08/12/2011 (AllAfrica.com) - Agriculture has no doubt proven to be man's last resort when it comes to sustaining the human race and providing the basic necessities of man.

When agriculture was booming, the Nigerian economy grew in leaps and bounds.

In the North in particular, there was nothing close to the mass youth unemployment that we see today. Young men, fresh from primary school, had something to do either on the farm or in the textile factories in the cities.

But the famous Kano groundnut pyramids have disappeared; the tonnes of benniseed that came from the Benue trough have gone, and so have the cotton fields in Gusau, Ngurore in Adamawa and the ginneries that fed textile plants in Kaduna, Kano and Funtua with bales of cotton.

Recently, government and some interested private sector groups have begun to make efforts to ensure a sustainable transformation of agriculture amidst global calls for the promotion of sustainable agriculture to meet the food demand of about seven billion world population.

Telltales of this decay in a sector which used to be the mainstay of the Nigerian economy are all too visible, and particularly ironic in the North whose economy is largely agrarian.

The recently concluded agriculture show represents effort by the private sector to promote agriculture in Nigeria and ensuring its sustainability.

Senator Adamu Abdullahi, former governor of Nasarawa State who spearheaded the evolvement of the agriculture show as an annual event had once lamented that "Nigeria had raised enough food to meet its domestic needs during its colonial period and in the decade following independence, however it began to experience food shortages in the 1970s and 1980s which necessitated the importation of food from foreign countries."

He said Nigeria has lost a lot of its agriculture fortunes to the extent that it now imports palm oil from Malaysia.

"Once Africa's largest poultry producer, Nigeria lost that status because of insufficient corn production and a ban on importation. Furthermore, it is no longer a major exporter of cocoa, peanuts and rubber," he said.

Abdullahi said at the agricultural gathering that "The current situation is as inexcusable as it is unacceptable, and must, therefore, be changed for the better. The country must pause; retrace its steps, change course and direction."

Kaduna used to be a destination to private investors because it was home to most of the region's textile companies, public and private.

Kaduna Textile Limited (KTL), United Nigeria Textiles Limited, Northern Textiles Limited and Arewa Textile Company, in which the then Northern Nigeria Development Company (NNDC), now rechristened New Nigeria Development Company, had major shareholding.

It was formed by the old Northern regional government and it was where most of the technocrats of northern origin in the country had their roots, it is the joint property of the 19 Northern states, but today, it is a shadow of its former self.

Companies such as the Northern Oil Company in Gusau, Zamfara State, Kano Tannery and others formed the fulcrum of the growth of the northern economy.

In the South-west, after independence, the Action Group party led by Obafemi Awolowo also made agriculture the mainstay of the region with cocoa as its main export crop. To this day, cocoa has stood to remind people of the economic strength of the region.

Some observers' say the agricultural economy was what, in fact, enabled the General Yakubu Gowon government to execute the Civil War without borrowing a kobo from external sources.

It also formed the backbone of his government's subsequent development and rolling plans aimed at laying the foundation for the nation's long term economic growth.

Every household earned enough money from farming to send boys and girls to school; farmers got the right price for their farm produce through the existing marketing boards.

The presence of the boards protected the farmer from exploitative middlemen. In the heydays of the colonial administration, according to records, the agriculture-based economy of the North was so buoyant that money was taken from its treasury by the British administrators to run/supplement the other two regions - East and West.

Those were the glorious days of agriculture, in the North especially. The North's success story was, to a large extent, replicated in the West, where the main cash crop was cocoa; it was to the Western region what groundnut and cotton were to the North: a big foreign exchange earner. In other words, agriculture, back then, was to the North and West what oil is to the South-south today.

Decades on, the story is heartbreakingly different. Many have blamed easy money from the black gold - crude oil - of which Nigeria is one of the world's largest producers and exporters, leading to the decline of agriculture.

