The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, Olayemi Cardoso on Wednesday, delivered fertilizers amounting to over N100bn to the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security FMA&FS. The gesture is part of efforts to boost food security in Nigeria.
Cardoso said farmers will receive over 2.15 million bags of fertilisers, noting that one of the major roles of the apex bank in ensuring food security was to maintain price stability, noting that the cost of food was a crucial component of inflation.
He decried that despite the CBN effort to curb inflation in the short term, the inflationary pressures had remained predominantly driven to an uptime high of 29.90 per cent resulting in a surge in the prices of food.
Cardoso disclosed the new development during a visit to Minister FMA&FS, Abubakar Kyari in Abuja.
Incidentally, this move is a deliberate attempt to move away from similar interventions like the controversial anchor borrowers programme in the past. Hear him: “In alignment with our strategic shift towards focusing on our fundamental mandate, the CBN has veered away from direct quasi-fiscal interventions and transitioned towards leveraging conventional monetary policy tools for executing monetary policies.”
He, therefore, hinted on the new approach going forward, as he said, “In this light, we aim to extend our support and foster closer ties with ministries, departments and agencies that bear the mandate and expertise to undertake these critical initiatives, consequently, we aim to enhance our partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture, thereby bolstering your endeavours to enhance food productivity and security, and ultimately, curbing food inflation and fortifying our pursuit of price stability.
“In pursuit of these goals, we are delighted to announce the allocation of 2.15 million bags of fertiliser valued at over N100bn, which we are humbly handing over to the Ministry of Agriculture.”
On his part, Kyari noted that the agriculture sector had recently been challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic, flooding, climate change as well and the Naira redesign policy, which had adversely affected farmers at the grassroots. He was delighted that the apex bank chose to give support in the most challenging area of agriculture, thus giving the ministry a great relief.
Kyari said, “Fertiliser constitutes the majority cost value in terms of inputs in any agricultural production. So we are very happy and we are extremely grateful for this gesture. We have right now a programme called ‘the National Agricultural Growth Scheme’ that has been supported by the African Development Bank to give a 50 per cent subsidy of all inputs to our farmers.”