"Coutd"Agriculture Is Nigeria’s ‘New Oil’

Here is some of the citation from the  interview.(please note that it is a reported speach).

Agriculture as Nigeria’s new oil? Yes! I believe that the future millionaires and billionaires of Nigeria will come out of agriculture. Listen, if the business of food doesn’t pay, why are we spending all that money importing food? It pays! You can choose not to ride a car, you can go inside of a train – but you can’t choose not to eat. Nobody eats GDP. People eat food.
Don’t get me wrong; growth isimportant. We need a lot of economic growth, GDP growth. We’ve got to make sure that we have inclusive growth that carries millions of people out of poverty, and the way to have that is through an agricultural transformation that reaches the tens of millions of people at the bottom.
Agriculture has the power to create jobs where it matters, in the rural areas. If you have almost 70% of our population living in rural areas, the main source of livelihood for them is agriculture. That is why as a government we took a position that we must make agriculture work. We must make it a money-making enterprise for farmers, for small businesses, because it creates jobs massively at the bottom. Even a 1% increase in productivity of agriculture will give you more than four times reduction in poverty.
What we’re doing now is to make sure that we can produce enough food for ourselves; process our foods locally into what’s accepted by our consumers and that can compete with imports. Our population, 167 million people, should be eating a lot of what we are producing. That way we create jobs for ourselves, we will revive our rural economies and we create a future of hope and shared prosperity for millions of our youth in this country – and assure our national security.
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