The Federal Government has received the final report of the National Technical Working Group on the World Bank-supported $500 million Sustainable Agricultural Value Chains for Growth Programme (AGROW).
This was disclosed by Vice President Kashim Shettima at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, on Tuesday. 
Mr Shettima noted that the receipt of the final report marks the conclusion of the programme’s design phase and its transition to implementation.
He said the government, through the AGROW programme, is bridging the gap between farmers and national planning and policy-making decisions at the centre.
The VP noted that while the challenge in the agricultural sector had been the distance between farmers who till the earth and the systems that determine what their labour is worth, the government is set to implement the process of shortening that distance.
The US$500 million World Bank-supported programme was developed through seven zonal consultations involving 32 states, reflecting the increasing commitment of subnational governments to agricultural development.
It also reflected the state’s readiness to assume greater responsibility for productivity, infrastructure, extension services and market development.
The Vice President described the AGROW programme report as the conclusion of a design process that restores the farmer to the centre of our national economic reasoning, where he has always belonged.
“Today marks the transition of AGROW from programme design to implementation,” he added.
Mr Shettima maintained that the World Bank US$500 million Nigerian agriculture programme is targeted at developing a programme rooted in the realities of farmers, delivered through Nigeria’s states, and capable of attracting the private investment required to move agriculture from subsistence to scale.
The Vice President noted that agriculture, a sector that accounts for 23 per cent of the nation’s GDP and sustains 34 per cent of its workforce, must not be treated as a negligible sector, attended to at leisure and financed at the margins.
He said no other sector carries as many livelihoods or touches as many households as the agriculture sector, noting that most Nigerians earn a living from the tilling of the soil.
“When yields rise, food prices ease, rural incomes recover, industries receive raw materials, and the pressure on our cities and foreign reserves begins to relax. When yields fall, the entire economy discovers the price of hunger.
“Productivity on the farm is therefore a question of growth, employment, food security and poverty reduction. What we do to the farm, we do to the nation,” Mr Shettima stated.
The Vice President expressed satisfaction with the response from states, saying it reveals the scale of the opportunity before the nation.
He stressed that the participation of 32 states in seven consultations to shape AGROW reflects “both the urgency of the challenges confronting agriculture and the growing appetite across Nigeria for agricultural development and investment.”
