o Governor in the history of the Central Bank of Nigeria has strongly impacted on the country’s agriculture sector as seen in the almost five-year leadership of Godwin Emefiele. He has creatively implemented strategy to diversify the productive base of Nigeria’s economy, thus, creating thousands of jobs in agriculture and conserving foreign exchange.
His engagements with Oil Palm Value Chain Stakeholders have also been yielding fruits. Emefiele has helped to catalyze and fast-track investments across the oil palm value chain. Oil palm is on the forex excluded list. Now, official figures indicate that importation of oil palm had declined by about 40 per cent from the peak of 506,000 MTs in 2014 to 302,000 MT in 2017. This CBN governor has clearly changed the narrative.
The oil palm industry is a US$60 billion market and Emefiele believes Nigeria desperately needs to be a major player. That was why he promised that the CBN would work with stakeholders to ensure availability of quality seeds and agro-chemicals, ensure land clearing services at affordable cost, and above all, guaranteed prices and markets for all products in the value chain.
Furthermore, to spur banks’ lending to high-impact sector, including agriculture, the CBN, at its July 2018 MPC, pledged to refund CRR to banks that bring proposal for funding of new projects or expansion of existing ones in agriculture and manufacturing sectors. Accordingly, they will qualify for CRR refund of up to 100 per cent. Banks are using this opportunity to expand credits to the agriculture and manufacturing sectors.
With the CBN continued efforts at driving indigenous production in high-impact real sector activities, especially agriculture and manufacturing, Nigeria’s GDP has consistently been on the rise for almost three years. The CBN intervention in production of tomatoes currently stands at a little over N10 billion in eight projects. One of the projects is the Dangote Green House tomato manufacturing project, which has the capacity to produce 10 million tomato seedlings in a month. This would be sold to about 5,000 outgrowers that would grow and supply the tomato factory, which has commenced operations, with tomato fruits.