 400g tin of purée sells for
N300. Look at how many bottles of purée you
can get from a basket, and how much value
you will be getting. Who, then, is making the
real money? The factory will pay company tax,
its employees will pay PAYE and the
consumers will pay VAT. That is how
government will boost its revenue.
The purée bottle makers offer a different
business altogether that employs workers and
pays all kinds of taxes too. And if we are good
enough, we can begin to export purée to other
countries, and earn forex. This is just purée.
Think of a thousand agro-allied factories.
Think of our huge population.
Sure, agriculture is very important in a
primitive economy like ours. But we always
miss the bigger picture. One, we need full
optimisation of the sector to enhance
productivity. A country like the US knows this
much better: the percentage of the population
engaged in farming is insignificant, but it is so
optimised that the output is out of this world.
For instance, the US produces enough rice for
local consumption, for export, for aid and to
dump in the sea to “stabilise” market prices.
Two, processing is where you find the
massive job opportunities. The agro-industry
will yield far more output, more jobs and more
economic value than Benue Friday Farming.
These things look so simple and doable, but
commonsense is not common. Our
agricultural output can be far better in quantity
and quality than currently obtains. We can do
with better technology, storage, conditioning,
packaging and transportation. Most
importantly, our brains should focus on how
industry can bring out the real value of
agriculture and spark off a chain of economic
activities that will create millions of good jobs
and generate billions of dollars in revenue to
investors, employees and government. But we
seem excited only about preaching and
promoting the export of raw produce, and we
feel so smart we think this is the way out of
our oil dependency!
But how can we add value when, despite the
billions of dollars we have made from oil
since 1999, we don’t have the basic
infrastructure to inspire an agro-based
industrial explosion? Where are the roads?
Where are the rails? Where is the electricity?
Where is the security? Where is the finance?
Yet I can point to uncountable private jets,
mansions and customised cars that politicians
and their friends have acquired since 1999
with proceeds from the oil boom , while they
keep preaching stone-age agriculture to
Nigerians.
So if your governor joins this craze of
declaring work-free days for primitive farming,
just ask him politely:Your Excellency, who
agriculture alone don epp?

obailala:

A very brilliant piece; however, a child must learn to crawl before it learns to walk.

Branzy:

how long sha we crawl.. India has start walking same with South Africa, Brazil nd Co ...... Should we continue to celebrate mediocrity..

mrvitalis:
Please the mistake the OP is making is thinking when they said agriculture is the key it means only farm... no that's not the idea
Agriculture and agro allied industry are what us meant by agriculture
U have to farm coco before you can make chocolate
U make to farm pig before u can make its products
The truth is this value added agriculture is what we are asking and not farming

Warship:

garriguy mikolo80 9jii


Wrong. Did you see his example of a company named MARs that has no cocoa farm but makes lots of money from Chocolate.


Nigeria can buy Farm products all over the world including our local farm products, processed and Sell the products to the world.

That is one area in Agriculture that will bring wealth and create jobs.

maddock you said things I have clamoured for over the years

Warship:

garriguy mikolo80 9jii


Wrong. Did you see his example of a company named MARs that has no cocoa farm but makes lots of money from Chocolate.


Nigeria can buy Farm products all over the world including our local farm products, processed and Sell the products to the world.

That is one area in Agriculture that will bring wealth and create jobs.

maddock you said things I have clamoured for over the years

mrvitalis:
Please the mistake the OP is making is thinking when they said agriculture is the key it means only farm... no that's not the idea
Agriculture and agro allied industry are what us meant by agriculture
U have to farm coco before you can make chocolate
U make to farm pig before u can make its products
The truth is this value added agriculture is what we are asking and not farming

Warship:

garriguy mikolo80 9jii


Wrong. Did you see his example of a company named MARs that has no cocoa farm but makes lots of money from Chocolate.


Nigeria can buy Farm products all over the world including our local farm products, processed and Sell the products to the world.

That is one area in Agriculture that will bring wealth and create jobs.

maddock you said things I have clamoured for over the years

maddock:


The question here is have our excellencies done anything really serious with the various green revolation embarked on till date?