In Maputo Mozambique (July 2003), African Heads of States and Governments of the African Union (AU) endorsed a Declaration on Agriculture and Food Security in Africa popularly known as the ‘Maputo Declaration’ and also adopted the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) framework. One of the cardinal components of the Declaration is that African countries will allocate and implement increases in spending on agriculture to at least 10% of their annual budgets by 2008.
While progress is being made in terms of increasing budgetary allocations to agriculture in some African countries, some others like Nigeria have unfortunately fallen short of the 10% Maputo Declaration commitment over the years (except for 2008 when Nigeria struck up to about 12%) and it is generally observed that annual allocations to agriculture in these non-responsive countries are insufficient to galvanise growth and development impact intended through CAADP. To illustrate the impact of the underfunding on the sector, an analysis of the 2012 Nigeria’s federal budgetary allocation to agriculture shows an abysmal less than 2% of total allocation to the critical sector. With such poor level of investment, it is evident that Nigeria is too far away from the Maputo commitment and this may obviously portend negative implications for food security and failure of government’s Transformation Agenda centred on Agriculture.
There is need to raise voices from public and private sectors towards supporting increased allocation to agriculture and specifically to SSFs, and also for corrective measures from the Parliament in designing appropriations skewed towards job creation using agriculture which is Nigeria’s comparative advantage sector, as well as to effectively monitor disbursement and track implementation of budgetary allocations and finally to influence compliance with the minimum 10% of national budgetary allocation as demanded by the Maputo Declaration.
It is for these needs that National Association of Nigerian Traders (NANTS) and her partners organized a one day dialogue on the subject matter of increasing budgetary allocation to agriculture in compliance to Maputo Declaration.
To read the report of this dialogue (40p.) : http://www.inter-reseaux.org/IMG/pdf/Report_of_the_Africa_Maputo_Declaration_Dialogue_organised_by_NANTS.pdf