*Agriculture is not the magic solution*... This is a must read!

All credits goes to the author, Simon

Kolawole. Culled from August 21st edition of Thisday.
Anytime I hear Nigerian presidents, ministers, governors, economists, analysts and
commentators declare that agriculture is the alternative to oil, and that the solution to Nigerias
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. Weve been told again and again that agriculture, as Nigerias biggest
employer of labour, is the magic solution to unemployment, that we will export agricultural
produce and earn plenty forex. Well done.
Ive 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. My grandfather responded by setting up a garden in our backyard. President
Shehu Shagari did Green Revolution. The structural adjustment programme (SAP) of Gen.
Ibrahim Babangida was basically about diversifying into agriculture. 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 neverending 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
dIvoire 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 dIvoires fabled cocoa wealth. Cote dIvoire produces 33% of world
cocoa and exports to manufacturers such as Hersheys, Mars Inc. (both in the US) and Nestl
(Switzerland). You know what Cote dIvoire 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 dIvoires 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 ICCOs list of the worlds 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
dIvoire, Ghana and Indonesia the worlds three biggest producers of raw cocoa. There must
be something that Hersheys, Mars and Nestl know that we dont know as we keep planting
cocoa.
To be fair, Cote dIvoire is waking up. In 2015, French chocolatier Cmoi 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 dont 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. CNNs Richard Quest visited a cocoa farm in
Cote dIvoire. 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 dIvoire. 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!
Dont 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 Nigerias
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 worlds 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 pure? 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.
Im not done. A basket of tomatoes sells for N800 in Kaduna. A 400g tin of pure sells for N300.
Look at how many bottles of pure 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 pure 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 pure to other countries,
and earn forex. This is just pure. 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 dont 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?
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