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TELL magazine published a story, titled ‘The delayed Harvest in Kwara State’ describing the not-so-positive experience of the Shonga large-scale commercial farming project in Kwara state in its March 22, 2009 edition of the magazine. Beyond the aspects of the story which dealt with default of loans by the Zimbabwean farmers on loans from the Nigerian Agricultural Co-operative and Rural Development Bank (NACRDB) and other commercial banks, and accusations of the entire scheme being a fraud, the story raises a very important debate that should attract the attention of every government official and concerned Nigerian on how to grow the country’s economy and raise a large number of rural and urban people out of poverty.  
 Nigeria’s population is estimated to have grown between 2-3% annually but the agricultural sector has averaged less than a 1% growth per annum in the same period. With the exception of cotton, none of the crops we produce is competitive in the world market. For a country that employs 60-70% of its population in the agricultural sector, it is not therefore surprising that the country is experiencing an effective stagnation of per capita income, especially in rural communities. The experience of the Zimbabwean farmers, invited by the Kwara State government to develop commercial agriculture in the State, has uncovered the deep flaws of this country’s agricultural sector and explains why average crop yields in Nigeria are about a third of that in other developing countries of Asia and Latin America- and that is counting cassava, maize, and rice. 
The average Nigerian, it is revealed, spends between 40-60% of his income on food compared to 20-30% in other developing countries of the aforementioned regions. The problem of the agricultural sector revealed by Kwara State’s experience with large scale farming can be grouped under 4 main headings: a highly inefficient agricultural credit system; inadequate or absent infrastructure of irrigation facilities, roads, storage services, etc; limited availability of appropriate varieties, crop and natural resource management packages; and primordial input and output markets. These problems would not have been identified and brought to the nation’s attention without the actual experience of the Zimbabwean farmers; for which reason the Kwara State Governor, His Excellency Bukola Saraki, ought to be praised, and not vilified, for his foresight.
Let us take the first bottleneck of agricultural credit: In every country in the world where agriculture has developed, there are 3 kinds of Agricultural loans: short term loans of 1-3 years that cover annual operating costs; medium term capital loans of 5-10 years to cover equipment and necessary facilities, and long term loans of 15-20 years for expensive infrastructure such as irrigation schemes. Short term loans are provided by commercial banks while medium to long term loans are provided by Government-backed Agricultural and rural development banks with 4-6% interest rates. For the Nigerian Agricultural Co-operative and Rural Development Bank (NACRDB) to award loans, repayable within 3 years, to the Zimbabwean farmers who fled from their country amidst political unrest and recently arrived in Nigeria without a single tractor but just their over 25 years average of experience in commercial farming reveals how rudimentary our agricultural lending scheme is and also set up the farmers, and thus the banks, for failure. 

Secondly, the time required to process agricultural loans in Nigeria is simply too long. The TELL article mentioned that loans requested by the Zimbabwean farmers were received one and a half years after the process started. Another experience that buttresses this claim of the chaotic process of obtaining agricultural loans in Nigeria is that of rice farmers in Lafiagi and Pategi local government areas of Kwara State. Over 1,000 smallholder farmers are participating in a USAID funded project, Maximizing Agricultural Revenue and Key Enterprises in Targeted Sites (MARKETS) started in 2005 to partner credible rice processors and farmers to develop an efficient commercial rice industry in Nigeria. By August this year, 2-3 months into the rice season, the farmers were yet to receive the N60,000/hectare loan facility from commercial banks participating in the project; the rice fields all look yellow and yields will surely be down by 30-40% this year. Thirdly, to be successful in agricultural credit, loan officers and bank managers need to build relationships with the client, including visits to better understand the farming operation. Was NACRDB aware that the first maize crop of the Zimbabwean farmer was a disaster due to the drought of the 2005 farming season that actually led to extremely high prices of food commodity prices that year according to Central Bank estimates? Maize yields of the Zimbabwean farmers that year were less than 2tons per hectare compared to the 5tons per hectare they had expected to obtain. Were the bank officials aware that asking the farmers to sell their maize crop in November rather than selling it in April meant taking a 50% reduction in gross income because of the wide swings of maize price in Nigeria? 
