President of the African Development Bank, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina has urged the Federal government to consider reintroducing the electronic wallet system to tackle the food crisis.
“The government needs to go back to the policy of electronic wallet system. Remember when I was a minister, we designed a program to get seeds and fertilizers to farmers directly via their mobile phones with electronic vouchers.” he remarked
The former Minister of Agriculture added that through this initiative remarkable impacts were made by reaching millions of farmers while in the office as a Minister.
“We were able to reach 15 million farmers in four years the whole place was booming with food. And so it is like a patient that is sick, that you recommend something for the pharmacy, but who doesn’t have the medicine, a person will always be sick or probably even die.
“So at the end of the day, it is not your prescription, it is the access to what they need. And I think that is what I will advise needs to be done and done very quickly. Access to high-performing yields, high-performing seeds, fertilizers and farm inputs is very critical otherwise you will not be able to do it.”
“We have a program that we’ve already implemented called the special agro-industrial processing zones. These are new economic zones we are supporting Nigeria to develop that are dedicated completely to food and agriculture so that they have power, water, roads, infrastructure and food processing facilities.
“We provided $520 million for that, ourselves, at the African Development Bank, the Islamic Development Bank, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. It is currently working in eight states and we expect that those things will start hitting the ground and start construction by June of this year.
“What they will do is they will change the entire rural economy from what I can call economic misery right now, to new zones of economic prosperity because you turn agriculture into a real business with value chains that can work and add value and create massive amounts of jobs.
“We are already planning to launch this year in 28 states a program for $1 billion, ourselves and partners that will build 28 more special agro-industrial processing zones in 28 States”, he added.