Showing posts with label farm land. Show all posts
Showing posts with label farm land. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Full Storry: The Urgent Need For Agricultural Development

The annals of agriculture dates back once again to 1000s of years and its development has been driven and defined by greatly different climates, cultures, and technologies. However, all farming generally count on techniques to expand and maintain the land which are suited to raising domesticated species. For plant, this usually requires some irrigation, although, you will find types of dry land farming, pastoral, herding on rangeland which remain the most common methods to raise lives stock. Agriculture in Nigeria falls into two main groups, food crops produced for home consumption and cash crops for export. Cocoa may be the leading non- oil foreign exchange earner but the dominance of smallholders and not enough farm labour as a result of urbanization restrain production.



In 1999 Nigeria produced 145,000 tons cocoa beans but Nigeria has the capability to produce 300,000 per year. Rubber is the second largest non-oil earning foreign exchange earner. Farming in Nigeria suffers plenty of neglect and abandonment from investors who rather devote their finance into oil and other sectors. Majority of people who farm in the country is suffering from not enough finance and man power to understand a large harvest while only a few rich can spend money on commercial farming that may be conveniently useful for export trading.


Agriculture, accounts for 23 percent of Nigeria's GDP and engages 3 percent of the economically active population. Agriculture contributed significantly more than 75 percent of export earnings before 1970. Since then, however, agriculture has deteriorated, partly as a result of government neglect and poor investment, and partly as a result of ecological factors such as for instance drought, disease, and reduction in soil fertility. Agriculture contributed 32% to GDP in 2001. Recently, agriculture's share of exports had declined to less than 10 percent. Once an exporter of food to nearby countries,



Nigeria now must import food to meet up domestic demand. Today's government of Nigeria has made endless promises to revitalize the agricultural sector of the economic which had once fed this nation and nations far and wide with her palms (used to produce palm oil, sesame, cocoa, rubber, cotton, soya beans, plantain, gum Arabic, kola nut, melon sorghum, millet, maize (corn), yams, and cassava which were once exported but are now actually sold mostly locally. Farming is one major aspect that Nigeria can boast of if properly utilised.


The lack of development in agriculture which has been relinquished to the poor has greatly affect, the country's economical progress. Most of our graduates even those specialized in the field of agriculture will rather work in a company than work in a farmland. The thought of “white collar” jobs has eaten deep in to the logical reasoning of Nigerians that farming is regarded as stressful and sometimes dirty. They'd preferred to get money to get food as opposed to produce the meals themselves. The total outcome of this is that, if every Nigerian is in a company and paid huge sums of amount, then you will have not enough food and importation of food stuffs will increase.