The widely fluctuating yields from year-to-year of rain fed agriculture in Nigeria and the wide swings in prices of most food crops in Nigeria brings us to the second problem of limited infrastructure. The Zimbabwean farmers had planned to grow crops under irrigation when they arrived. They quickly realized that there were no irrigation facilities, no long term government backed loans to put in place the expensive canal/pipes and irrigation equipments, and no irrigation companies, so they abandoned irrigation in favor of rain-fed agriculture with disastrous consequences. Fortunately the Federal government has recently stepped in with the installation of an irrigation scheme for the Zimbabwean farmers. Unfortunately, the contractor handling the project is drilling deep boreholes in a most haphazard fashion, without regard to the location of fields or the hydrology of the area, laying pipes over uneven ground which will likely lead to air “bubbles” and burst pipes, and placing pumps at depths other than the actual depth of the boreholes, setting up the entire scheme for failure within 10-15 years. Who is ensuring that the significant investment in that laudable irrigation scheme will yield the expected results?
The instability of prices of agricultural products is associated with the seasonality of farming and a serious dearth of storage and processing facilities in Nigeria. Between October and December when most crops are harvested, prices are at their lowest; in the absence of storage or processing facilities, and in the absence of government as a buyer-of-last resort, the increased supply depresses commodity prices and farmers are forced to sell their produce to the lowest bidder. This leads to a precarious existence for the small holder farmer and poor urban consumer during the ‘hunger’ months of April to September when crops are yet to be harvested; This leaves the farmers at the mercy of wholesalers who can afford to buy and store food commodities or expensive imported food trucked over hundreds of miles of bad roads from the country’s ports. These problems easily add 20-30% to household food receipts during this period. 
The deplorable state of roads, especially feeder roads in rural Nigeria is perhaps the single most important reason for the high cost of food. It is estimated that transporters make more money from transporting the Nation’s harvest over seasonal and terrible feeder roads compared to what farmers themselves make from agriculture in Nigeria. Rather than invest billions of naira in subsidizing fertilizer, that can easily be corrupted and abused, or purchasing tractors for distribution to farmers that ought to be paid for by long term loans to serious farmers and their associations, government ought to invest limited resources in developing infrastructure of roads, irrigation, and storage facilities to reduce the transaction costs involved in agriculture and stabilize prices.
That said, easy access to agricultural credit or excellent infrastructure cannot make up for low productivity which is the consequence of a lack of proper varieties required for high yield, and necessary agro-inputs to enable these varieties express their high yield potential. Nothing brings out these more forcefully than an anecdote from Asia in the late 1960s, better known as the Green Revolution. After his exceptionally successful wheat breeding program in Mexico supported by the Rockefeller Foundation that led to that country becoming self sufficient in wheat production, Dr. Normal Borlaug persuaded the political leaders of Pakistan in 1960 to recognize the advantages of introducing the new Mexican breeds of wheat into their country. At that time the agriculture of West Pakistan was producing a steady annual deficit in relation to national needs. Wheat yields were low, farming methods were primitive, the soil had been overcropped, and artificial fertilizer was a rarity. After a successful struggle to overcome bureaucracy, prejudice, and even rumors to the effect that Dr. Borlaug’s variety of wheat would produce sterility and impotence among the population, it was finally decided that Pakistan should import a certain quantity of Mexican seed corn of the new breed. Once the seed had been introduced and had yielded superb results in the form of increased crops, the triumphal march of the green revolution was ushered in. Within 5 years from 1965 to 1970 Pakistan doubled its wheat production from 4.6million tons to 8.4 million tons, and the country became self-sufficient in wheat production.  
India soon followed and by 1970 had become self-sufficient in wheat production, increasing wheat production from 12.3 million tons in 1964 to 20 million tons in 1970. The increase in crop yields required the building of artificial fertilizer factories, roads, irrigation works, it is estimated that a total of seventy thousand private tube-wells were sunk during the 1969-1970 crop season in India, which brought about 1.4 million hectares of additional land under controlled irrigation. Consumption of nitrogen fertilizer in India increased from fifty-eight thousand metric tons of nutrients in 1950-1951 to 538,000 and 1.2 million metric tons in 1964-1965 and 1969-1970 crop cycles, respectively; and about sixty percent of this amount was produced domestically. Railways, warehouses, silos, flour mills and roads were built to accommodate this huge explosion in wheat and the demand for inputs of fertilizer, bringing rapid rural development to outlying districts and desperately needed cash for the building of schools and hospitals. From whatever angle the green revolution of wheat in Asia is considered, the effects of increased total production made these developing countries food sufficient, economically better, and set them on the path of rapid socio-economic development.