It is true that the emergence of oil as the mainstay of the Nigerian economy shortly after a destructive Civil War provided the military government at the time with the money with which it executed a massive reconstruction and rehabilitation programme; it was also able to begin a gargantuan programme of rapid industrialization that included the setting up of automobile plants.

But the nation was unable to produce enough food, cash and industrial crops to support the industrialisation process. It was at this point that agriculture lost its pride of place in the national economy.

Let us, first get a glimpse of the rot in this critical sector of the Nigerian economy believed to have "unmatched credentials".

Take infrastructural decay. Almost all the large earth dams built during the First Republic in the 1960s and sustained in the 1970s by General Yakubu Gowon and by General Obasanjo's military governments with the help of the World Bank and other development partners to boost agricultural productivity and generate electricity, especially in the North have broken down.

In the rainy season, a huge volume of water bursts through the dams' spillways and floods villages, killing people and destroying crops.

The case of the nation's 12 river basin development authorities is even more sickening. They are the Anambra-Imo RBDA, Benin-Owena, Chad Basin, Cross River, Hadejia-Jamaare, Lower Benue, Lower Niger, Upper Benue and Upper Niger. The rest are Niger Delta, Ogun-osun, and Sokoto-Rima.

Created to enable all year farming, livestock development and power generation, these RBDAs have instead become "sinking holes" through which hundreds of billions of naira have disappeared over time. For instance, N40 billion was appropriated for them in 2009, N37 billion of this for capital projects alone.

Recently, appearing before the Senate Committee on Agriculture to defend his ministry's budget, the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina, revealed that the performance of the RBDAs had been dismal so far -a result of mismanagement and corruption. But then he shocked the senators when he said the federal government planned more of them.

What he got were stares of utter shock.

Take another area: silos. There are 12 scattered all over the country, with a combined storage capacity of 300,000 tonnes of grains and cereals.

They are supposed to store farm produce which the government buys from farmers for the rainy day - which could be during the time of poor harvest.

But today, with the few farmers still engaged in farming producing barely enough to feed their families there is nothing to store and silos are virtually empty.

Again, another irony, we hear that the government is planning 20 more silos. To store what? Clearly, the foundation for agricultural growth laid at independence has been allowed to collapse.

The farmers" cooperatives, cattle inoculation centres, rural roads to transport produce, dairy, livestock, pastures and all the initiatives mentioned earlier have all been abandoned.

It is disheartening that just nine years to deadline for actualizing Vision 20 20:20, the nation is still without stable electricity, no viable railway links, no functional coastal waterways etc.

The collapse of agriculture also invariably contributed to the collapse of the traditional institution as matters of land ownership which were hitherto in the purview of traditional rulers were taken away from them and in the process, denying them an active role in agricultural activities in their areas.

Ventures such the national agric show should be encouraged by government in every way because it serves as a platform for uniting farmers and linking them to farm input and markets for various produce.

Abdullahi, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the National Agricultural Foundation of Nigeria (NAFN), describes agriculture as "clearly the most neglected and most underdeveloped sector in the country."

"Nigeria now yearly imports foods to the tune of over US$3 billion. Imports of wheat, rice, fish and sugar alone cost Nigeria 1 trillion naira in foreign exchange annually. And the imports are growing at an alarming and clearly unsustainable rate of 11 percent per annum."

Also commenting on the need for the full resuscitation of agriculture in Nigeria, official of the United Nations Food Programme (UNFP), visiting Nigeria in September had warned of imminent famine in the country.

A key and practical strand of the agenda is the government's decision not to have anything to do any more with the purchase and distribution of fertiliser, a key farm input that has been politicized and mismanaged, to an extent that it is hardly available even though it is heavily subsidized.

However, it is one thing to have a good policy and another to implement it faithfully. Policy somersault and poor implementation have killed many a good government project. It is hoped that the Jonathan administration will muster the political will to do what it has professed - to give our agriculture the turn-around.